Originally Posted by
cyccommute
I think you are both making somewhat spurious “safety” arguments. Yes, the cable bridge on a linear brake can be damaged but I’ve never seen one damaged because the handlebar is turned too far. I’m not even sure how that could happen. The bridge is located where it would be difficult to have it contact any part of the frame. You might be able to turn the wheel far enough to wrap the cable around the headset but that’s user error and not something that is going to happen all that often. A lot of the damage I’ve seen done to the cable bridge comes from people not understanding how to remove the cable properly. People tend to pull the end of the noodle out of the cable bridge and end up damaging it. But that’s user error but not something wrong with the design
I agree with your comment about people who haven’t worked on cantilevers don’t understand them but that is true of much of bicycle mechanical work.
I had to replace
9 7 sets of brakes (2 were changed due to broken springs) this year because the cable bridges were damaged and bending them back into shape cacked the metal. This resulted in an iffy anchor point for the brake end of the noodle.
You may not have had the pleasure of working on bikes ridden by 5th graders for 15 years
I'm not sure exactly how the kids do it, but I think it is casued by wraping the cable arond the head tube. I've found bikes after classes with bars turned more than 180 degrees leaning against the bike trailer. Go figure. The kids are hard on bikes. The bikes also take a lot of abuse transporting them between schools, and loading them in and out of the trailer every day we have class, sometimes twice a day. That could be 50-60 times in one schoolyear. I wish we had a better system of transporting them, but we are lucky to have what got. There is not a good way to get 37 bikes, 130 helmets, tools etc into a 20' cargo trailer. Check the picture in post
#49 , and that is not fully loaded.