On Friday, January 20, 2017 at 12:43:50 PM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:

I have hydraulic discs on a Roubaix and cable discs on my CX commuter bike. I've never gone OTB because of my brakes. The last time I went OTB it was with ordinary caliper brakes and because my son had crashed in front of me on a wet descent.

Well you I don't remember the last time I ever had any sort of exceptional power with dual axle caliper brakes. Very much the opposite in fact. Mechanical disks are NOTHING like hydraulics that are properly set up.

Does your Roubaix have one of those 7" disks? I would imagine that there is a great deal less danger from the power of a disk on roads compared to off-road. On steep off-road you take your hand off of the brakes and in 40 feet you can go from 8 mph to 30 mph only to hit more rough roads. On full suspension that isn't a problem but CX not only doesn't have suspension but is about the weight of a road bike. With low gearing it simply lifts the front wheel off of the ground on hard push up a steep uphill (20% or more).

The hydraulic brakes are powerful and they do take some use to understand.. Front braking is not all that much different from a good dual pivot; however, rear braking is much more positive, and that is where you have to avoid ham-handedness.

This takes about 90 seconds to figure out, and most rear wheel skids are controllable during the learning period.
This isn't anything that isn't part of the game. Talking to the local shop mechanic he said that you can't use the bottom two gears usually and the trick is to use third (which is about the same as a low road bike triple gear 30-28) for climbing the steep part and then use the lower gears to go ultra-slow and rest when the trail flattens out a little. This really works well and my average over a hard trail went up a couple of MPH using this trick..

Both the cable and hydraulic brakes beat the hell out of calipers in rain and slop, like the snow slop I've been trying to ride in. In dry weather, any good rim brake will do the job. I don't see any reason for hydraulic discs on high-end race bikes that will never be ridden in the rain, except maybe to avoid over-heating CF rims -- which could be a real problem with tubulars, although I'm just speculating. Personally, I think its just marketing.

I don't ride in rain though it is muddy off road a good deal. And I had no problems with V-brakes.