Floorjack Auto Repair is on the Black Canyon Hwy frontage road along I-17, south of Norterra. Owner and head technician Javen Coughlin trained at UTI, is ASE Certified and GM-certified, and worked at GM and Buick dealerships before he started the shop in 2021. He does brake repair on all makes, with the most depth on GM, Ford and Ram. If your car lives off Norterra Parkway or Happy Valley Road, this page covers what wears your brakes, what a brake job here includes, and how to get the car to us.
How Norterra driving wears brakes
Most of the miles on a Norterra car aren’t where the brake wear happens. A run down I-17 to work barely touches the pads. The wear comes before the on-ramp: Norterra Parkway, the lights on Happy Valley Road, the I-17 ramps, and the parking lots at the Shops at Norterra. In Phoenix, stop-and-go driving wears out pads. Highway miles don’t.
So a short errand can do more to a set of pads than a long commute. A loop from an apartment off Norterra Parkway to the Shops at Norterra and back is a few miles with a stop at nearly every light. Do that every day and the pads wear by the number of stops, not by the odometer.
Weekend trips add load. If you tow a boat or a camper west on Happy Valley Road toward Lake Pleasant, the brakes stop that extra weight at every light on the way out, and in July they do it in the heat. A truck that tows needs its brakes looked at more often than the same truck driven empty.
When to bring it in
The Federal Trade Commission’s Auto Repair Basics guide lists four signs that a car needs brake work. The car pulls to one side when you brake. The pedal sinks toward the floor when you hold it down. You hear or feel scraping or grinding. Or the brake light on the dash is on.
Two more are worth a call. One is a shudder through the pedal or the steering wheel when you stop from speed. The other is an ABS light. A high-pitched squeal is often the wear indicator, a small tab on the pad that starts to rub when the pad gets thin. Pads replaced at the squeal are often just pads. Pads driven until they grind usually take the rotors with them.
What a brake job here covers
- Pads and rotors. The old parts are set aside so you can see what came off your car and why it was replaced.
- Calipers and hardware, including slide pins that stick. A sticking pin keeps one pad dragging, and that corner wears out first.
- Brake fluid exchange. Brake fluid takes on water as it ages, and old fluid is one reason a pedal goes soft.
- ABS diagnostics, read down to the fault code, so the repair goes to the part that set the light.
- Lines, hoses and master cylinders, the parts behind a pedal that keeps sinking.
Brakes and the suspension under them are one service line here. The full list, including shocks, struts, ball joints and wheel bearings, is on our brake and chassis service page.
You hear the price first
We look at the brakes, tell you what we found, and give you the price. No work starts until you’ve heard it. If the bill lands at a bad time, payment plans through American First Finance are on our financing page.
Before you book
Tell us what you hear or feel and when it happens: the first stop of the day, every stop, or only after a long drive. Add the year, make and model, and we’ll get it on the schedule.
More on brakes and Norterra
- Norterra auto repair: everything else the shop does for Norterra drivers, from oil changes to AC.
- Brake repair in Phoenix: how a commute from farther into the city wears brakes, plus the monsoon and ABS questions.
- Brake and chassis service: the full list, with the suspension work that shows up as uneven brake wear.