Originally Posted by GrayJay

Cool mechanical aspect of design for these brakes is the progressive mechanical advantage that they provide. You can set the pads relativly far from the rims (more tolerant of bent rims, broken spokes) and when you first pull the lever they function with low Mechanical Advantage so the pads move fast (with reduced force) to make contact the rim. As the caliper is further actuated, the mechanical advantage increases, they travel less but gradually become more powerfull. I would suspect that to get them setup right you need to have the internal linkage geometry such that you are in the highest mechanical advantage region just a bit before max caliper pull. Doesnt seem like such a design is very tolerant of pad wear however. If you adjust cable to make up for worn pads, you are messing with where you are on the progression curve. (Is there some other pad wear adjustment maybe??)

I have a set of modolo kronos that I used to ride on a dedicated time-trial bike. They looked fantastic, light and aero but unfortunately braking performance was in the "death brake" category and squealed horribly. I was always a bit suspicious that the pad compound used on the Kronos was unsuitable, might be an interesting experiment someday to try to re-fit them with modern compound pads and see if they can upgraded to merely chronic braking performance.