randyjawa 

Having owned and ridden quite a few high end vintage road bicycles, I have come to understand that some components are better than others, both cosmetically and functionally. Though much ado surrounds the Campagnolo product, I have not found their Old School brakes much to my liking. I speak now of the older Nouvo and Super Record side pull calipers.

I do like the newer Campy brakes, the ones I call Light Action(see pic). The levers are easier to reach and the brake system does not need as much effort to apply. The braking seems to be much better. This holds true for other Light Action sets such as the Shimano Exage or Suntour Edge sets that I have been lucky enough to use. I absolutely love my Shimano 105 eight speed brifters.

About the best Old School brake set I have used was a first generation Dura Ace side pull set fitted to an early seventies Motobecane Grand Record. The levers fit my hands perfectly and the stoppers actually stopped.

I really like a good set of Mafac Racers. They look vintage, are nice to set up and work very well when compared to all other Old School systems. My opinion is based on experience and many comparisons. That said, I absolutely hate the stupid half hoods offered by Mafac.

Weinmann makes a reasonable but mostly unimpressive product abut some of their levers are very attractive(my opinion). Dai-Compe has never done much to impress me with the quality of their levers or calipers. Modolo has lovely hoods but not all that much else to offer in my humble opinion. Having used Mavic stoppers on one bike and for a fairly short period of time, I cannot comment much but I do recall not being impressed.

Then there is the problem of being able to reach the brake levers. If some levers are difficult for me to reach, a guy with fairly good size hands, how tough must it be for a smaller person to use the same brake.

How do others fell about the Old School brakes available and common on vintage road bicycles? Does anyone have a favorite or, for that matter, anti-favorite?

balindamood

I like Mafac centerpulls best, but the older Campy and Shimano copies are a close second.

T-Mar

I second your opinion of the Campagnolo NR/SR sidepull brakes. The performance to cost ratio is very poor. I never liked the Camapgnolo Delta either, other than for aesthetics. The best of the vintage Campagnolo brakesets in my opinion was the Chorus monplaner.

MAFAC brakes well, courtesy of the generous pad contact area. They were also super adjustable but the number of adjustments could make them labourious to set-up and cause problems with inexperienced hands. They also came out of adjustment more easily than other brands.

I was never fond of CLB, either the center-pull or lighweight side-pull.

I found the Weinmann and Dia-Compe centerpull brakes both good performers, for their day. Generally, I found the Dia-Compe to be softer than the Weinmann, but in retrospect I contributed that to the pads and the use of lighter gauge cables. I always found the sidepulls to be slightly less effective than the centre-pull.

I put Universal in the same category as the Weinmann and Dia-Compe. I never did like like Modolo. Looked good, but that was about it. I never liked any of the lesser tier Ialian brakes like Balilla.

Worst of the Japanese offerings would have to be Cherry.

At the bottom of the list would be Altenburger 's Synchron brakest.

In my opinion, Shimano was consistently the best of the vintage brakeset manufacturers, There's a reason why the 1st generation Dura-Ace were the most popular aftermarket upgrade on high end bicycles. They looked good, were reasonably priced and worked well. The 1987 SLR brakes were a revelation. The only substandard performing Shimano brakeset was the Dura-Ace AX though they are arguably the most beautiful beakeset ever manufactured.

Having said that, the performance of any vintage brakest can be noticeably improved via the use of modern premium pads, teflon lined housing and good cable. John E would undoubtedly add aero levers to lthe list of suggestions but I have found mixed results depending on the mechanical advantage of the levers and calipers.

Citoyen du Monde

I believe there are a number of things that are being overlooked here. Campagnolo was the only brake back in the day to come with the extra thick, no stretch cables. They also had comparatively superior cable housing, they were virtually impossible to knock out of alignment, they had distinctly superior lever hoods and lever shape. They had long-lasting brake pads that featured virtually no fade and they were the first to have a continuously variable Q/R lever. All of these features were major improvements when compared to anything available up until then. They, along with the better than average brake modulation were also all very important to racers but not necessary to other users. When one was racing back in the day, the value of having a brake that allowed for opening while riding, to adjust for dents in the rims and rims that went out of true, as well as during wheel changes became immediately clear. This advantage would have virtually no value to other riders. With improvement in rims, this adjustability on the fly has lost almost all benefit, but it was a very real advantage in the day. If you are comparing these brakes today, you will no longer benefit from the better cables and cable housings as all have by now improved their cable housing at least to the level or far better than to that of Campagnolo back in the day. The better cables have also brought about a situation where thicker cables are no longer an advantage and the stiffer springs required by Campagnolo to work with these thicker cables has now become a disadvantage. The Campagnolo brakes remain to this day the ones that are the easiest to adjust and keep in adjustment. All of these marked improvements brought on by Campagnolo were universally recognized by other manufacturers and made them all rethink their products. If you look at the brakes in their then current configuration, your ideas will be thoroughly modified.

Now lets look at the other brakes: Mafac has lever bodies that are very poorly shaped that rarely if ever fit anybody's hands and have such huge reach that it is virtually impossible to activate the brakes from the hood position unless you have anything other than large hands. The brake calipers are indeed quite good except that they had abominable quality control standards which meant that as T-Mar has pointed out they required an incredible amount of fiddling to get to work properly. Without the fiddling you had brakes that would howl incessantly and would vibrate the fillings out of your mouth. They were also impossible to keep aligned and they would not allow for quick wheel changes. They had a completely useless cable fixing system that required at least three hands to do properly (better yet 4 hands).

