I think the best stopping power available to a touring cyclist without sacrificing durability or field-reparability is the Avid BB7 Disc Brake + Compressionless Housing.

Why?

Avid BB7 brakes are widely available, and the caliper action is very good. They use a brake pad that weighs just a couple of ounces if you need to carry spares. The steel cable is standard across all types of brakes, so every bike shop in the world will have them. And, they're plenty durable with no corrosion or anything plaguing mine after two winters.

The Yokozuna Compressionless Cable Housing I picked up is a big upgrade to an already pretty great brake; it uses a different sort of brake housing with an extra layer of incompressible wire, which makes braking more powerful and precise. I wrote a review on this housing here.


I don't think brakes are talked about enough. When you're going downhill for 6-10 miles at a stretch, the brakes on your bike become life and death. It's the biggest safety feature on your bike. For loaded touring, I feel much more confident with a disc brake than I do with a rim brake, especially when it's snowing or raining.

Just my 2¢!

Is that one interrupter brake lever on your bars? I have never seen a bike with only one.

Just curious, why did you set it up with one?

At ~$26/ft I think I'll pass. Last time I checked I haven't flown off the side of any mountains due to cable compression. Sounds like a solution to another problem I don't have.

The front brake does a lot more of the braking than the back brake. I didn't see a need to clutter my bars with both levers when I really only wanted the one as a "slow-speed" brake.

When I am moving fast, I'm in the drops with both brakes. When I'm just cruising along, I am often on the flat part of my bars and the single lever gives me a little tool for modulating my speed on bike paths or in traffic. I don't rely on it for serious stopping.

Hard to find a better investment. You're kind of saying "I haven't crashed my car, so seatbelts and airbags are useless."

I bet there were people who were satisfied with steel rims, but a safety upgrade goes a long way.

I used to complain about the bad brakes on one of my bikes, until a close call one day.

I stopped at a four way stop sign, a car to the right was slowing down to stop so I started to proceed thru the intersection. That car driver apparently was afraid he might have to wait for a couple extra seconds for me, so he hit the gas to try to beat me thru the intersection. I was only doing maybe jogging speed, but I hit the brakes so hard my rear wheel came off the ground. Fortunately I was going so slow I did not do an endo.

Bottom line, I stopped complaining about my bad brakes, when you need brakes you might find that you really have them.

No it's nothing like "I haven't crashed my car, so seatbelts and airbags are useless." It's more like the seatbelts and airbags that came with the car work fine, and I see no value in changing something that already works.

I have and have had compressionless cable housings in my bikes. Nothing to write home about. There's some improvement sure, but for the price it's hardly a good investement. The only real bonus I can see it giving is more flexibility in cable pull.
There's also the issue that compressionless housing is very picky about twists so it can be unusable with drop bars, and it apparently doesn't always like bar tape pulled on tight (massive drag on my rear brake when I put the bar tape on, no drag with the bar tape off)

I won't be bothering again any time soon.

Sure didn't seem that way to me. It seemed like the poster was saying they didn't see the benefit in upgrading from their already existing safety features to more expensive safety features. I am not sure how you equate that to going from 0 safety features to safety features.


I haven't used compressionless brake housing before. No experience with it, and I am actually interested in it. But at $25/foot, Ill hold off for now since the bike I would try it on has housing running along the top tube. It'd be over $100 to even try the housing out.

What makes it so incredibly expensive? It sounds like, at best, a marginal improvement over traditional housing.

A little fun here. Some of the best stoppers I have ever had were mismatched sidepulls of unknown type (one visibly bent) set up with nothing special cables and probably Koolstop pads. Cost me $5 and $10 from a used calipers box. Tektro levers. On a bike that hit the road with $105 spent (inc frame) and parts on hand. On my Mooney, the bike I would tour on, I have had the OEM Shimano cantis off an early '80s Miyata tourer for the past 20 years. Every time I ride that bike, I am reminded those are serious brakes.

This is not to belittle the importance of brakes. But in my view, the important things are to stay away from the bad ones and be diligent on set-up and maintenance. That and be smart about the ride. Before that 10 mile descent, make sure everything is in order, you have lots of brake pad and the positioning is good, cables are in good shape, bolts are tight. On the descent: as much speed as is prudent and alternate brakes when braking hard for long periods. Let some air out of the tires before you start down. (I blew out a sew-up descending Mt Washington and had to wait for the rim to cool so I could touch it years ago. I have some idea of what is involved here.)

Ben

I'm with the OP on this one, I did notice a worthwhile improvement changing to compressionless housing. It did not raise the performance to mtb hydro levels, but made them quite a bit better. I did use the cheaper Jagwire housing, and followed TRP's advice to run regular flexible housing under the tape with drop bars and then run the compressionless for the rest of the run. I'm running the TRP Spyre calipers which I like better than the bb7s which I ran for a few months. Incidentally, I've switched to a SRAM Centerline front rotor which I find quieter and smoother and prefer it to the Avid rotor.

On a tour a few weeks ago I was able to continue on another 300 miles to a bike shop, on a wheel with two broken spokes and a rim which was severely bent. I could feel the wiggle with every rotation of the wheel but at least I wasn't forced into an emergency repair. This real world anecdotal experience reinforces for me the advantage of running disc brakes over rim brakes in touring.

Regular Tightly coiled square wire housing is Adequate , but I suppose this was a read my blog post, basically..

My Disc Pocket Llama seems fine with the regular stuff , but I have a coil of Jagwire Low compression to put on Later..

