If you're running Shimano hydraulic discs on a road, gravel, or cyclocross bike and you keep cooking your brakes on long descents or losing bite in wet weather, the L04C is the pad that solves both problems at once. Shimano's L04C Metal Disc Brake Pads pair a sintered metal compound with the aluminum Ice-Tech radiator fin, giving you the highest all-around stopping power in Shimano's flat-mount lineup along with meaningful heat management on sustained braking. This is the L-shape narrow profile pad for 2-piston flat-mount calipers, so before you order, verify your caliper is on the compatibility list below.

The sintered metal compound is where the wet-weather performance comes from. Metal pads bite harder and more consistently than resin when water, grit, or road spray gets between the pad and rotor, and they hold up longer under repetitive hard braking. That extra durability is why riders in the Pacific Northwest, the mountain West, or anywhere with real winters tend to gravitate toward metal pads for the wet season and keep resin pads on the shelf for dry summer riding.

The Ice-Tech radiator fin is the other half of the equation. The backing plate uses an aluminum and stainless steel composite construction, and the exposed aluminum fin acts as a heat sink that pulls thermal energy out of the pad and dumps it into the air. On a long alpine descent where you're feathering the brakes for minutes at a time, that heat management is what keeps the pad compound working in its intended temperature range instead of glazing over and fading.... Read More