Modolo brakes were more or less a 10 year newer copy of Campagnolo, where they had worked on certain features. If you used their economical Speedy model, you got virtually all the same features of Campagnolo at a fraction of the cost. Their anatomical hoods were also the nicest in the business. Even today for vintage bikes their hoods are still widely admired and used. They too came with their own cables and housing that were well-suited to their brakes and spring rates. With the hard coat anodization, the finish of the Modolo brakes were also among the best in the business. If you find 25 year old brakes, the finish of the caliper arms will remain impeccable.

Weinmann brakes when they came out in the late 50's were very good brakes, but over time were thoroughly outclassed by others and became a discount OEM offering. Their lever bodies were not conducive to braking from the hoods, the levers and the calipers had comparatively more flex than most. Their brake pads while good lasted only a very short time because of their soft compound. Overall the absolute stopping power was good but the modulation was useless. They were also very difficult to keep aligned and adjusted. In the 70's, they came out with a handy tool to adjust the centering of the brakes which made a huge improvement.

Dia-compe brakes were almost exact replicas of Weinmann brakes to begin with, except that they made the caliper arms somewhat stiffer, at a better price. The levers still had terrible body shape and too much play side to side. The cable fixations nuts were also fiddly and of a poor design. In the 80's Dia-compe started making their own designs and you can see that a considerable amount of engineering went into the changes. The 1980's Dia-compe brakes seem to be good all around. The soft compound Dia-compe pads also work with almost all brakes.

Universal brakes are almost universally forgettable and don't have many redeeming features. I suppose you could say that prior to the advent of Campagnolo, they had the most user friendly lever body shape and lever hoods and the most functional Q/R, but those advantages were thoroughly blown away once Campagnolo came on the scene. The Universal Mod.61 center pull brake calipers also seemed to be more user friendly than Mafac Racer, without the dreaded howling. To get them to work decently you did however need to use somebody else's levers. If you had big hands, I would prefer to use Mafac levers with Universal calipers than Universal levers. With small hands I would prefer Weinmann levers (with the lever Q/R).

For Shimano brakes, these were originally all copies of existing brakes. The Dura-ace were copies of Campagnolo, but in my eyes did not have anything that was in any way superior to Campagnolo. They do however benefit from the softer spring rates when used with modern cables and cable housing, so something that was originally a disadvantage has turned out to be an advantage when looked at today. The center pulls were copies of the Universal but with better shaped levers.

The Altenberger Synchron's were not all that bad for the reach that they offered, but when compared to short reach caliper arms of other manufacturers they are indeed thoroughly disappointing. But when using with 45 mm tires, their intended purpose, they work quite well.

Back in the 70's when I set up a touring bike on a budget for riding around North America, I set it up with Modolo Speedy levers (they had not yet come out with the anatomical lever hoods yet), Dia-compe side pull calipers and Scott Matthauser brake pads. They were great for loaded touring, but when I later tried them for racing was terribly disappointed and switched to Campagnolo.

balindamood

Perhaps I just have big hands, but I actually like Mafac lever becasue there is so much cable take-up, I can run rims a bit more out of true and still mash the brakes to lock-up.

I agree that Modolo brakes are awful, but I really like the levers. I have one or two bikes set up for commuting/knock around....I probably log more miles on these on a yearly basis tham any others. They are set up with Mafac centerpulls and Modolo levers.

I still think Shimano SLR is probably the best rendition of the traditional side-pull.

KonAaron Snake 

I'm going to cordially disagree with the OP. The ONLY Campagnolo parts I find distinctly superior to their Japanese counterparts were the brakes. They seem to require less adjustment, stay aligned longer and have an excellent feel to them. The levers always felt like butter to me where dia-compes and shimanos frequently had a stiffness. Generally I prefer shimano drive trains with campy brakes.

Citoyen du Monde

Mafac levers when you have large hands do indeed work, but only then. Plus you must set them up reasonably loose, otherwise you do not get the advantage of the larger reach.

I do not see what is not good with Modolo brakes, The arms are solid, they pivot freely, they stay centered, the cable fixation bolt is functional, they can be fully adjusted on the fly, plus for cheap money they do just as well as the item they copied. The bad parts are the fact that they work best with fatter cables.

The SLR are what I consider teh first generation modern brake and not to be confused with those preceding them.

Wino Ryder

Well no bike expert here, but I've been around the block a few times never the less. I've had my fair share of experience with road bike braking systems over the years and still consider the chorus monoplaners and Athena aero brakes to be the very best of any single pivot design. They are robust and sleek looking, and when they're polished up they look like gems. The brake blocks and chrome holders are the same as Super Record and absolutely gorgeous. I have a set of Athena aero brakes on my Tommasini and they perform beautifully. They never go out of adjustment and they modulate good. Unfortunately they weren't in production for long until campy dual pivot came out in I think 1993. Still, they were clearly the best looking brakes ever, in my opinion.

The Shimano Dura-Ace and '600' single pivots from the mid to late 80's until dual pivot were also very nice, as were the 'Dia-Compe' Gran Compe and 'Royal S' calipers from the same era. All were some very nice high end braking systems for their day.