I hate disc brakes - help!

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Stevek76
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Stevek76 »

A set of spares for hydraulics would also be less mass than a bottle of water, even if you're going to the level of spare hoses and pistons which is really covering some outside chances of failure.

Hydraulic maintenance isn't tricky. It's a different skill of course with somewhat different equipment requirements but I'd not rate a basic bleed as being any more difficult than the other basics like gear fettling, cable gear/brake replacements.
Last edited by Stevek76 on 25 May 2022, 1:30pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Tiberius
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Tiberius »

I've not really thought about it before but I have three bikes all with different brakes. One with rim brakes, one with cable/hydraulic (TRP HY/RD) and one with full hydraulic.

ALL the bikes have got great brakes. If I had to give one the 'nod' I would go with the full hydraulic as I prefer the lever feel and I'm not wearing the rims out. They all have pros and cons, but they're all easy enough to work on.
mattheus
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by mattheus »

Stevek76 wrote: 25 May 2022, 12:53pm A set of spares for hydraulics would also be less mass than a bottle of water, even if you're going to the level of spare hoses and pistons which is some really covering some outside chances of failure.

Hydraulic maintenance isn't tricky. It's a different skill of course with somewhat different equipment requirements but I'd not rate a basic bleed as being any more difficult than the other basics like gear fettling, cable gear/brake replacements.
I don't think you can dispute that they represent *additional* parts, tools and skills to learn for the majority of riders. Cheaper bikes are available with rim-brakes than with hydraulics.

(I'm pretty sure you could teach a 12year-old rim-brake maintenance more easily than hydraulic-disc, but that's perhaps more subjective ... )
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NATURAL ANKLING
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by NATURAL ANKLING »

Hi,
Brake fluid.......what type!
Splitting Calliper halves in the field.............
Opps dont lose the o rings...........

You can repair cable brakes under water :mrgreen:
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Tiberius
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Tiberius »

Time for somebody to mention 'Outer Mongolia' - Somebody always does when the subject of anything more complex than a screwdriver is mentioned.... :mrgreen:
iandusud
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by iandusud »

jimster99 wrote: 25 May 2022, 11:57am I hate cable disc brakes also, especially on quick release rims!! I took one of my bikes to a bike shop because when you lock the front brake and rock the bike back and forth, the front wheel visibly twists in the hub, like when the headset is really loose, but in my case, the headset wasn't loose!

The mechanic looked at it ... and said "That's normal". :D

I can now see why they don't sell disc brakes with quick release hubs anymore....I feel lucky that the front wheel has never popped out while braking! And that bike is no longer in regular use!
I would suggest that you have a poor q/r skewer, almost certainly with an external cam. If you use a good internal cam q/r (Shimano for example) you can get the wheel as tight as you like in the fork/frame. BTW what you're experiencing is peculiar to cable disc brakes as your post implies.
rareposter
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by rareposter »

NATURAL ANKLING wrote: 25 May 2022, 2:42pm Hi,
Brake fluid.......what type!
Splitting Calliper halves in the field.............
Opps dont lose the o rings...........

You can repair cable brakes under water :mrgreen:
There's two types of brake fluid, mineral oil and DOT. Thats not exactly difficult...
Splitting caliper halves?!
They're one-piece units now. Some of the early Hope units were two halves, anything now is one-piece.

A friend fitted cable discs for an ultra-endurance ride on the grounds of "easy maintenance". Suffice to say that at the top of a mountain pass in freezing rain, they were not able to be fixed (it was a cable problem). Hydros wouldn't have gone wrong in the first place.
Jupestar
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Jupestar »

Hydraulic Disc are fiddly to replace hoses, bleed etc, and finding the right hose/olive/insert is a deep dive into the web. And if the seals go- forget replacements…

But I’ve never had one go wrong on the road in fact the only times they have gone wrong is cause of unnecessary fettling.

Maybe if ever do that trip to outer Mongolia….

MTB cable discs are good.…. Road I find too fussy.
audaxjk
Posts: 155
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by audaxjk »

I didn’t rate my Cable Spyre discs on road shifters so upgraded to hydraulics which are much better and the auto adjusting to prevent rub is nice. A pain to bleed every 6 months or so. I do have a flat bar bike with cable discs and they work much better than the road shifters ever did.

However - when I ride my rim brake (road or mtb) bikes I don’t feel as though I’m missing out & it makes me wonder whether discs really offer that much more. My mtb has v brakes and these have been fine on xc trails.

My latest bike build (in progress) will use Juin Tech 4 piston GT callipers (a cable/hydraulic hybrid) on road sti shifters, so I’m curious as to how these compare to the above set ups.
Tiberius
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Tiberius »

Jupestar wrote: 25 May 2022, 7:20pm Maybe if ever do that trip to outer Mongolia….

You've made my day.... :mrgreen:
jimster99
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by jimster99 »

iandusud wrote: 25 May 2022, 4:41pm
jimster99 wrote: 25 May 2022, 11:57am I hate cable disc brakes also, especially on quick release rims!! I took one of my bikes to a bike shop because when you lock the front brake and rock the bike back and forth, the front wheel visibly twists in the hub, like when the headset is really loose, but in my case, the headset wasn't loose!

