dwmckee

I found this to be quite quick and easy. I leave rotor on wheel and wheel propperly seated in frame. rotate wheel to locate center of high spot in the caliper then turn wheel enough to get that part out of the caliper. Then a quick twist with the wrench being careful to just slightly bend. Then a second check and maybe another tweak. If rotor is worse than that I'd probably toss it and buy a straight one. I have only done this a few times but in my experience hardly any time at all needed. I put a few sheets of paper in the jaws of the wrench to be sure not to mark it with the edges of the Crecent wrench. How anyone could spend much more time than that is beyond me. Maybe a whole minute spent on a really bad one with two warps? Just get on the darn thing and ride it... It does not take much force to get to the yield point and better to do too little than too much the first time you try it.

cyccommute 

And some of us ride year around in ice, snow and mud with rim brakes. I've never found hub mounted disc to make that much of a difference...whether hydraulics or mechanical...in those conditions. That could be due to the fact that rim brakes are disc brakes and I learned long ago how to get the most out of rim brakes on- and off-road as well as how to adjust rim brakes properly so that the brakes perform like hub mounted discs do. I've run across far too many rim brake equipped bikes where the brake is set to engage at the halfway point of the lever travel. This makes for very poor brake performance and is probably the reason that people find hub mounted discs to be better brakes.

If adjust a hub mounted disc to the same lever travel...i.e. half lever travel before it engages..., they are a whole lot worse than a rim brake. Bad hub mounted disc...and there are a lot of those...generally suffer from this exact problem. They can't be adjusted well enough so that the brake lever has less travel and more effectiveness. A bad hub mounted disc is a really bad brake, like 1980s Mafic Racer knockoff bad or BMX long arm bad.

cale

If you're that good (and modest, too) at braking with rim brakes, the disc brakes will be a cinch to get the hang of. Hang in there, you'll get it.

FastJake

I ride year round in all the ice and snow that Madison WI will dish out (woke up to slush this morning), all on cantilever or V-brakes. I've ridden over 2,000 miles since January 1st and never once wished for discs. My rim brakes with Kool Stop pads work just fine in all conditions and never give me reliability issues even with all the salt they use around here. People riding discs here in the winter report corroded/stuck calipers after a few years.

At 140lbs I have no desire for a heavier braking system that requires stiffer frames/forks. That they come standard on most new bikes is a result of bike manufacturers realizing they can sell more new bikes this way.

Leebo

Give it a rest man. Discs are here to stay. Concede that lots of riders do not have the high and dry of Denver. The PNW of rain and drizzle. NE freeze and thaw for months. With 8 + feet of snow this year. My rims don't wear out with discs. And I have gone through 3 due to wear. Yes, regional differences with winter and road treatments. Rim brakes work for you, great. And I'm sure in CA, AZ and FL too. I run good brakes like avid BB'7s and shimano hydros. Concede that for many people in lots of different riding situations, disks work great for them. Like me. If someone likes rims brakes, great. For me in my riding situations, disks brakes are far superior. I run avid speed dial levers, a great match for the BB'7s, setup and pad contact adj. too. YRMV.

edthesped

First, I have a new build with Hy/Rd's installed and eliminating disc rub has been the least of my problems.

They were great for the first couple hundred miles of breaking the new bike in. Then one day I hit a very muddy section of the GAP that caked my bike and brakes with a soupy mixture of mud and limestone dust. Afterward I started getting a judder, almost like the pads were catching the cutouts on the rotor. After much f'ing with the pads and attempted adjustments I threw in the towel called TRP tech support for help and was given the "wow, we never heard of that happening" so I followed my gut and replaced the pads, Clarks resin from a local bike shop, the judder immediately went away after they were installed. I did a few more rides and seemed fixed until I took a hilly way home from work the other day. Coming down the hill I was intermittently braking then braking harder to stay relatively slow on the high traffic, pothole and winter crud lined Pittsburgh streets, GPS recorded a top speed of 48 MPH coming down the hill. In doing so my front brake lost a ton of power and had me thinking this is what they mean by brake fade. I noticed I still had no power at the front brake when I was back on the flats and couldn't lock up my front brakes if my life depended on it. That's the current state of my front disc. I am now trying figure out what the problem is and fix it so I don't experience it again. FWIW, there are no signs of overheating on the disc so I don't know if it's the pads, poor bedding on my part though I bedded them per online reading, rotors, or something else.

MikeyBoyAz

Yeah, I don't like disc brakes on my road bike either. I have hydro on my 29er and it's great, but I find it annoying to adjust the rotor when it gets slightly warped due to use in the nasty switchbacks. I have no desire to do the same on the road bike. Considering I can never hear the rubbing on my MTB, I leave it swooshing, but on the road bike I would be adjusting the discs every friggen ride, because I have OCB.

