Originally Posted by
whitecat
40 miles isnt breaking in anything. Discs need at least 200 miles of strong riding in order to be somewhat broken in. I can lock up rear on my road bike with MX4‘s, so if BB7 wont do it, then it is not set up properly or not broken in.
Disc brakes have lower initial bite then v‘s, but braking is more consistent up to the limit when the tire starts to loose traction. V‘s tend to grab quickly and proceed even quicker to lock-up, they are mostly an on/off brake. Discs on the other hand dont have such an initial bite, but they scrub speed down much more quickly then v‘s, because you can balance the braking with them right up to the point where tire almost starts to skid, but not yet - and that is the point of max deceleration, efficient braking that scrubs the most speed in the least time.
Sorry but
any brake should be able to lock up the rear wheel of
any bicycle. A coaster brake can lock up the rear wheel of a bike. It's not exactly the gold standard for brake effectiveness.
The rest of your post rates a giant "Huh?" I've never heard anyone refer to v-brakes as 'on/off brakes' nor have I ever experienced any v-brake to be such. I have experienced the on/off effect with discs but not with the BB7s.
Originally Posted by
pkulak
Hmm... looks like I am expecting behavior I shouldn't be. Thanks for all the help, guys. I'll just take them as they are now and see what happens after breaking them in for a lot longer.
Pkulak, I think all this 'breaking in' stuff is hokum. What you get out of the long break in period is used to how the brakes work and how to deal with their short comings.
The BB7s I have, and the ones I had in the past, were well 'broken in' but they really haven't improved any. The sponginess at the lever isn't a function of the pads and the discs bedding together...which is what 'breaking in' does. It's a function of the mechanism from the lever to the caliper. Perhaps compressionless housing would help but that seems a bandaid fix. I don't need to use compressionless cable housing on rim brakes...front or rear...and those brakes seems to work just fine without it. My rear brake follows the same route...with the same housingless sections and only slightly more cable housing from the seattube to the caliper... as my rim brakes did but the rear brake is even more spongy then the front brake is.