ORIGINAL: gjscott

I'm European and have been changing brake pads plus everything else on cars for nearly 20 years and nobody ever skims disks at a routine brake pad change in Europe and that includes trucks and busses etc
I don't understand your 'heat cycling' statement. Your changing the pad so that negates that, and to harden cast iron you need to get to 1,500 to 1,750 degrees which I doubt any of us are getting to. The disks would warp way before that point and you'd have to change them anyway.

There is no need to skim unless the disks are scored, warped or massively uneven. And even then we replace the disks. This sounds like the similar scam and old wifes tale dreamt up by dealers and garages as the 3k oil change interval. Ford recommends 5k, at least they do in my maintenence manual.
Just because a garage says it, definately doesn't mean it's true. They're out to make money and if you think any other than that you'll be ripped off.

In Europe now many cars that are the same as here are having factory oil changes at between 10k to 20k miles including that first change after new, and there is nothing different about the car or the oil in Europe. Modern engineering tolerances are so accurate and oil quality is so high that it takes a long time for it to get contaminated and degrade. So the garages simply get their money other ways, sales, parts etc

Additionally the master cylinder is designed so that fluid can pass back through it wheither you have ABS or not, if it wasn't your brakes would lock on after the first use. You simply have to push the cylinders back slowly and steadily and maybe remove the resevoir cap in case theres too much fluid. I don't think you'd get any crap in your fluid thais way, if you did you would have had a leak from the piston seals first place.

Well that's my opinion anyway.