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I tried searching but couldn't find anything that specifically mentions what thickness (in mm) your pads and shoes can get to before you should change them. I went to the dealer for some service and they measured the front pads at 4.3mm and the rear shoes at 4.3mm. Any info would be great, thanks!

 
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This is a 6th gen but the information is relevant...nice pic too.

https://www.civicforums.com/forums/2...ice-limit.html

 
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Short answer is "BEFORE THEY GO METAL-TO-METAL"
If the numbers posted are correct, you have a lot of time and miles left on your brakes (unless you use them a lot, like delivering pizzas for a living).


New pads are around 8-10mm thick.
On pads so equipped, the scraper or wear indicator is usually set to make contact around 1.5mm, and 1.6mm is the replacement spec in my manual.
For customers we begin recommending pads at around 3mm thickness remaining (Hey you will need them in the near future!) because we don't know when they will be back, could be over 10k before we see the car again.


Shoes, I prefer to measure in inches (fraction) instead of millimeters but 2mm is about as far as I'd let them go. NEW spec says 4mm. Shoes can outlast the car for many people in my corner of the world.

Measurements are of friction material only. The steel backing is not part of the measurements.

HTH

 
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Thanks! I can't see the pic on my work computer but it sounds very informative.

Thanks! I actually meant 4.3mm in the front pads and 3.4mm for the rear shoes. I've probably never changed the shoes, since I have about 105k miles on my 02 and they don't get used much, so hopefully they'll be good for at least 5-6 years more (I've had this car for almost 13 years now).

Sounds like I have some time left for the front pads (unsurprisingly, Firestone told me they should be replaced pretty soon when they saw it a few weeks ago). I hope it'll last at least a few more months (I put on almost 2000 miles/month nowadays) but I'll probably buy some replacement pads (along with rotors and maybe calipers) so I'll be ready to change them.

 
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my shoes looked brand new when i disassembled the drum... at 80-90k...
want to buy some new shoes?

 
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Strange, I've never ever seen anyone actually measure millimeters with using a decimal place more exact than .5 as a rough estimate. Maybe this was interpreted wrong.....Written as 3 to 4 mm, or 4mm on one side and 3mm on the other. Someone else writes it up as something very different from what was intended.

Would be interesting to pull wheels to see for yourself what the measurements are.
At that rate, you may never actually wear out the rear shoes.

I figure the front pads get replaced far more than rear shoes, something like 5:1 or more.

Yep.
"Eventually", "pretty soon", "sooner or later", "NOW -- OR YOU WILL DIE!"
It's all the same LOL

At least it doesn't sound like they hit you with a hard sell on the brakes.

At work when they get to that range, we tell the customer and let them decide, along with the reassurance that we do check visible brake pads during almost every regular service, so as long as they return for the next oil change we can keep an eye on how they are doing. Other oil change places may or may not bother to check anything like that.


When were your current front pads installed? How many miles ago?

Let's get some math going here and estimate how many miles these might actually last for you.

Brakes only wear when you use them. You could drive across the country without ever using the brakes, and there could be zero wear for many many thousands of miles.

OTOH if you deliver newspapers or pizza where you might be using the brakes 200 times per mile, they will wear out rapidly.

I have a friend that used to deliver newspapers on a rural route, 250 miles per night. Floor the gas for a quarter mile then slam brakes and stand the car on its nose as you reach the mailbox. Repeat for 250 miles every single night. Wore out brakes every 2 months or so. He used almost every shop he could find that advertised lifetime brake jobs and got kicked out of all of them LOL.
He drove an 88 Mazda MX6 to well over 400,000 miles doing this...and wore out some stuff I never ever saw anyone else wear out or break.



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Actual pictures of actual measurements of actual Honda (might be from an Accord?) brake pads in an actual shop:

I sure did try to sell a brake job on this car......

First pic is taking a measurement with a cut-off steel ruler, you can see this one has about 2mm of pad material remaining (always measure the thinnest part of the thinnest pad of the set, that's the one that counts most!)

2nd pic shows the wear indicator and you can see it should make contact (and therefore make noise) when the pad wears to about 1mm thickness.