jmX

I find myself using the rear brake 90% of the time, and as I see on Sheldon brown's site, this is not a good habit to be in. During an emergency situation, if I'm not used to using the front, it could end up in disaster. The reason I'd been using the rear was that it felt a lot safer during long sweeping downhill turns . It also of course felt like I could flip the bike on the flat straight braking scenarios, but I suppose I simply need to learn to shift my weight back.

Anyway, anybody have advice for when *not* to use the front brake? Should it be fine on long downhill curves?

Also, is it normal for the front brake to be 3-4x louder than the rears? Sounds like sand paper on cardboard when I use the fronts right now, the rears sound much quieter and smoother. Both front and rear seem to be gripping the proper region on the rim, no tire contact. Pads are new and look fine to me.

Dunbar

It's not a good habit to get into. I got into the habit of using both brakes and had to panic stop. I jammed both brakes on and the rear started to skid so I lifted both brakes. Needless to say that's not the quickest way to stop, especially when your front tire is pointed at the side of a car.

There is no difference in noise output between front and rear brakes. If it's noisy adjust it yourself or take it to a bike shop. I used to like having a noisy rear brake when I rode my hybrid so I could use it to "alert" pedestrians I was overtaking them without getting that confused or annoyed look.

acidrock23

I use both brakes. I sort of modulate the stopping, a shade more on the rear to start and then front more quickly in some more panicky situations? There are some downhill trails that curve through the woods near my house. During some heavy rains this summer, a lot of the gravel sort of accumulated near the bottom that made it more treacherous when I was sailing down the hill at 20-25 mph? Even for more moderate stops, I just feel like the bike is being controlled better if I use both brakes.

DW99

Same here, I use both. I start with the back and ad the front with increasing pressure, relative to the surface I'm riding on. It just feels like I have better control this way. Certainly less front when it is wet out or a gravel patch on pavement as your wash situation. My home turf, so to speak, is the Katy Trail, crushed limestone, it can be a little touchy in some places. Brake noise, how do I stop the squeeeeaaal? Drives me crazy.

acidrock23

Also, it occurred to me that the jmX's front brake would likely be louder b/c it hasn't been broken in as much? I think part of the reason to 'share the load' is so your back brake doesn't wear out faster?

steve0257

The only time I'ld be hesitant about the front brake is when turning on a slippery surface such as sand on asphalt, or in light mud. A lot of times I barely touch the rear brake.

Scarecrow7

I use both. I'll use the rear first then ease in the front. In a panic I'll apply both which almost results in me going over the handlebars.

Anti-lock brakes would be nice!

Tober1

I'm probably 60/40 or 70/30 for the front. I usually use the rear to modulate speed and the front when I really need to stop.

carlspeed

I'm used to riding motorcycles and OHV, so using the front brake is pretty standard for me. I'm not really sure if I ever use the rear brake. When I first got the bike, I noticed that the rear rubbed a bit, so I loosened the brake all the way up. I haven't even adjusted it.

driveblind

Since reading Sheldon a few months ago I made the switch to primarily braking with the front. I rarely use the rear brake anymore, except when I need to stop really quickly.

khutch

I have always used both brakes together but now I try to use the front alone unless I am on a slippery/rough surface, per Sheldon Brown's advice. The reason is something else in that article: fishtailing. I was riding on a asphalt bike trail with a slight downgrade and a tailwind. So I was cruising along at about 22 mph (not a pace I can sustain normally) and coming to a place where the trail jogs to the right by a bit more than its width to avoid some part of the gravel pit operation it runs alongside of. I realized rather late that I needed to slow down sharply to make the jog so I grabbed both brakes hard, as I normally would. I felt the rear tire slip and the bike immediately went into a rapid, violent fishtailing unlike anything I have ever experienced on a bike before. I thought I was going down, hard and when I regained control I really, really needed to still make that jog on the path to avoid running right into the chainlink fence that runs along the path and follows the jog. I don't know how I did that but I did. I've driven rear wheel drive cars and pickups a lot so I was familiar with how to deal with a rear wheel slide (get off the throttle/brake and steer into it) and I have dealt with similar situations on my other bike (a Dahon Mu P8) without any trouble like this. It put the fear of God in me though and now I follow Sheldon's advice.

