Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
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.
If the best response you can come off is “duh“, then maybe it would be good to refrain yourself from posting that. Because it is not informative at all, and in essence, meaning of that word is not defined.
I get that you are a die hard for obsolete technology -I can gather as much from your track record -but please dont try to convince me of that by using some twisted logic. It simply wont work.
Only real pity here is that you can, and probably will, confuse someone who is searching for good advice.
And, judging by the respones of others, wr can see just how ineffective discs really are. Go figure.