Kevlar braided sheath makes it better than indexed shifting Housing, for Disc brakes , logically..

Ok, two things:

One: Not sure where you're getting your numbers from. Full-length housing for a front and rear disc brake bike is $30 on Amazon from Yokozuna. That's about 8 feet on my bike, maybe a bit more.

Two: My editorialized example with the seatbelts aside, perhaps a lot of people are content with "the way things are" or they throttle back their riding based on their braking ability. Surely I don't expect everyone to go flying off a mountain.

For me, the amount I bike in ICE, MUD, and on ridiculously long descents at high speeds, disc brakes with this type of housing make a considerable difference in hand fatigue and safety. More than a little- a LOT. That's $30 well-spent in my eyes.

I am interested in the Nokon system: looks really nice, sorta looks like a one time buy, until they stop supplying spares, because the sheathing of little beads should last for ever, all you need to replace is the PTFE liner. You can even edit the length if you need a different set-up at some point.

- For big folk, yeah, you probably have more to give in a panic stop situation. But little folk, maybe not. I don't really see any reason to degrade your brake performance on a bike. Bikes are really cheap, having the best is not something to feel you have to explain or apologize for. Just getting the pads for my F-150, bricks of chinese crap, was 100 each (Oh Canada... would have been a lot cheaper in the US).

- The other biggie is modulation, though in touring on the road, it is normally an on or off thing, modulation I can live without. But it is important to a lot of people, and better cables should help

- I like the single interuptor brake format, except I would prefer it was a third brake system.

- BB7s are a respected system but they are not very nice. What a clunky piece of crap. I am hopeful about the new Paul disc.

- Discs compromise wheel build which is great because apparently when the wheel tacos you can still run the brakes. Talk about a toofer.

Except the parts that come with the car are bush league. Nobody seriously concerned about a crash would wear an over the shoulder belt, and the air bags regularly decapitate people, and are really only there because the seat belts suck. Do race cars have over the shoulder belts and air bags?

Basically the way it works with tour bikes is this: If you have a standard LHT and take it transam, at the end of the trip these are the two questions:

1) How did it work for you? Answer, everything was fine after I switched out the seat.

2) Is there anything that could be upgraded or improved? Answer, every single part of the bike.

People self select either to be 1 or 2.

I took the photo while waiting for my rims to cool off a bit.

I was just going off the previous post mentioning it costs about $26/ft. I hadn't even looked up any prices as I really don't know anything about it. Last I checked, compressionless housing didn't work for brake cables because the cable would inevitably break thru the housing and render the brakes useless. Clearly there have been some advancements in brake cable housing.

$30 is expensive compared to the $7 total it takes to put new lined housing and stainless cables on one of my bikes right now, but that's at least an amount which is reasonable enough to try something out and test the improvement.

What little ive googled shows compressionless is specifically for disc brakes. Is compressionless brake housing like indexed vs friction where compressionless shift housing works great for friction even though it was made for indexed? Or is compressionless brake housing specifically for disc brakes and not to be used otherwise?

Nashbar offers a kit for $12.99

Nashbar - Welcome!

Question:
Do you think that in 5 yrs (maybe 10 years since many tourists are old traditional curmudgeons), that most all newer touring bikes will be carrying disc brakes?

I don't think it is just for disc, Nokon, the stuff I mentioned is on a lot of road bikes with I guess sidepulls

This is pulled from Rob English. The first road bike I found was a disc equipped one which is unusual.




This is the disc road:

1) I think not on the merits based on current technology, though on style, sure why not:

- I would guess a fair number of those who don't today, fall into the group who have discs on their MTBs. That probably doesn't rule out the curmudgeon effect but it shows the broader reasons in play;

- At whatever a wheel, it is above the usual tourist price point of 15 dollars a cantis;

- Until they do something about wheels other than just trying to cram more crap into the same space, I think there is a traditional touring bias in favour of solid wheels, disc wheels are pretty crap. There are easy fixes but the industry doesn't buiild touring bikes, it builds hand me downs, so we will see.

2) The current disc technology is crap. In the future, there are many possible revolutions coming down the pike, like commonplace hydro disc brifters, or electronics, better wheels, like all carbon no braking surfaces, and so forth. These could be huge game changers, but they cost money and tourists are cheap. But the new question would be if everything changed for the better where the disc technology was without compromise and entirely better, would tourists change if they won the new gear for free. Yeah, probably.

3) Are there any residual ways in which rim based disc systems (like cantis) could survive the coming changes. If the new stuff weakens wheels; is hard to work on in the sticks; is poorly modulated; and too expensive, sure the old stuff could survive.

I read up on some old Cunningham interviews, and he makes a pretty good case against discs, and he was probably talking about hydro discs, not the crap we have.

Thanks for clearing that up, I had no idea.

Something that would make a huge difference would be if we could buy a lever that worked with drops for what a moderate priced MTB lever cost. For touring a lot of guys are using bar ends, or Rohloff, and don't need a hydro brifter, or some kind of electronic integrated system. A Hydro drops levers would be a huge game changer. But working throught what the market is going to consider the winner in 10 years for road and XC is a huge task for the makers.

TRP

There are patches that allow a regular lever to activate a hydro system, but that is just so awful. The hylex system is pretty nicely priced, at 160 a wheel, by the time you get BB7 and some levers and good cables it is in the ballpark.

I'll just mark you down as a "1" then... OK done.