I have and older Huffy road bike that I really enjoy riding, but always disliked the brakes. I recently got rid of the safety lever type original brake levers and upgraded to better bars and some nice Diacompe aero levers. The new levers did not change anything as far as braking performance goes. I do not have a close-up of the old school Polygon alloy brake calipers, but here are a few pics so you can see what I got.............
The last thing I did was clean the Araya aluminum alloy rim braking surface and sanded the brake pads and this made a huge improvement, but the braking is still very poor. Any suggestions on better brake pads for my setup? I could always upgrade the calipers and if you think this will be the trick, what calipers would you use and what pad combo? These old calipers work correctly and everything is adjusted correctly, the stopping power is just poor. I don't mind spending some money on this beautiful bike, but if all I need are pads, I would prefer to keep the old calipers. I do have a set of old Diacompe calipers on another bike I could swap over, but prefer not to. Thanks!