On 4/27/2018 3:11 PM, 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. 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.

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).

... 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.

-- Jay Beattie.

That pointy tip also makes it easy to toe in the pads an appropriate
amount to reduce squeal/judder. Once the pads are installed, if that
"tip" wears off, it's already served one useful purpose.

-Mark J.