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Old 12-08-05, 08:29 AM
  #14  
cyclintom
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: San Leandro
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Bikes: Eddy Merckx Corsa Extra, Basso Loto, Pinarello Stelvio, Redline Cyclocross

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Originally Posted by grolby
2. Cantis are more than sufficient
DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!

V-brakes trade distance for leverage. The ONLY advantage of this to the RIDER is that you can brake too hard with only two fingers without thinking about it.

The disadvantage to the rider is that you can brake too much in the monentary panic when you grab the brake levers with all your fingers. In the dirt this usually doesn't have a high price because the front tire usually skids before the bike rolls over the front wheel. On high traction surfaces though it can have some pretty dire consequences.

Why V-brakes then? Well the brakes become entirely self contained. That is the ONLY additional brackets necessary to use V-brakes are the Cantilever bosses. No cable brackets are necessary.

You have essentially the same problem with disk brakes. Since cantilevers brakes, both long arm and short, already have sufficient power to lock the front wheel you have to wonder exactly what goes through people's heads when they buy them.

One person raved about "modulation". Now I hate to point this out, but the reason that disk brakes were avoided for so long on road racing motorcycles was because they didn't "modulate" well. We had 4-leading shoe drum brakes so huge that the spokes were only a couple of inches long!

Another person claimed that if your disk pads were dragging that your brakes were incorrectly adjusted. Well, DUHHHH - exactly HOW do you suppose that loose brake pads "retract"? The caliper has to rattle back and forth a bit to KNOCK the pads back into the caliper far enough so that they don't drag. Looking at all of the fancy mounting hardware used to mount disk brakes you'll note that everything is pretty solid these days. Meaning that neither the caliper nor the disk can rattle back and forth and so the pads drag all the time.

As I've noted in several group discussions - what APPEARS to be tiny inconsequencial sources of drag add up over a long ride to be a trememdous work load.

Now let's discuss disk brakes even further since it is a completely brain dead idea to begin with.

Rim brakes are situated nearest the actual loads. One side of the brake is attached to the frame and the other drags on the rim very near the road surface.

Disks are attached to the hub and are much smaller diameter and must operate to slow the wheel through the spokes. Anyone else notice that you are going from direct loading to indirect loading here?

The long and the short of it is that disk brakes on bicycles (which already have the most superior disk already) is something that is little more than a marketing man's dream. It's a device that NEVER needed to be included on a bicycle.

Last edited by cyclintom; 12-08-05 at 08:36 AM.
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