Old 07-09-16 | 04:19 AM
  #63  
Flinstone
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Joined: Dec 2015
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Originally Posted by halbritt
All of the braking forces on a radially laced front wheel using a rim brake will be transmitted through the brake bosses and into the frame.
I'm necroing this because I ran into and someone else might too and information should not live forever without correction.

This is completely false and even somewhat upside down. In short momentum conservation dictates that ALL force to decelerate the forward motion of a bike MUST come through the ground (except for a little through the air), transferring momentum to the ground, and thus it goes through the spokes to the frame. (a bike hurling through a vacuum can never stop itself.. you have to push from the ground)

As the brakes make the wheel try to roll slower it is resisted by the ground since the weight of the frame and rider still want to continue over the ground at the same initial speed. Ignoring air resistance, the force at the ground is the full rearward acceleration (foward deceleration) force, m*a.

That force to stop the bike is then transmitted from the wheel to the hub through the trailing spokes which pull backwards and through the leading spokes which push backwards. This is true on radial spoked wheels essentially just as on cross wheels. The misconception may arise from a (wrong) notion that disk brakes transmit stopping force through spokes and rim brakes don't. What disc brakes do that rim brakes don't is disk brakes put TORQUE on the rim through the spokes, but only to slow down the wheel itself. Both put stopping force through the spokes because again, stopping force MUST come from the ground, not the brakes.

There is a force on the brake boss, a big one, but if the boss is on top (as usual for front wheels), the wheel is moving forward there and pulling the brakes, the boss, and the bike FORWARD! As it turns out the force on the brake boss IS equal in size to the force on the ground (for weightless wheels) in order to balance toque on the wheel (if the wheels have weight, SOME net torque is required to decelerate the rim, and then this force is even bigger). But if the brakes are top dead center, that force pulls the bike forward with m*a. That means to place net m*a on the frame, the force transmitted through the spokes is actually 2m*a, backwards!

So I would certainly not say that "all of the braking forces" go through bosses. You could say some of it does, depending on what you mean by braking forces.
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