Originally Posted by
Darth Lefty
cyccommute in what sense do you believe hydraulic brakes are more powerful, or run closer? They have about the same leverage. I happen to have a cable disc road bike and hydro disc MTB right now. Though I haven't measured it with valve shims or anything, they appear to have about the same gap at rest and the same lever travel to clamp. The advantages of hydraulic vs cable are many but that's not one. I invite you to look at some exploded drawings and block diagrams and see how they work... not just in a raw piston area ratio sense, but where the moving parts are, how they are exposed to the environment, and level of complexity. They really do have a lot of advantages over cable, and are just satisfyingly clever to boot. The cable road bike is getting converted soon.
Most all of the gushing about hydraulic brakes is how they are so much more powerful than other brakes. Whenever I bring up what I would consider the
lack of modulation, I’m always told to use only one finger. I understand that but I don’t feel that is the solution.
As for the gap, hub mounted discs need a much closer gap than rim brakes. Hydraulic brakes are even closer. I’ve gapped them with a
Birdzman Clam which has 2 sides that are each less than a millimeter thick. Hydraulic pistons can pull back only a very small amount before they become ineffective. Automobile discs don’t even bother with a gap and just let the pads rub all the time. We obviously can’t do that on a bicycle.
I don’t see hydraulics as being “clever”. I had to try and bleed too many of them...rather unsuccessfully in most cases. They are mess, difficult to deal with, have many seals that can decay and fail, and, if the disc box at both locations of my local co-op is any indicator, they are replaced often.
A cable operated brake on a bicycle
is clever. It’s simple. It requires very little maintenance. It’s effective enough that the limits of braking on bicycles can be reached with hand power alone.
The point I am trying to make is that cable brakes...either hub mounted disc or rim brakes (still a disc)...are as bad as people make them out to be. I have cable brakes that are single pivot side pulls, cantilever, linear, linear (rear) with hub mounted disc (front), and disc front and rear (at least 3 bikes with them).
All of them stop when I want them to stop and I have never worried that they wouldn’t work...even a 50 mph in the rain with 40 extra pounds of gear in a driving or a steep rocky drop from the top of a Colorado Pass with 25 lbs of gear. I even went for a mountain bike ride with cable disc brakes on some steep and rocky trails this last week and didn’t have any problems with surviving the ride.