A rim brake confession

I’ll have to bear them in mind if my SwissSide deep section ever fails. When I chose the Swissside they had alloy rims with a carbon fairing too; it looks like they’ve went the carbon rim route too. For the sake of a few grams I would rather have something which braked consistenly and lasted longer and I could swap out for training wheels or shallower wheels easily without changing the pads and crucially aren’t disc brakes because my road and TT bike won’t take them (plus the reasons listed in the first post) :wink:

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The best! (even if it does have some shortcomings in comparison to modern features)

Mike

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HED JET series. Had v1.0 on my TT bike (9 and disk) and still ride 6s on my main road bike with a set of 9s in a bag somewhere. Backup TT wheels.

Alloy rims with fairings are good stuff. Particularly back when full carbons would delam if you even touched them with a brake pad.

Sure, you’re 1 person with 1 experience. Depends on where you live, weather, terrain, etc. You won’t get 16-20k km out of a set of carbon wheels in an alpine region with sketchy descents. I can also say it would be nearly impossible with many parts of SE Asia due to how steep the roads are that require heavy braking continuously. If you live in the midwest or Florida, sure, 20k km out of carbon rims, no problem.

Watch this to give you anxiety about carbon rims and rim brakes :open_mouth:

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I recall there being some controversy over that video.

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A lot of those on YouTube also! People like watching stuff like that (and videos on bike rim failures) :rofl:

The point (in the Mavic comments) of fixing a brake lever force rather than modulating pad pressure to maintain a fixed braking moment (or a constant wheel speed for a set power) is pretty important. Indeed in the way the test was done, a slippery brake surface will be favorable, but certainly not what you want in real life.

It would be interesting to see equivalent tests with disc brakes. While rim failures would obviously not be on the menu, I’m curious to see what would fail first.

To answer your question - Retrogrouch.

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In my experiance carbon rims don’t seem to wear anywhere near as fast as aluminium… of course that is probably influenced by the type of weather each wheel gets ridden in.

My comment re: it being a horrible braking surface had nothing to do with wear…it is about braking performance.

The more I read about this the more convinced I am that this is highly dependent on personal preference. It’s like trying to argue what is the best ice cream flavour, wine, beer, etc. You like rim brakes? Fine, get them on you bike. Like disc brakes? No problem. I come from MTB, I do not miss the V or Cantilever brakes, I’m a disc fanboy.

I don’t see any benefit (for me) to change the disc brakes on my Spesh Roubaix but I totally get some will prefer rim brakes

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Not so much personal preference but more the type of terrain you ride:

  • if you regularly ride HC climbs and/or in the wet, then the benefits of disc brakes arguably outweigh the negatives
  • conversely, if you regularly ride flatter terrain and avoid riding in the wet, then rim brakes all the way

I live in pan-flat Chicago and I’m never going back to rim brakes (unless I am riding one of my backup bikes)

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If I lived somewhere flat and/or dry I’d still be on rims for ease of maintinence and how well the bikes travel*, but I moved somewhere hilly and wet in 2017 so I unenthusiastically switched to discs and although I don’t regret it, I do pine for my rim brakes of yore.

*In pre-plague times I liked to fly my bike, rim brakes are easier to build/tear down, and there’s no taking rotors on/off so that’s less faff and tools to bring, and I don’t even want to contemplate having to do a bleed in a hotel room the night before an event, or replace a hose that was kinked during a ham-handed TSA re-pack.

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