You posted at a good time for me to share some of my recent 4th gen rotor experience w/ a replacement China product. I recently had my rotors warp due to my negligence in fully removing some powdercoat on rotor-facing surfaces. I initially thought this was the result of sticking caliper pistons, so I went all-in and bought new seals preparing for a rebuild.
I was going to buy OEM rotors expecting to drop $600, but even pricing the most reasonable new OEM from David Silver Spares would have been $700+ pair, and had me saying “ouch”. I shifted my strategy to thinking practical, or so I thought. I ran across this service in Michigan called
TrueDisk, which is basically this machinist duo who use a minimalist resurfacing/grind approach. After some correspondence, I had a good feeling these guys were experienced in their trade. I sent in my rotors which were ~4.4mm each, and in a week’s time I got them back. Price: $110 for machining the two. The result? One rotor was resurfaced down to ~4mm, the other was resurfaced down to 3.5mm (min). The machinist (Tom) indicated that the one rotor had some warpage, and he needed to grind down more metal to get zero runout. Tom @ TrueDisk is a nice guy and does good work, but I wasn’t feeling exactly thrilled with the one rotor at min spec. I'll keep them for spares.
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Mulling this over, I already went down a path that I wasn’t satisfied with. I looked at the non-OEMs, still being haunted with Honda’s price. EBC contour pro-lite looked pretty good for the $$$, and I was about to pull the trigger on a pair ($500), but I wasn’t feeling the non-OEM appearance. There are many of wavy rotors available, but I just wasn’t thrilled with seeing them on my 16-year old VFR. I ran across some OEM chinese look-alikes on eBay and rolled the dice on a pair. They looked very close to OEM, and I figured at $180 a pair, I would already chalk this up to this project’s losses if I wasn’t happy w/ the quality.
The rotors arrived on the quick boat from China... at my doorstep in about 4 weeks. I seriously was expecting the worst, as I was skeptical throughout the whole bit about purchasing China parts for my Honda. I opened the package, and wow, these rotors actually looked up to par and exceeded my expectations. The only difference that I could see between my OEM and the China units is that the carrier design was different to accommodate 7 float buttons instead of the OEM’s count of 10. Ironically, my 6th gen has seven buttons on its OEM rotors, so I wasn’t terribly concerned about the reduced number of buttons.
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Still skeptical, I mounted the rotors (mating surfaces free of powdercoat of course), and set up a dial gauge. There was less than .001” of runout on both, which is good enough for me! I have since taken the VFR out on one mountain ride after rebuilding the calipers, new EBC pads, and mounting the China rotors. I felt OK with the rotors: everything is smooth and there is no pulsation or noise when stopping. I am still going to be skeptical on these rotors until I get a few more rides in, but so far, I cannot discern any difference from OEM. Not too shabby for $180. I'm sure there will be those who say they wouldn't cheap out on such a part, but after scrutinizing these rotors the best I could, their quality is just as good as original IMO.
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