Are rim brakes daft?

[Boycey]

hope minis are about £100 a piece, deore Vs are £25 for the full set.

if we start comparing like with like ie XTR Vs with hope minis, XTR will be considerably lighter and extraordinarily powerful and a little less money putting us back in the situation where it depends what you're using it for.

 

[Boycey]

I'd like to see a bike that weighs 8kg with caliper brakes stopping in a comparable distance in the wet to a bike that weighs 12kg with discs.

we need to sort this shit out- me vs crispy for the acceleration challenge, me vs you for the stopping challenge.

it may be dangerous and i may look silly but you'll all get thoroughly pwnt.

 

[weepiper]

shhhhh I actually use v-brakes myself

 

[Boycey]

i was thinking of ghosting my fixie tbh

we used to do a comp involving longest skid, shortest stop and all sorts (called the longest kid after a sprog ran onto the track at a european event), people used to get sparks of their cleats leaping off for the shortest stop, it was pretty awesome

 

[Sunray]

Very debateable because of the tyres of a MTB are going to have a much higher surface area. I can easily lock my wheels front and back, wet or dry.

 

[Sunray]

we need to sort this shit out- me vs crispy for the acceleration challenge, me vs you for the stopping challenge.

it may be dangerous and i may look silly but you'll all get thoroughly pwnt.

What gear would you start in for the acceleration challenge?

I can power away using 3.81

 

[IC3D]

your all braking wrong *legs it*

 

[Boycey]

What gear would you start in for the acceleration challenge?

I can power away using 3.81

3.81 x 27* = 102.87" ie. fucking huge. i'll eat you alive

*this is assuming you're riding 700c wheels.

i'm on a 50/20 x 27 = 67.5" ie fairly light but i can maintain a pretty scary cadence, trackstand indefinitely and physically leap forwards off a starting line while you're still struggling to push your 3.81... unless you happen to be bradley wiggins, tom boonen or one of their team mates... or an elephant?

bring it on.

eta: the gear i start in is the gear i finish in, ie. fixed sprocket single speed so it's more efficient and more responsive. that was the point of the acceleration gauntlet being thrown down: can technique on a fixed wheel beat the technically higher initial torque of a geared bike.

 

[keybored]

How much does a BMX bike weigh. Discs are good but they require a chunky bike and chunky wheels to mount them on.

Braking to weight ratio, please read the post carefully.

I did, just didn't realise you were such a gram-shaver. You seem to think discs weigh almost twice as much but they don't have twice the stopping power, therefore they aren't worth the extra weight. That's just daft. They need to be fitted to a bike before they'll stop anything, and in most cases the overall weight increase will be insignificant compared to the improvement in stopping power and efficiency.
As said though it depends on how/what you ride.

 

[Herbsman.]

disc brakes are useless for bmx. if they were useful then bmxers would use them.

 

[gentlegreen]

disc brakes are useless for bmx. if they were useful then bmxers would use them.

There's a young chap on a BMX I often encounter coming down the final steep hill on my way to work who has no brakes at all. I sort of assumed when I first saw his bike, but not his charging down the hill with his feet scraping the ground that maybe it was a fixie ....

 

[Boycey]

brakeless freewheel has been big in bmx for a while now- check out the "no front teeth" videos for some sheer sickness.

 

[XR75]

Rim brakes are rubbish especially the non caliper kind.

 

[Cid]

9 miles is 'a lot of cycling'? lol

maybe it feels like that on a penny farthing...

You ever ridden in Devon Herbs? It's a whole different world out there... Anyway, 18 miles altogether to be fair.

I can't for the life of me remember what I was doing as a courier; must be at least double that (I mean the commute alone was 6 miles each way), and that was just contract work, I imagine circuit guys pull more than that. Stuff wears out quickly.

For me it's disc brakes all the way these days, I'm not trying to shed weight (it would make very little difference considering that I'm a fat bastard at the moment) and the stopping power is excellent (if you have good ones that is). They're also one of the few off-road innovations that is actually justifiable in Britain (designed to combat wet weather conditions).

 

[Chz]

I'm still able to easily lock my wheels in the wet with V-brakes. I understand discs have a resilience to mud and grunge, and they don't overheat so badly on long downhill stretches but that's not really relevant to my riding style.

And non-hydraulic discs are hardly any benefit at all. I see so many cheapo bikes in Halfords these days with crappy cable disc brakes. You can't get a cheap bike with decent components easily any more - they cram on crappy features and stick you with some unholy alliance of SRAM and a Chinese brand you've never heard of for the drivetrain. Screw the rear suspension. Screw the disc brakes. How about a half-decent drivetrain?

 

[weepiper]

yeah cheap mechanical disc brakes are AWFUL. Far worse than cheap Vs

 

[Greebo]

Has anyone got an opinion or experience of drum brakes on a bike? I'm wondering how easy it'd be to get them adjusted if I got them fitted (bear in mind this is a hilly area).

 

[Sunray]

3.81 x 27* = 102.87" ie. fucking huge. i'll eat you alive

*this is assuming you're riding 700c wheels.

i'm on a 50/20 x 27 = 67.5" ie fairly light but i can maintain a pretty scary cadence, trackstand indefinitely and physically leap forwards off a starting line while you're still struggling to push your 3.81... unless you happen to be bradley wiggins, tom boonen or one of their team mates... or an elephant?

bring it on.

eta: the gear i start in is the gear i finish in, ie. fixed sprocket single speed so it's more efficient and more responsive. that was the point of the acceleration gauntlet being thrown down: can technique on a fixed wheel beat the technically higher initial torque of a geared bike.

I can get to 20mph in 11 revolutions of the pedals, and I can get them turning pretty damn quick once warmed up. I've been going up Archway hill for 3 years now.

 

[cybertect]

Has anyone got an opinion or experience of drum brakes on a bike? I'm wondering how easy it'd be to get them adjusted if I got them fitted (bear in mind this is a hilly area).

[Keeps eyes peeled for tandem riders]

 

[Part 2]

disc brakes are useless for bmx. if they were useful then bmxers would use them.

The few BMXs I've seen are on either cheap as fuck Appollo (MX20 model to be specific) or high end eeeeuuuuro race bikes, Meybo do a frame with a disc mount. Even then they've never caught on because the weight is a disadvantage.

An XTR V brake is as powerful as most discs, I've heard of XTR's bending rear ends on bmx race frames over time.

A brakeless BMX/fixie is the most appealing look for any pushbike, pure simplicity. On a practical level I need a brake though.

 

[Lemon Eddy]

An XTR V brake is as powerful as most discs

Sorry, but that's just not true.

There's plenty of reasons to use v-brakes, but even the very best aren't as powerful as a decent set of disks, and in bad conditions they're not even close.

That's actually one of the reasons why they can be a better option for some scenarios.In the wet, the last thing I want on skinny road tires is a set of brakes that will have my tires skidding if I so much as look at them. Even on a bmx, a decent set of disk brakes is going to be overkill.

 

[Herbsman.]

If you feather your brake during manuals then I dont think a disc would work for that

I'm hardcore though, I manualed brakeless for 400m once