Originally Posted by Swervo

Figured I'd also pile on this thread rather than start a new one, and I'll try some of the tips in here, like hitting the braking surface with alcohol and scrubbing them down.

I've just bought my first road bike in a few decades - previously I had a hybrid with disk brakes, this one's got rim brakes. The brakes don't seem to work too badly, I haven't had any major complaints about them, but there's something that's unnerving me. If I use them for more than a second or two at medium or higher pressure, the noise they make rapidly changes from a slight hiss as they grab the rims to a very loud scraping sound, it sounds like someone dragging a big flattened cardboard box over concrete. It's loud enough that people turn around to figure out what the hell the noise is. The noise will then stay like that the next time I hit the brakes, even if I hit them lightly, but as long as I only use them lightly, they'll eventually quiet back down with use. As soon as I have to hit them harder, though, they'll go right back to making a huge racket. Braking performance doesn't seem to change when this happens, but it is a thoroughly unpleasant sound.

Does this sound wildly out of the ordinary, or is it expected? I'm worried I'm doing something like overheating them, or potentially, somehow, causing damage to the tires and would prefer not to have a tire blow out on me under heavy braking.