SquidPuppet

Have you inspected the pads to see if they have glazed over?

trailangel

I am going to wait until dual front disc brakes come out. I was riding really fast down a hill and I grabbed the front disc brake and I started to get torque steer... I almost lost it.
The rear brake started to smoke....smelled like a semi-tractor losing brakes on a long downhill.
BTW, which is worse for the environment .... rubber rim brake dust or .. dust from disc brakes?.... I really care about this.

edthesped

That's what I'm thinking happened but I won't have time to tear into this until the weekend. My thought is to remove the rotors and go over the braking surface and pads with emery cloth and try to re-bed. Part of me wonders if it has to do with the rotor design but I don't understand bicycle discs enough to know for sure and I don't want to change parts just to find out.

Hopefully I can get past all of this and start having some love for discs but as it stands now my experience isn't off to a good start.

FastJake

Apparently you missed my post just above yours? Madison winters are anything but high and dry.

If disc brakes work for you, great. Just keep them away from my bikes.

asmac

My experience:
1. Avid BB5 (cable-actuated) are adjustable but very finicky and damned-near impossible to get right.
2. Avid Elixir (hydraulic) always rub and have nothing to adjust other that getting them lined up with the rotor. The pads don't retract.
3. Shimano XT (hydraulic) never rub and have a mechanism to retract the pads automatically. Very little effort to set up.

cyccommute 

We have winter here too. It's not always dry and, although our snow doesn't stick around for long, it has in the past and will probably do so in the future. As for your 8+ feet of snow this year, that's fluke and no brake is going to perform well in that much snow. No bike is going to perform well in that much snow.

I also deal with salt, sand and wet during the winter. I deal with dry dust in the summer. I would dare say that I probably use my brakes more than you do because I live and ride in mountains that you don't have. I have about 800 feet of climbing each day I ride to work...500 feet of which occurs on the last 2 miles. If I feel like it, I can climb up and over a mountain (another 500 feet of climbing) to go home. I use my brakes a lot. In the 80,000 miles I've logged since 1988 (I only have records back to then) for all kinds of bicycling...mountain, commuting, touring and recreational...I have worn out 2 rims due to braking. I've broken more rims due to other factors...crashes, poor design, jumping, etc...than I have worn out brake tracks. Saving rims by using a hub mounted brake is just not valid reason to use them in my book.

As I've said above, I have hub mounted discs on several bikes. I've used them. I even have a bike that has a disc on the front and a rim brake on the back. Frankly, I can't tell the difference. I can stop as effectively and in the same distance with a 203mm hub mounted disc on a camping gear loaded mountain bike as I can on a cantilever equipped loaded touring bike doing 45 mph on a rainy twisting North Carolina road. To say that one is "far superior" to the other just doesn't hold water. I've ridden both kinds of brakes in the same...or worse...conditions that others have. I've never noticed any difference. Up to and including ineffective braking on hub mounted discs due to ice glazing the rotors. If anything, that is worse than ice glazed rims which I've also experienced.

Yes, discs are here to stay. I accept that. It doesn't mean I have to drink the Kool-aid.

cyccommute 

It sounds more like you have air in the system. Look into a brake bleed and/or seal replacement.

SBinNYC

maximum braking rate is:

gL/H, where g is gravitational acceleration, H is distance of center of mass above ground and L is distance of center of mass behind front wheel.

Any additional braking acceleration will result in rider lifting rear wheel and flying over the handlebars. Just about all rim and drum brakes can exceed this acceleration. The difference is mostly in the hand force necessary to achieve this.

The only way around this limitation is to lower the center of mass (e.g. recumbent) and/or increase center of mass distance from front wheel (e.g. tandem).

Jarrett2

Good stuff, thanks.

cale

By the time you're ready for them, they'll better sorted out.

cale

Haha, "torque steer".

cale

Hold the quick release skewer open 1/2 way. Tighten the quick release nut down to finger tightness. Close skewer. (If you consistently have the skewer too tight or too loose, change the setting by a quarter turn of the nut before flipping the lever over.) I don't think counting turns is going to be easier but YMMV.

Jarrett2

Thanks for all of the input. All of this has made me understand I don't need discs on my road bikes. I don't need to be counting turns and measuring millimeters. I just want to ride.

cale

You may get it anyway. Just saying, I would have resisted a lot of the safety devices on cars that are mandatory AND inflationary. We don't always get to pick our battles.

dynaryder

Then you're not doing it right,cause it doesn't take me long at all.

dynaryder

But you already have them,don't you?

BTW,which model bike/brakes do you have? And do you have QR's or through-axles?

rydabent

Old time mechanics didnt like fuel injection either. They wanted to stay with carburetors. Pretty much the same thing with disc brakes.

Wilfred Laurier

I put a cheap set of hydraulic discs on my mtb about three yeas ago and never had a problem with rubbing after the initial setup. They started rubbing a bit at the start of this past winter and by mid January were all but seized against the rotors, but that is because of road salt and lack of maintenance, not an inherent flaw with discs.