Originally Posted by
Ritterview
You have two caliper brakes, then? You might have thought of getting a disc. If you are thinking of wheels, then so too is it a time to ponder using a disc, as that affects wheel choice.
The venerable Avid BB7 has been a staple, but new mechanical brakes in the offing tip things in the direction of a disc, such as the
TRP Spyre, that weighs less than the new lightweight BB7,
and squeezes bilaterally.
If you release at least the rear rim from its heatsink mission, your wheel choices expand.
We have Avid 7 V-brakes. A disc would be nice, but we have some little problems. Our Speedster has a pacman for a drum, but no disk mount. Would mean a trip to CoMo and a repaint as well as a new rear hub or whole new wheel. Our current sport hub is a CK, which I really like for winter riding, with mount for neither drum nor disk. We have a touring wheel with an Arai, but it weighs about 2 lbs. more than our sport wheel. We do get into some steepish descents with our sport wheels and have blown tires off the rim before we got Deep-Vs on both ends. Luckily always immediately after the descent, not during! We know how to brake, but sometimes . . .
So a big expense, for us at least, for what wind tunnel tests say is a small speed increase for a tandem, especially over Deep-V rims, and what seems to be uncertain reliability. Our friends with the Rolfs, whom we already outcoast, have sent them back for service at least half a dozen times in 2 years. They've given up on them for ordinary use and now ride a Deep-V wheelset.