Originally Posted by
cyccommute
There are two things you aren’t taking into account. First, as the lever moves toward the bar, the angle of the leverage lessens. If you start braking when the lever is at a low angle, the leverage that can be developed is less.
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, I believe most better levers compensate for that, ie. they compensate for the lever movement so that no matter the lever position you get the same leverage.
Secondly, a long lever pull means that more cable has to move and the cable stretches more. It’s a smaller effect but it’s still significant enough to make the brakes feel mushy.
That doesn't sound entirely correct. The cable travel difference in miniscule when comparing to the complete length of cable in use. Also the contributing factor for cable stretch is not the travel distance but rather the force the cable is pulled with. Other compounding factors are housing length and thus also housing compression.
If anything, road type brake systems should cause a mushy brake feel as they pull less cable but with greater force than mountain brake systems. But that doesn't seem to happen as road brakes are, I find just as crisp as mountain systems.
And, again, these effects can easily be demonstrated with a hub mounted mechanical disc. Move the pads away from the rotor and the braking ability suffers significantly. And it does so with far less distance from the rotor.
PAD, not PADS. The unmoving pad must always stay in place. If you move that then of course braking performance suffers as the rotor has to needlessly flex and also loses pad contact area as a result. But moving the moving pad out doesn't cause issues nor does it degrade braking performance as long as the lever doesn't pull into the bar.
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
That’s the most common one, yes. However in nonstraight ahead situations, locking the front wheel won’t result in a good outcome. A nonspinning wheel is unstable. That’s why a skidding rear wheel tends to move from side to side during a skid. If you could skid the front wheel, it would do the same and the rider is going to have difficultly staying upright.
Very true. Hence I prefer braking systems which allow me to toe the line of front tire skidding. I've only fallen once due to a front tire skid and that was due to carelessness on a wet mossy surface.
It is a strange difference indeed. By “do[ing] manuals”, I assume you mean nose wheelies. That’s not a measure of modulation in my opinion. It may be a measure of power but I can lift the wheel of just about any bike I own with just about any brake own.
Manual in my understanding is as you say a nose wheelie which is then sustained for a period. It's the sustaining the manual which requires precise brake modulation.
I don’t know what brakes you have used but I’ve used a lot of different linear brakes. I work on a lot of linear brakes on other people’s bikes. I’ve never experienced one that is as you describe. Nor have I ever had anyone at my bike co-op complain about linear brakes being to grabby.
All I know is that I did not like them when I used them in my LHT. Also Shimano used to make these elastomer brake modulators which would effectively work as extra compressible break housing. I've only ever seen those used with full sized vee brakes. Also there's this weird 'wisdom' older folks have according to which one should never brake with the front brake. This 'wisdom' to my knowledge comes from the advent of vee brakes when people would frequently endo with front braking. I have spent some considerable effort in teaching my wife away from that weird belief and nowadays her front pads have finally started wearing faster than her rear pads.
I have experienced hydraulic brakes that are digital...the opposite of good modulation...with exactly the on/off quality you describe.
I am genuinely interested in the models you've tried which were digital. Though I'll admit I do kinda see a pattern here. You don't see a problem with cantilevers which to me require some considerable squeezing to get any power out of. If you move from that to hydraulic brakes I can see how they might seem digital. But the hydro brakes I use are not even one finger brakes, they're fingertip brakes as in I get all the power I could ever need with very little effort and it's the most accurate braking I can imagine.
As to making the rims, there are all kinds of complex shapes extruded from steel. It would be trivial to make a steel rim in exactly the same shapes are aluminum rims. You mistaken about the properties of steel. Steel isn’t a flexible material. It’s 3 times stiffer than aluminum. Steel rims have been made in the past and a steel rim is the opposite of flexible. A steel rim doesn’t need the same shapes as aluminum because it is inherently stiffer. It wouldn’t need to be double walled to resist bending. A steel rim at the same weight at an aluminum one would be stiffer and stronger.
Well, no. Aluminum is three times lighter but what you fail to account for is stiffness via thickness. An aluminum part has to only be 44 % thicker than the steel part to be as stiff. Hence aluminum frames tend to be stiffer than steel frames but that's a different discussion.
I’ve been building wheels for 30 years. I’ve never heard a spoke and nipple being referred to as “sealed”. You have the process reversed. A thread preparation is applied to the spoke before it is threaded into the nipple. The spoke/nipple junction is then lubricated with an oil of some kind. The thread prep is used to keep the nipple from vibrating loose by putting material in the threads but it doesn’t “lock” the threads. The spoke/nipple junction is never “sealed”. In fact, during truing, it’s advantageous to add some oil to the spoke/nipple junction to make it easier to move the nipple on the spoke.
It's my term that I use. The way I build wheels is set and forget. I use boiled linseed oil and while its still liquid and in lubricating form I build the wheel, stress relieve it, retrue it and usually never need to touch it again. The sealing means that when the linseed oul hardens it lightly locks the nipple threads.
As to truing a wheel, all that is usually needed is a simple turn of a spoke or two to bring the rim into alignment. There are 22 threads per cm on a spoke. It’s very precise because you have a gauge telling you how much to bend the rim. I teach people how to do it all the time and it’s easy for them to grasp the fundamentals and apply them.
Contrast that with a rotor alignment. The only way to true a rotor is to bend it. It’s only a guess as to how much the rotor needs to be bent. There’s no real way to tell if the rotor has been bent enough or too far. There no small adjustment ability like there is on a spoke. I’d much rather make adjustments to something by using threads than by simple bending it.
The way I see it, just tensioning the spokes so that the rim is pulled is bodging it. To propely true a wheel is to tune its tension as well. This in turn makes truing a bit of a hassle as it typically requires the adjustment of multiple spokes on both sides of the wheel. This is of course with wheels which haven't been built by me.
As to rotor truing it's literally a few quick adjustments and off you go. Of course a rotor only needs to be true enough and that level of trueness is quite easy to achieve.
You are saying to opposite things. Do you need a significant gap or a tiny gap? You’ve said both. People set up rim brakes with a significant gap but there is nothing that says there has to be a significant gap. It doesn’t improve the performance of the brake. Even if there is a smaller gap, there is nothing that dictates constant adjustment.
I'll assume you just read my post too quickly and missed the point I was making. Different rim brake systems require different gaps. Dual pull calipers can be fully open without pretensioning and adding tension to the brake doesn't in my experience add much to the performance. Fully open the gap is quite significant. Cantilevers always require a bit of pretensioning of the brake cable and also require the pads to be close to the rim. You get the point. Different brakes, different requirements.
You keep saying things that make no sense. There is no lever that compensates for caliper travel that I know of. Brake levers are simple mechanisms. The lever is a body that has a pivot point on it and a lever that rotates around the pivot. What would compensate in that system from caliper travel.
Did I write that the lever compensates for caliper travel? Sorry, must have typoed . What I meant was what I wrote above, ie. the lever compensates for the lever. In effect it means that no matter what the lever position, it'll always pull the same amount of cable This is achieved with the pivoting cable holder and some smart lever design. So in effect it does not matter at which position of lever travel the brake bites as the cable pull is linear with the lever movement range.