Originally Posted by
jazzmanjm8
In the BMX world a front brake tends to be not useful when riding. I am sure their is a complicated reason why this is true but for me I am curious as to why most folding bikes come with both?
I am curious if anyone has experience in this and could shed some thoughts. The biggest one I can see is two is better than one!
If both brakes are applied, the front brake actually contributes more to braking power than the rear brake, due to weight transfer and the physics of stopping a bike in motion. So you get more braking out of your front brake than your rear. This assumes traction -- on loose surfaces, since the front wheel is also used to steer, use of the front brake should be modulated...
Originally Posted by
smallwheeler
in my particular case, installing the brake was quite easy given that the bike i was using at the time already had a brake lever mounted on the side of one its tubes. incidentally, if you have a bike with this type of break lever you may want to hang on to it because it's probably quite rare and valuable. when i took the bike to a bicycle shop to have the wheel balloons re-filled (they were out of helium - had to settle for standard air) the owner called all the employees to gather round and have a look. seems they were all very happy to see this rare bike.
So this one time? On BikeForums? There was a thread about how you couldn't use a twist shifter as a brake lever. Of course I then had to rig up v-brakes to a SRAM grip shifter to prove them wrong. It worked. Kind of. Not recommended for other than novelty use...