I used it for ~6 months and found it to give all the ease of adjustment of my old Mafacs, but maybe half the power and twice the squeal. Huge PITA in general and, for the money, fuck those weak ass brakes. Using a $10 Tektro mini v now, and it is giving me all of it. The Shimano br550 canti I put on the back that I won’t stfu about is a much better way to spend euro x money, since it stops the bike in a timely fashion.
I fucked with those TRPs for months and never got anything resembling acceptable power from them.
I race with them so DGAF. Also, it’s nice that small parts are available separately. The weirdo straddle cables can suck it, but I have spares waiting. Agree on the general meh nature and if I were to do it again I might just run v brakes coz singlespeed but I already had levers kicking around and they were cheap at bike swap. I want to get some roller straddle carriers and a barrel adjuster on the straddle so I can run whatever wheels.
It’s interesting going from these to BB7s on the geared race bike though.
cx70’s. front is wide w/ low cable hanger and is good, but not endo good. rear is narrow w/ high cable hanger, not much power, but plenty of pad clearance to make up for my out of true wheels. i’ve used this for courses made entirely of mud and they still worked sufficiently. Set them up last year like this and haven’t touched them since cos they’re actually quiet and if i did change it they’d start making noise.
Though I rode a friend’s dickbrake cross bike and it felt so much better.
[quote=deadforkinglast]I used it for ~6 months and found it to give all the ease of adjustment of my old Mafacs, but maybe half the power and twice the squeal. Huge PITA in general and, for the money, fuck those weak ass brakes. Using a $10 Tektro mini v now, and it is giving me all of it. The Shimano br550 canti I put on the back that I won’t stfu about is a much better way to spend euro x money, since it stops the bike in a timely fashion.
I fucked with those TRPs for months and never got anything resembling acceptable power from them.[/quote]
I bought them off you and tried a couple of different sets of pads but they still didn’t work any better than my CR720 front/shorty 4 combo. There were too many wrenches required for me to mess with them in the woods or at a race. The last part isn’t performance related but the rear would hit my leg if I had to get out of the saddle on a loose descent.
yeah, not backing TRPs due to difficulty of adjustment. shorty 6 is the best combo of stopping/not waking the entire city/cheap that i’ve found yet. shorty 4s are really quiet but screw those oldschool mtb post pads
[quote=scrub][quote=deadforkinglast]I used it for ~6 months and found it to give all the ease of adjustment of my old Mafacs, but maybe half the power and twice the squeal. Huge PITA in general and, for the money, fuck those weak ass brakes. Using a $10 Tektro mini v now, and it is giving me all of it. The Shimano br550 canti I put on the back that I won’t stfu about is a much better way to spend euro x money, since it stops the bike in a timely fashion.
I fucked with those TRPs for months and never got anything resembling acceptable power from them.[/quote]
I bought them off you and tried a couple of different sets of pads but they still didn’t work any better than my CR720 front/shorty 4 combo. There were too many wrenches required for me to mess with them in the woods or at a race. The last part isn’t performance related but the rear would hit my leg if I had to get out of the saddle on a loose descent.[/quote]
I felt bad about selling them to you when I knew they sucked, but…well…I did.
So, my cantis started screeching bad enough it was hurting my ears, so I decided to fix them by cleaning my rims and replacing the worn out pads, and installing a crown mounted cable stop.
I had two weeks of blissful quiet-ish braking which worked, and then it rained. Now, my fork shudder is bad, my bike won’t stop, and the squealing is bad enough that drivers slam on their brakes when they hear it because they think a train is coming. I don’t think these brakes play nice with my frame.
cantilever brakes are the greatest compromise in cycling history.
hope mini vs and discs finally kill the canti once and for all.
maybe a niche like muddy cx will still go that route, but for the love of
all that is good & holy, lets stop specing bikes with that bullshit. its damn near 2013 for fucks sake.
The shimano BR-550 canti is awesome, as I said above. Mini-Vs are great when you don’t have to worry about fenders, but it gets pretty tight, even with medium-width tires (JB Green) and 45mm fenders. I couldn’t fit a tektro mini-v in the back, and the cable boot in the front touched the fender a little bit, but the power was awesome enough to just make it work. The canti I put in the back has been 100% awesome, with absolutely no trouble or lack of power. I would say it feels at least as powerful as a good dual pivot road caliper.
I had some cx9’s for a while and I played with a bike with a set of cx8.4’s and I couldn’t find a compelling reason to get those instead of the $11 tektro mini v, $8 kool stop cross pads and a $3 tektro noodle with an integrated barrel adjuster. Those are prices off the floor, not shopbro pricing. My only real complaint is that I don’t like the super soft kool stop pads, but they fortunately can be replaced with any road pad when I wear these out. Probably going to put in shimano pads when I kill these. Which would probably require me to actually ride my bike this rainy season…
Running 6400 levers, so should I try to get the 8.4’s or 9’s? Or as DFL said, just go with tektro mini v’s? This bike will have me, a 230 lb gorilla, descending long and fast road descents along with lots of dirt.
I had the joy this morning of having brakes which only worked to slow, not stop my descent down the fluted glacial till hill on which I live. Lucky for me, there’s little traffic, and my rims sort of dried by the bottom of the hill so I mostly slowed. Once I got to seattle and the rain had mostly stopped, then the wonderful squealing and shuddering started again. I’m going to take the brakes off this bike, and sell them once this quarter is over. I’m done with my oh-so-uber paul touring cantis.
Edit: tonight, riding through traffic, back to the ferry, it took me a half a block to stop. basically: have stopping power, squealing, shudder, teeth; or none of the above.
If you can fit them, the super cheap 80mm tektros (jensonUSA have them with a lever for lowlow prices). I’ve measured a bike and it looks like I can just get away with 80mm arms and 35mm CX tyres and nothing else. 85mm arms, 32mm tyre & fender worked with 85mm tektros on a cross check, the noodle guide did rest on the fender though.
for a big dude get the cx8.4
you can run them a little farther away from the rim for clearance and still have catapult you off the bike stopping power.