Now earlier this year I had a crash on the same bike. It was a nasty one and one of the results of the crash was a concussion that left me with no memory of that afternoon so I don't know how it happened. I was turning off a well used street into my neighborhood and for some reason I apparently went wide and over the curb where I fell and hit my head on the curb or the sidewalk beyond it. One possibility is that I had to brake hard because I was going too fast (again!) or maybe I had to brake hard to avoid a car pulling out in front of me and the bike went into that same oscillating fishtail mode. I won't ever know for sure. I wish I could think of a safe way to intentionally excite this behavior and learn how to deal with it better without crashing but so far I haven't come up with anything for that either. I don't really know why this bike (a Fuji Absolute 1.0) would be susceptible to this when no other bike I have ridden did it. Maybe all bikes do it under the right conditions and I had been lucky enough to avoid this until now. The fishtailing may have had nothing to do with my crash. For the time being I concentrate on using the front brake or the rear but not both.

Ken

five0fan

I use both brakes at the same time. Iam a old motorcycle rider and if you really wanted to stop even a little bit fast, you had to use both brakes at once.

10 Wheels

28 safe years on motorcycles. Both brakes at the same time.
Same on a bicycle.

knobd

I'm probably about 66/33 front/back overall. I always hit the back at least a little bit. This is mainly for a more effective controlled stop. However, I'm also thinking that even though it is extremely rare, I'm giving myself a bit of safety net if for some reason one of the brakes would fail.

NS86

I only use the front brake in dry conditions, on flats, and on downhills. The only times I use the rear brake is to hold myself steady while stopped or to drop a bit of speed. Using the front brake hard should stop you most of the time, the rear brake just introduces skidding and tire wear. Only reason to use both at the same time is in wet conditions.

dbc

I'll use both brakes most of the time, modulating the stop with the front. Sometimes I'll do a front brake exclusive stop.

Your front brake is your friend, but always be mindful not to grab it too forcefully.

A good thing to practice now and then is the emergency stop. Get your buns off and behind the saddle, brake a little with the rear, modulate the stop with the front, and pay attention to any rear wheel skidding. You'll start to understand a bit more what are your limits to traction.

rumrunn6

I use both

meanwhile

This is the correct answer; Brown is right that the front is *more* effective, but both brakes applied with proper modulation are best. However they need modulating separately - the greater grip at the front means that braking there can be stronger.

Brown is also correct that you need to keep your arms "strong" while braking - ie you don't let your weight come forwards. If you can move your weight back that's nice, but not going forward is the real key.

If you can't brake effectively then finding a quiet spot to practice is an excellent investment in your safety.

meanwhile

The answer to fishtailing is to learn to use both brakes effectively, not to give up using them. SB was wrong that the rear brake shouldn't be used at all - he was an excellent bike mechanic but not a great expert in bike handling. If you want to know how to handle a bike, talk to people who ride off road or to messengers who ride 40 hours a week in city traffic, often in rain. People have conclusively proved that both brakes > front brake > rear brake by experiment.

You have only so much traction per wheel: turning uses traction, so does braking. But braking increases traction at the front and decreases it at the rear. Which is why you never "grab both brakes hard" - the rear should usually get less brake than the front and this is especially the case in turns; as traction is reduced by braking and eaten up by turning this maybe the one time you want to use no rear brake at all. The best thing you could have done in this case would have been to break hard using both brakes both the corner, release, enter the corner, and then do any more stopping on front only, with maybe squirts of rear. Using both brakes together should get bike a bike from 20mph to 0 in only 5 metres on the level - this is a required federal standard (https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=74375&page=1.) Bicycles have amazing stopping power once you have tuned your ability to control it.


You've been extremely unlucky and shown a good deal of common sense and steady nerves, but you'd be safer learning to use both brakes and modulating them. Robert Hurst's book "Art Of Cycling" is good on this. Once you learn to got from 20 to 0 in 5 metres there is usually room to let the back roll in a straight line in an emergency and this is much better than trying to brake and turn.

Re. the Fuji, a very large part of how a bike handles is determined by the tyres. There might not be a handling problem at all, but just in case- what tyres did you have on the bike for each crash? Did they have a tread pattern? Were they a colour other than black? What model and with were they?

Another (unlikely!) possibility is that you suffered the dreaded "front end shimmy" - a resonance phenomenon:

https://www.spectrum-cycles.com/615.htm

coffeecake

Front brake for stopping; rear for speed modulation.

khutch

Well, Sheldon also did a lot of bike riding and I presume he read a lot of other people's opinions on everything to do with biking. I would not be too quick to dismiss his opinions. I am somewhat skeptical of bringing motorcycle practice over to cycling too. Motorcycles are far heavier, the weight distribution is different, and the handling may not be the same for several reasons. It is certainly not a gimme that a motorcycle behaves like a bicycle and even though driving both the same way has worked fine so far from some posters here remember that I have ridden bicycles for somewhere at 46 years now and have never seen this before. If you have a good online article by one of these bike messengers describing his/her technique and experience with braking I would be happy to read it. Sheldon does make a lot of sense from the physics standpoint. When you are braking hard with either or both brakes you do transfer weight from the rear to the front, making the rear brake less effective and eventually causing it to skid if you break hard enough. With only rear wheel braking this is not a problem, for me anyway, I have years of experience with rear wheel slides in automobiles and the coaster brake bike I had as a kid. I know how to recover from that, it is second nature.


