Originally Posted by
dragonmg
TIn my experience, brake shutter isn't that big a deal in cross races, but if you use your cross bike for road training, it can be downright scary on fast and twisty road descents.
Yep. I don't race CX, but do ride on trails with it and there I don't even notice the shudder.
On the road however it feels unsafe to the point that I am uncomfortable on such roads you describe.
The bike I have problem with is a Lemond Poprad w/canti brakes. I started with the aluminum fork and went thru many fine tunings with LBS, all the tricks of pad angle adjustment, pad material, etc. tried, but with no good results. Lemond, in response to my complaint that the shudder was a safety issue, sent me a new carbon fork. That helped a bit, but the shudder is still there and still too dangerous for fast decents. It is quite easy to get the front wheel to start skipping on pavement on decents due to shudder. That is quite disconcerting.
It is unfortunate. I love this bike and while I can still use it on trails, no longer use it on the road. My other bike is a fixed gear and I ride it 99% of the time now - I want to use the Lemond for routes that are not good for the fixed (i.e. hilly routes with steep descents) but that is unsafe on the Poprad.
So I either need to convert to a road fork and different brakes or buy a road bike.
Al