The mechanic looked at it ... and said "That's normal". :D

I can now see why they don't sell disc brakes with quick release hubs anymore....I feel lucky that the front wheel has never popped out while braking! And that bike is no longer in regular use!
I would suggest that you have a poor q/r skewer, almost certainly with an external cam. If you use a good internal cam q/r (Shimano for example) you can get the wheel as tight as you like in the fork/frame. BTW what you're experiencing is peculiar to cable disc brakes as your post implies.
Thanks for the teaching point - I had no idea there was a difference between internal & external cams! Off for a quick google to understand the difference :)

I don't however think I necessarily had a cheap QR skewer (although can't rule it out). It was an £800 bike when new from Decathlon, but it probably dated from the mid-naughties and I think bike disc brakes were just starting to be in common usage back then and maybe the skewer had been replaced. The other major issue was that it was single sided, so applied massive twisting force to the forks when braking hard. I do think there were some lawsuits over this design and even a non-engineer amateur numpty like myself can see that "single sided disc brake + QR skewer = accident waiting to happen..."
iandusud
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by iandusud »

jimster99 wrote: 26 May 2022, 9:55am
iandusud wrote: 25 May 2022, 4:41pm
jimster99 wrote: 25 May 2022, 11:57am I hate cable disc brakes also, especially on quick release rims!! I took one of my bikes to a bike shop because when you lock the front brake and rock the bike back and forth, the front wheel visibly twists in the hub, like when the headset is really loose, but in my case, the headset wasn't loose!

The mechanic looked at it ... and said "That's normal". :D

I can now see why they don't sell disc brakes with quick release hubs anymore....I feel lucky that the front wheel has never popped out while braking! And that bike is no longer in regular use!
I would suggest that you have a poor q/r skewer, almost certainly with an external cam. If you use a good internal cam q/r (Shimano for example) you can get the wheel as tight as you like in the fork/frame. BTW what you're experiencing is peculiar to cable disc brakes as your post implies.
Thanks for the teaching point - I had no idea there was a difference between internal & external cams! Off for a quick google to understand the difference :)

I don't however think I necessarily had a cheap QR skewer (although can't rule it out). It was an £800 bike when new from Decathlon, but it probably dated from the mid-naughties and I think bike disc brakes were just starting to be in common usage back then and maybe the skewer had been replaced. The other major issue was that it was single sided, so applied massive twisting force to the forks when braking hard. I do think there were some lawsuits over this design and even a non-engineer amateur numpty like myself can see that "single sided disc brake + QR skewer = accident waiting to happen..."
Hi Jim,

External cam q/r skewers are necessarily cheap but they don't exert anything like the same pressure as internal cam ones. There's nothing wrong with them used in the right applications but not suitable for disc brakes IMO. All bicycle disc brakes are single sided and it is important that the fork and frame are suitably designed and built to withstand the forces that they create. I have read about fears of front wheels being pulled out of the forks ends when using disc brakes but with a good q/r and the standard fitting of "lawyer lips" on the drop outs I don't really see this as an issue.

Ian
Jdsk
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by Jdsk »

jimster99 wrote: 26 May 2022, 9:55am
iandusud wrote: 25 May 2022, 4:41pm I would suggest that you have a poor q/r skewer, almost certainly with an external cam. If you use a good internal cam q/r (Shimano for example) you can get the wheel as tight as you like in the fork/frame. BTW what you're experiencing is peculiar to cable disc brakes as your post implies.
Thanks for the teaching point - I had no idea there was a difference between internal & external cams! Off for a quick google to understand the difference
Sheldon Brown: "Bicycle Quick-Releases":
https://sheldonbrown.com/skewers.html

which includes a link to:

"Disk brakes and quick releases - what you need to know (Updated Jan 2006 with the first out-of court settlement)"
https://web.archive.org/web/20121005235 ... k_release/

Jonathan
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horizon
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by horizon »

Some years ago I looked at installing a front disc brake on my disc-ready Sardar, really just to try them out. The cost of the new brake and wheel deterred me but my starting point was actually the question of the fluid.

The idea of using DOT fluid (I used to bleed the brakes on my Renault 4 in my younger days so I'm familiar with bleeding brakes) appalled me. However I do accept that that is an overly strong reaction: it can be used safely and you don't need to store lots of it (I never did find out how you dispose of it though). This got me thinking about mineral fluid and I worked through this webpage to get the pros and cons:

https://epicbleedsolutions.com/blogs/ar ... ineral-oil

I gave up on hydraulics at that point and turned to the possibility of using cable discs. What I read is that cable discs are far inferior to hydraulics and not that much better than rim brakes. Given the time investment needed to change my bikes over and learn new (albeit not too difficult) skills, I concluded that, for an existing bike user, discs were a fool's errand and of course the fact that we already have very good brakes in the form of Vs.

Repairing and maintaining a bicycle can be at times a little toxic, pricey, complicated and frustrating so in that sense, hydraulic brakes don't add to the mix. I would be happy to recommend discs to someone buying a new bike (on the basis of what I have read) but it's still the fluid that would make that less than full-hearted. And I would definitely hesitate to recommend discs to a young person, though I think that particular ship has long sailed, as they say.
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rareposter
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Re: I hate disc brakes - help!

Post by rareposter »

horizon wrote: 26 May 2022, 12:00pm
The idea of using DOT fluid (I used to bleed the brakes on my Renault 4 in my younger days so I'm familiar with bleeding brakes) appalled me. However I do accept that that is an overly strong reaction: it can be used safely and you don't need to store lots of it (I never did find out how you dispose of it though).
The quantities used in a bicycle braking system are so small that you can basically pour it into a rag and allow it to soak in then bin (or burn!) the rag. Most car garages have a drum of used oil as well, they'd be happy for you to pour half a jam jar worth of DOT in there.

It's not as bad as people make out so long as you wipe up any spills quickly. A decent bleed kit minimises that possibility as well. I used Hope brakes (DOT 5.1) for years, never had any issues with spilling oil. Performance remained spot on throughout.
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