I probably was not clear but I was not breaking in the corner but before the corner. The onset of the fishtailing was sudden and totally unexpected. If the rear wheel had simply slid to one side as has happened many times before (but possibly not on this bike) I would indeed have modulated the rear brake and steered into the skid to regain control, like I say this is second nature to me, been there too many times to count. Sheldon believed that this was a danger of braking hard with the front wheel and skidding the rear. He isn't usually wrong about things like this but it is possible, I disagree with him myself on some things. What he describes is exactly what happened to me though and that makes me tend to believe him. "Grabbing both brakes hard" should not be taken too far, I have many miles on bicycles over the years and colorful language aside I used both brakes as I normally would to make a sharp but not panic reduction in speed. The rear wheel slipped unexpectedly and then all Hell broke loose, even more unexpectedly!



I will look for that book. The bike had the same Hutchinson Acrobat 32 mm tires in both the accident and the fishtailing incident. The Acrobats come in any color you want as long as you want black and they have little in the way of tread but they do have knobs on the side that might come into play if you are leaned far enough over. They could not have been a factor in the fishtailing and as far as the accident goes there is no way to know but I think it unlikely that I would ever lean the bike far enough. They are intended for deep mud or other soft surfaces, I believe.

If shimmying takes place at 5-10 Hz then this could not have been shimmying. This was more a case of the bike responding to inputs at a frequency that corresponds to the reaction time of the human driver. Reaction time is effectively a transport delay and transport delays can be deadly to the stability of a feedback control system. I don't think a bike can fishtail on its own, the fishtailing comes from the human overcontrolling the bike and possibly getting out of phase with what input is required at what time. I suppose it could be that this bike just happens to have a natural response time that is optimally poor for my 58 year old nervous system and that is why I have never seen this before. I rode my Dahon folder down a railroad embankment covered in turf all last summer. It required braking hard on the front because the rear alone was insufficient even when I moved back as far as I could. On dewy mornings the rear wheel would often skid and I would have to back off on it to straighten out. If anything this was an even more extreme situation that I saw on the Fuji but I could handle that day after day without problems.

I don't know, but thanks for your comments. It has given me some more to think about. For now I continue to brake with the front alone unless I am on slippery surfaces and then I use the rear alone. Sheldon did write what he wrote later in life (and very late in his life as it sadly turned out). It could be that he gives a late 50 something rider more appropriate advice than 20 something bike messengers do.

Ken

keggo

Ironically, a portion of my ride back home from school is just as you a describe, a steep, downhill curve. I primarily use my front brake. It feels a little uneasy, but as long as you're smoothly initiating the front brake, it'll be fine. I can't comment on V-brakes since I have discs on mine, but the front does seem to be a little louder than the rear.

zazenzach

i started off with motorcycles...strangely enough...and ill tell you what i learned/was taught

rear brake should be engaged lightely with increasing pressure (braking to quickly will lead to skids) and front brake should be used with more power, but not too hard, with a less increasing pressure (compared to rear)

as you see, both brakes should always be used, just with different intensities

meanwhile

When someone is proved wrong by experiment, then they are wrong. Brown was wrong. These, for example, are the results of tests by a US company that provides forensic evidence for cycling cases:

Very different to SB's opinion!

The paper gives reasonably complete details of how they tested and you can repeat the results yourself. (Ok - modified to do without the doppler radar gun.) But remember that when you are turning that grip is used by turning force too, and this grip has to be subtracted from the braking power of each wheel. Eg a in turn that uses up the equivalent of 50% of the braking power of the front wheel then front will have 100-50%=> 50% braking left, but the rear only 76-50%=> 16% braking power left. Go beyond this and the back wheel will slide.


The physics is true, but he got the numbers wrong. I think he was influenced by the MIT Press "Bicycling Science" book which states, based on theory, that rear max brake is 10% of front. BiSci is an impressive work but when it disagrees with experiment then I take experiment.

Got it.

Yes, if you weren't turning then the knobs weren't to blame.

That sounds like good logic to me. Perhaps the problem was just that you held the bars too rigidly and denied the bike the ability to make the constant self-generated auto-steering motions that keep a bike under control.

That sounds reasonable. Especially if you have practised front brake only emergency stops. The difference between front-only and front-plus-rear isn't huge, and modulating one brake is much easier than two.

dmac49

Without question...both brakes.