JohnDThompson 

The front brake provides the majority of braking power. If you have a fixed gear, you already have a brake on the rear wheel (your feet resisting the pedals' forward motion). Adding a caliper doesn't really give you any more braking capacity, as it is limited by the friction of the tire with the road.

TwistyMcFisty

Gotcha.
I would love to run brakeless, but this thing is impossible to skid. I imagine it is because of the 52t/19t drive??

Thanks for all the replies!!

CO_Hoya 

Sheldon Brown wrote a rather exhaustive set of articles about converting road bikes to fixed-gear and riding fixed-gear in non-track settings.

Start here, and look particularly at this section for an authoritative discussion of the issues with fixed-gears and brakes.

Good luck,
CO "Been there, done that" Hoya

rustystrings61 

An interesting footnote here - c.1936, uniform traffic codes in the U.K. changed to a requirement that all bicycles have a brake both front and rear. Said code also apparently considered a fixed cog with a lockring to be a suitable brake, hence all those old British bikes with front brake only.

There was a discussion a few years back on the classic rendezvous list involving someone who had ridden fixed and brakeless before the war, but he had mastered the use of the track mitt on the left hand as a "brake" of sorts. If I remember the drill, your left hand and forearm go under the handlebar, fingers straight up and out and out of the way as you firmly press your gloved and padded palm against the tire tread just in front of the fork, while your tensed forearm is pressed as a lever against the underside of the bartop. Expect some bruises doing this, and bear in mind you have effectively reverted to a brake technology that pre-dates not only pneumatic tires, but equal-sized wheel bicycles. I do NOT recommend it, and the above information is for historical purposes, and really only useful in the event of a major systems failure when the front brake is either absent or defective, the chain breaks or derails, and one MUST stop somehow.

From what I was able to figure out when I was trying to research fixed-gear riding in the U.S., going brakeless was at its peak before and during WWII, and mostly involved riders who were in clubs who learned the techniques from more experienced cyclists. You don't see a lot of it in old pix after the war, and I think that is because variable gears started becoming the norm among sports cyclists, coupled with more cars on the road after gas rationing ended. It hung on among people who actually rode on tracks who would ride to and from events - then again, many of them also fitted brakes to their track bikes - there's a photo of Art Longsjo at an event where he has removed his calipers but the levers remain on his bars, for instance.

The ONLY American adult cycling manual I could find from before the war (Roland C. Geist, Bicycling as a Hobby, 1940) depicted fixed with front brake on the road.