In those circs the owner is likely to let you check it out fairly thoroughly before you commit, so if you have agreed an appropriately low price you have very little to lose.
New pads and disks sounds likely to be a superfluous expense to me, unless you have a reason to believe otherwise. Pads don't wear out sitting.
Disks rust, but (cosmetic MOT failure aside, which certainly happened in Scotland) cleaning and freeing up calipers and changing brake fluid seems likely to be more productive.
Disks can rust quite significantly when stood so replacement may be easier.
II've de-rusted disk rims quite effectively here (car parked outside during the summer monsoon/typhoon season, when I was in the UK) by motoring them in 2nd gear and applying a crumpled beer can to them. Grinds the rust off and costs nothing.
https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/coke-can-for-brake-drums.242350/
(Starts with the drums, but goes on to disks)
(There was an HJ thread, but it was mostly howls of condemnation from the chorus with no visible means of support, and search doesn’t find it anyway).
I dunno if that would have been good enough to avoid my past UK Cosmetic MOT Fails (for rusty disks which passed the braking function test just fine), but I'd think it would have been worth a try, if I'd thought of it.
Regarding the criticism in that BITOG thread, that a wire brush would have been easier and safer, I’m not sure this is the case. As well as the point I make on the anti-corrosion effect of aluminium (which is probably only relevant if you use a binder to retain it) aluminium oxide is a very hard abrasive. A wire brush is roughly the same hardness as the disk, and tends to polish the surface of rust scale rather than remove it
Replacing these disks wouldn't necessarily be all that easy, since its a "captive rotor" design, involving risk of bearing damage during removal.
Edited by edlithgow on 24/02/2021 at 02:57
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