On Friday, April 27, 2018 at 4:18:58 PM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2018-04-27 15:11, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, April 27, 2018 at 2:10:07 PM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2018-04-27 10:57, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, April 27, 2018 at 8:27:49 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 4/27/2018 9:00 AM, Joerg wrote:
On 2018-04-26 15:40, Roger Merriman wrote:

[...]


I can remember wearing pads out on Canti MTB in single ride
if it was very wet/gritty area.


That is one of the reasons why I'd never buy any new bike
with rim brakes. Some roads in our area are either unpaved,
gravel or connect to a gravel road section and thus have a
lot of dust on them. However, my road bike was built in 1982
and there were no disc brakes available, at least not in
Europe.


Shimano's was around 1976 IIRC:
https://bmxmuseum.com/forsale/248919

Phil Wood 1974. http://www.philwood.com/about/txthist.php RIP
Phil.

There is no need for disc brakes for dry weather road riding,
even on "dusty" roads and occasional single track or urban trail.
It's a solution in search of a problem. My rim brakes work fine
in wet weather, ...


Work fine?


... but I prefer discs because of rim wear and better wet
braking.


Yet now they are worse than disc brakes? To me brakes are among the
most impoprtant parts on a vehicle. I want top performance from
them, not a "somewhat ok" performance.

Thing is, one doesn't always know if the weather turns foul during
a long ride and then I don't want to have to pussyfoot it back
home because of sub-par brakes.

Pussyfoot? Really? Oddly enough, I rode rim brakes across the United
States, east-to-west and north-to-south (and countless other tours, a
number in the Sierra) on a fully loaded touring bike with Nuovo
Record and canti rim brakes in snow, rain, hail, dark-of-night, etc.,
etc. and never once felt that they were inadequate to stop me.


I have never experienced a rim brake on any bike that didn't have a
1-2sec "free fall" in heavy rain. Unless I kept the pads slightly
engaged and that is murder for a rim.


Decades of racing and riding on single and dual pivot rim brakes in
the rain and never once pussyfooted except to avoid traction loss.
I've never crashed in the rain because of brake failure (and I've
crashed many times in the rain), although I had one close-call
involving some bad cantis on STI levers, but then again, I had an
even scarier incident with mis-adjusted cable discs. My crashes were
all due to traction loss.


One of my really nasty crashes happened when the front brake cable
snapped. It was almost new. That just does not happen with hydraulic
disc brakes. I had the choice of wiping out with major road rash or
chancing it into the vegetation. In either case I'd have been toast if
there had been oncoming traffic.

A catastrophic failure can happen in any system. Breaking a new cable is a catastrophic failure. It shouldn't happen (it's never happened to me in maybe 300K miles of riding). You could get the same failure with defective hydraulic tube or joint, piston, pad holder, mounting bolt, etc. You could get a leak -- you could even blow through a pad set on a single ride. A giant earthquake could wipe out your hydraulic calipers!


The fact is that well-adjusted dual-pivots or even single-pivots
caliper brakes are fine in the rain except that they eat-up rims. I
pussyfoot in the rain to avoid traction loss, and I give myself
plenty of braking room -- with all types of brakes. Yes, you will
have more immediate braking with discs and particularly hydraulic
discs, but in poor traction conditions, that is not all upside. I've
locked-up the rear wheel and fish-tailed far more times on my
hydraulic discs than on rim brakes. Super-powerful disc brakes pose
their own problems on road bikes, apart from the price of pads and
being mechanically fussy (pad-lock if you depress the lever with the
wheel out, disc drag).


The hydraulic disk brakes on my MTB are remarkably low maintenance and
they come on as hard as I want to in any weather. Rim brakes don't.


... I switch between disc and direct mount caliper brakes on the
weekends and find that braking is great on both.


Thanks for the hint about the Koolstop pads. They just came. Ebay
tracking is a nice "mail is here" alert. It came early today.

They fit like a glove. I wonder why they now flare the trailing
edge inwards towards the rim. It would make the pad want to skew.
Maybe I'll grind that off.

No. It's meant to wipe the rim before the pad fully engages. It is
exactly what you want for dirt and wet weather performance.


Let's see. I could almost bet that pointy tip will be worn away after a
few hundred miles.

Depends on the 100 miles, but yes, it's not going to last forever. My disc pads last about one-quarter the time of my rim brake pads.

-- Jay Beattie.