After my most recent track day I noticed the seals around the front brake pistons are mostly molten/disintegrated. I used porterfield R4 pads which worked pretty well (brake-intensive track), but noticed were starting to crumble when I took them off after I came back. Does anyone have similar experiences - are brake ducts required or could a different pad fix the overheating issue (I'm trying XP10s now)?

 

Neither of those will help. They will still melt.

I've been running the car for several years now without those dust seals at all. No apparent problems have resulted.

 

This may be a chicken and egg thing...

I've seen deteriorated/ripped seals tug on the piston in such a way as to cause it to get cocked in the piston bore.
This prevents the piston from kicking back enough and causes the pad to ride on the disk all the time.
That in turn causes the brake to heat up more than before promoting further destruction of the seal.

 

That's why I removed mine completely. I thought they were doing more harm than good in their partially melted state.

 

I've had this problem on a few cars in the past. The function of the seal is to keep dirt out of the piston bore. If the seal is removed or compromised there could be a problem at pad change time. When you retract the pistons to get the pads in you could push dirt back into the bore. That may score the bore and hasten the wear on the pison's O ring.

If you take an extra couple of minutes you can clean the area with some brake cleaner prior to retracting the pistons.

Pads that crumble could be a sign of a bed in problem.

 

The "piston seal" that you see deteriorating is the dust cover for the actual seal. As long as no fluid is leaking around the seal, you should be fine. However, like davepk said, if you notice a dragging pad, I'd look into removing or replacing them.

 

Visual aid:

 

LOL

I remember that!

Buttonwillow if i recall correctly. We had to pound that backing plate off of the piston.

 

Lucky thing I brought the sledgehammer 1,100 miles the day before. I remember hefting it in hand when packing the trailer and thinking to myself, "Do you really think you'll need this?" Needless to say, it is standard equipment on track days.

 

I managed to do the same thing on an RX7 twin turbo. I only did it once.