I guess this is more a frustrated rant than a useful post...

I have previously replaced pads, rotors, brake lines, and front hub assemblies on our '94 (see previous post). At the end of that job I had what sounded like front tires scrubbing the plastic fender well shields... right tire at full left lock, left tire at full right lock. This occurred only after the brake job, and both before and after the hub assembly replacements. I had cut away a portion of the plastic shields, but that didn't help. Yesterday, I found that both shields were "bowed" out somewhat by pressure from wire harnesses, but they were like that before I did the brake job, and there was no noise then.

The driver's side had the battery ground wire routed on the fender well side of two relay wire harnesses, and was pushing the shield toward the tire. So I removed the shield and re-routed the ground wire, which flattened out the shield quite a bit.

On the passenger side, there was a thick wire bundle jammed between the manual headlight **** case and the shield, pushing it out. I was able to reposition that mess on the inside of the **** case, which took the pressure off of that shield.

Unfortunately, neither of those fixes fixed the noises. And anyway, the wires were like that before the noise started.

Next, I am going to try Dave Geesaman's recommendation in my other thread and try to jack up the tire/wheel to compress the suspension, since I can't get under the car with it down on its wheels to see what's going on.

Am I being misled? What else could possibly cause a scrubbing sound at both full locks but not be the tires? (There are no marks on the shields... all the dust is still in place.) Can the power steering system do that (but why not before I did the brake work)? Anything else besides the tire/shield possibility? I can't think of anything besides the unlikely possibility that each wheel is now closer inboard than it was before. But the rotors look exactly like stock (except slotted and drilled), and the hub assemblies are OEM parts and also looked the same as the originals.

 

I'm thinking that it is the new pads rubbing on the new rotors at full lock due to a) side load on the tires at full lock or b) the hub assemblies hitting the lock limit causing the hub to deflect enough for the pads to hit the rotors at a slightly different place than normal. Are these slotted rotors? That might make this noise more likely.

 

Could also be enough flex at full lock with the power steering pulling on the steering arm for the splash shield to rub the rotor.

 

Rotors are slotted and drilled, as I wrote above. The rubbing also occurs at very low speeds (doing a U-turn in a cul-de-sac at maybe 5 mph max). Having a hard time visualizing the splash shield moving relative to the rotor. The pads are dead quiet, either when in use or with foot off brake in normal 90° turns. I need to think of a good test for isolating this problem, but am out of ideas.