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Re: very squeeky brakes
If you ride your brakes alot you will develope a glaze on your pads from them getting so hot, take some light sand paper to them and scratch them up lightly. This should take care of it if that is the problem, and you can definitely see the difference between the dullness of how they should look and the shiny glaze they tend to get from being rode.
Digging a little deeper, just to clarify are you talking discs or drum?
If you're talking about discs, there isn't much you can do besides blow all the dust out, make sure you've got a thin coat of grease between where the caliper touches the back of the pad, and make sure the mounting ears on the pads are crimped down tight to prevent any front to back movement.
With regard to drums these tend to get really dusty, so that can be a problem in and of itself. A more serious problem that I had with my back brakes and didn't solve until recently was the following. Mine like yours would squeak all the time, and everytime I would take the drum off I found that the shoes had no glaze but had a whole load of hairline cracks through them. I chalked it up to cheap pads and replaced them, but even as I moved to more expensive they would always crack and always squeak even when brand new. What happened, and this baffled me for a year before I finally figured it out, was that I often neglected to put grease between the shoes and the contact points on the backer plate. This eventually wore grooves in the backer plate, which the shoes would get stuck in. They would squeal like a banshee when I applied brake pressure, then they would pop out of the grooves and lock up my rear wheels. Talk about a frustrating. Eventually when I found out what the problem was, I wasn't about to go to all the trouble of pulling the axle and all the other stuff that goes along with pulling a backer plate, so I just ground down the contact points until they were smooth again. Hindsight being what it is, I realized I probably should have welded some metal into the grooves and then ground them back down to original height.
If you take anything from my story, please be sure to always grease the contact points on your brakes. Hopefully this gave you some insight into what is causing your problem.
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