"Dangerous" Cantilers?

Sheldon Brown wrote:

Werehatrack wrote:

Bloody hard to make a canti setup without adjusters at the levers
unless you cross-breed it with a roadie, innit? I can't see that
working well anyway.

I think the cited assertion is an overreaction to a problem that's
hard to create to begin with. *If* a set of canti brake levers could
be found which lacked adjusting barrels

There's no such thing as "canti brake levers" except in the imagination
of marketeers. The issue involves using drop bar brake levers with
chantilevers, as is done on virtually all touring bikes.

No current-production drop-bar brake lever incorporates a barrel
adjuster, but back when center-pull calipers were the hot thing,
virtually all "bike boom" tenspeeds had adjusters built into the housing
stops on the headset and seat cluster, even the cheapest models.

Thast is how it should be for modern bikes with drop bars and
cantilevers as well.

Alternatively, there are a variety of "in line" cable adjusters readily
available. Theres no excuse for trying to foist a bike off on a
customer that lacks some reasonable fine adjustment to deal with normal
brake pad wear.

No self-respecting mechanic would pass a bike with such a poor setup.

Sheldon "A Step Backwards" Brown

This came up (most recently, IIRC) in response to my post about my
Cannondale T2000 tourer which--as Sheldon correctly indicates--uses
canti's, drop bars, Ultegra brifters, and is conspicuously lacking any
adjuster.

Since I've since bought a 'proper' road bike, I've ignored the
tourer's fatal flaw for now, but /do/ intend to add an inline brake
adjuster/cable hanger w/adjusting barrel before I take to riding it
much more.

Whether potentially lethal or just damned annoying, it is most
certainly a brain-dead oversight/decision to exclude, especially for a
bike that has inline adjusters for both front and rear der's.

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 06:58:39 GMT, Werehatrack
wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:48:25 -0400, Sheldon Brown
wrote:

Sheldon "Perhaps I Should Have Said 'Mono-Buttocked'" Brown

Or would it have been better expressed as "velocity drawn"? Naah, too
obscure for anybody but Fogel.

Dear Werehatrack,

Not bad--reminds me of Bentley's comment about the kind of
computer programming in which it is important to obtain
incorrect answers as quickly as possible.

Carl Fogel

Robin Hubert wrote:

Hit the CR key by mistake ... and now DSL quit ... delay in posting
....

One of our esteemed experts previously suggested that a cantilever
equipped bike without bbl adjusters is dangerous.

"If there are no adjusting barrels provided, the bike is dangerous and
defective. Nobody should accept such incompetence."

I'm baffled by this. Inconvenient, maybe, but dangerous? Defective?

Some riders might not possess an allen key to tighten the cable and
ignore any pad wear or cable stretch.

I don't have an adjuster on the front of my drop-barred touring bike
because I couldn't find a quality cable hanger with lots of drop AND an
adjuster. Front brake pad wear on the clean front wheel of a road bike
is so slow that it doesn't need attention more than once every 2,000
miles or so. The rear has an adjuster which screws into a brazed-on
hanger, and this does see some use because the rear rim is bathed in
gritty water all the time.

Without an adjuster it's essential to thoroughly pre-stretch a new
cable. I hold the lever on as hard as possible for a full minute.
Sometimes doing this adds a full 3mm clearance on each side of the rim!