bfuser247819294

Hello,

I'm a newbie to bike forums.

I bought a used Giant Terrano recently, it is about 10 years old I believe. Nice bike for the money, double butted CrMo frame, good road tryes, nice range of gears.

But the brakes are causing me grief. The guy a bought it from said that it had been converted from cantilever to Vbrakes. Now I am finding that I have to adjust the brakes every second time I go out (I ride a lot of hill tracks over boggy ground). Also I find that the rim is breaking up - leaving little bits of aluminium shavings in the brake blocks.

My questions are:

1) is there anything about the vbrakes that could be causing the rim to wear, such as the contact angle of the vbrakes or something like that? I am prepared to accept that the rim is just worn out through normal use, it is ten years old after all.
2) I suspect that the levers are the original cantilever ones. I have read that canti levers pull a different length of cable to vbrake levers. Does anyone know what length of cable these two types of levers pull? I ask this because I suspect that I have the original canti levers, because, in wet conditions the levers tend to bottom out against the handlebars (if they haven't been adjusted for a week or so) or, if they have been recently adjusted they grab too suddenly.

I'll switch back to cantilever brakes if I have the correct levers - should be much easier to adjust and hopefully need adjustment less often.

Tinov