Bicycle Mechanics - Road bike brake ?

I have a mid 80's sport tour bike with Suntour Superb side pole brakes. Can I switch to dual pivot brakes ? and would the change provide better stopping power ?

Those brakes are excellent in my experience, besides looking great. The dual pivot does stay centered well and may offer better braking, but what exactly is your problem with the current brakes?

I agree! keep your current brakes but clean and tune them. then find a set of Kool Stop daul compound replacement pads that fit those brake.

if those are the original pads chances are a little freshing up will do more good than switching brakes. what kind of bike is it anyway? what are the rest of the components?

PS I actually took a set of Campi DP brakes off a bike and put older '89s side pulls on. both because I like the looks of the older brakes more and the performance

If you ride from the hoods a lot as I do and just lay your fingers down along the hoods and onto the levers to apply the brakes there is not as much leverage as when braking from the drops. So for me switching to dual pivots on a couple of my bikes was a highly worthwhile mod. It made it so that hard braking went from a knuckle popping exercise to an easy one.

But I agree that if it wasn't for so frequently riding from the hoods where it's hard to get the best leverage on the brake levers that just cleaning the brakes up, maybe new cables and housings and some better pads would improve things enough.

Thanks for all the replies :thumb:


what kind of bike is it anyway?
It's a Specialized Sequoia.

what are the rest of the components?
A variety of stuff :) Suntour, Specilized, mavic...ect.
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Ok well here's the deal, this bike normally wears a different set of wheels with 35c cycle-cross tires. I'm thinking of going to flat bars w/bare ends for this bike, and changing from 6 spd friction to 7spd index making this a cross bike of sorts. The one thing that I'm concerned about is the brakes. While the bike would be used mostly for around town riding it often finds it's self on less than ideal surfaces.

See if you can source some NOS cantilever levers for the flat bar conversion. They'll pull the right ratio of cable to suit the sidepulls and you may well find that it's a nice match without needing to switch out the calipers. And since you need MTB levers for the flatbars anyway it seems like a slam dunk solution. And if you want more sensitivity THEN spring for the dual pivot side pulls.

A more modern lever alternative is a set of Avid Speedial levers and just dial the cable barrel shuttles up toward the pivot until you get the sensitivity you want. The Avids are nice looking levers to boot so this would be a nice solution.

Keep your back brake; upgrading it is a waste of money and metal.

Dual-pivot FTW on the front. If you haven't used em before (which I'm tipping cause you don't know it's a mandatory upgrade), you're likely to go over the bars the first time an emergency happens ; )

Well I've made some headway on the switch to flat bars, I found some decent used bars for $8 and some Tektro RX 1.0 brake levers for $13. and used Topo barends for $6 I had a Ritchey 135mm cro-mo road stem that was to long with drop bars but is just right with the flat bars and barends.
Now I need some 7spd Shimano thumb shifters to go with a IRD 13-24 freewheel, these have proved to be hard to find at a reasonable price :( so for now I using fiction shifters on the down tube :cry:
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with only 20 miles ridden since the switch I'm really likin this change :)
The old brake calipers are working ok, but I will keep an eye out for the dual pivot brakes.

Did you change the brake pads? That will make a big improvement. You didn't mention that in your last post.

I have a set of the superbe pro brakes that I just installled on a bike this year. The pads were hard and I sanded down the surface and now they work fine but using new kool stops would work even better.

Did you change the brake pads? Yes.
I'm using Shimano pads on the rear and Madison on the front, the color, shape and materiel is much the same , these are the best I have found to grip the hard anodized Mavic open 4 CD rims. Well my stuff is 15-20yrs old but I did sand and clean'em.