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I can't believe my life is trusted to these


Square Wheels
Go to solution Solved by ChrisL,

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I try not to think about that....and as a younger lad, I never did.

I am hoping to bring my bike on a trip this summer, where I've laid out a loop I hope to ride.  But it would start with a 1.6-mile descent at about 8% that includes two 90-degree turns and I feel like I'm getting cold feet.  Maybe I'm getting too old for that.  Strange to think that I might be more comfortable with the idea of riding up this thing than down.

(no worries; I'd basically ride back up the same mountain 5 miles downstream... best of both worlds?)

Anyway, thinking about the tiny (tinier?) contact patches offered by my rim brakes isn't helping.  Nor does the combined 275-pound weight of bicycle and rider.

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28 minutes ago, sheep_herder said:

I was going to ask SW how many years he rode with rim brakes. I am old enough now, that I doubt I will ever ride disc brakes.

You & Page Turner will forever be on rim brakes!  

I was going down a steep descent just the other day that has a lot of tree root bumps and had four fingers wrapped on the bar, index finger on the brakes.  In that moment I actually thought of Page Turner and thought yeah he can kiss my arse, I’m loving my disc brakes right about now! 😂

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3 hours ago, ChrisL said:

The pads are just one piece of a braking system though.  If you think about it, there are a number of things that could go wrong, a loose anchor bolt, bubbles in the lines, overheating & boiling the fluid. I mean the pads are just one of many potential causes of death on the bike.   
 

 

I'll never ride again.

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3 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

Unclip and drag your foot on the front tire.

For me, "that moment" came when changing the tube on a flat tire and finding the tire bead melted to the rim.  Disc brakes forever after that.  The idea of blowing a tube at 40 mph on a long downhill was scary.

I had a frankenbike as a kid, based on an English 3 speed, the only brake was my foot on the front tire. I ran a hilly paper route with that bike for a summer.    I’m clever but not very smart 

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15 hours ago, ChrisL said:

The pads are just one piece of a braking system though.  If you think about it, there are a number of things that could go wrong, a loose anchor bolt, bubbles in the lines, overheating & boiling the fluid. I mean the pads are just one of many potential causes of death on the bike.   
 

 

My dad hates flying.  His buddy told him once that it is perfectly safe.  You're strapped to two large containers of kerosene in something as thin as an aluminum can doing 700 mph  with two huge fireballs on either side of you.  What could go wrong?

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9 hours ago, Thaddeus Kosciuszko said:

 

Look, here's something to put your mind at ease.

The contact area of those brake pads is probably about four times as big as the contact area of your tires on the road.

See? Doesn't that make you feel a lot better about the brake pads now?

 

 

;)

I would be curious to see a breakdown on braking surface area on my truck VS that of a rim brake on a bike.  I would bet that the bike has more surface area per pound.

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3 minutes ago, Parr8hed said:

I would be curious to see a breakdown on braking surface area on my truck VS that of a rim brake on a bike.  I would bet that the bike has more surface area per pound.

I was thinking about the same thing but compared to a fully loaded 80,000 pound semi.

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17 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

These are my front and rear brake pads.  This is it, there is nothing else to stop me.

Yikes

image.jpeg

image.jpeg

They look fine to me considering that when I had my Honda Fit's brake pads replaced, my former-auto-mechanic BiL asked to see the removed pads to make sure they had replaced them all.  They didn't look very big to me!

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