Hit the Brakes! Stopping My Civic

One thing I think anyone should look at upgrading, regardless of your end goal, is your brakes.  On my civic, I have front disk and rear drum brakes.  The fastest way to improve your braking is to simply swap your brake pads. Look for a quality street pad from a reputable company.

For my Civic DX, I only have front disk.  I opted to leave the rear drums stock and upgrade the pads up front.  I found a set of EBC greenstuff pads for a whopping 35 bucks on eBay.

That is about half the price of the pads normally.  Ok... so I got them that cheap because a cat peed on them and the guy didn't want them any more.  Thing is, they were brand new, in the box, and had never been used.  I pulled them out of the box and threw them on the car.  My car didn't care about the pee.  And as a side note, the pads didn't smell like anything.  The crazy thing is, the first time I went to stop after breaking in the pads I pulled up 20 feet short of where I was expecting to be.  That's a HUGE difference!  And that cost me 35 bucks!  Even at full price, that kind of impact for just 70 bucks and 30 minutes to install is an incredible deal.  The pads have been on for two years now and they have been great and have plenty of life yet to live!

I found a great site on how to change brake pads on edmunds.com HERE.  The vehicle isn't the same as my civic but it's the same basic concept.

Again, the key is to look out for deals.  You can save a ton of cash just being patient and smart about looking for a deal.  The way I found these pads for half off was searching for the part number of my car's break pads from several comparable companies and lines.  I checked Hawk HP and HP+ pads, EBC greenstuff and redstuff pads.  Then I put each part number in a search in Google Shopping as well as eBay and Amazon.  I found the sweet deal on the greenstuff pads and that was my clear choice!  That's how I get it done, the deadbrokehonda way.