Yeah they’re the cheapest and lightest of the ones that aren’t TRP which I knew I didn’t want. Decision made!
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Also an option?
I also have something like this on my endpoint that can de couple the lever from the hose.
I haven’t touched cable disks in 5 years but I hated them so much.
I’ve actually never used hydro discs before so I don’t really know the perks. They seem fussy and messy. I wanted to stick to cables because when I’m not in New York I’ll be living here:
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Literally the opposite of this.
Mech disks are at least 3x the fuss and never have the same power, consistency, or ease of breaking.
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???
You’re talking MTB applications, yes, because my experiences with hydro vs cable (not MTB!) didn’t show any advantage to hydro, and not only that I didn’t have the sword of rebleeding the cable brakes dangling over my head.
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Nah. I’ve had hydro on my coffee grinder for 5 years. Bled it twice, new pads once a year. Zero problems.
When I had mechanical I had to adjust the pads at least once a week, sometimes once a ride if it was all dirty and wet. That required a tool…. The lever throw on them was so long that full power was to the bars and I had to set them out out of spec to close up some of the extra space….
Honestly hydros have been set and forget except in MTB where lever feel is super important and where tolerances are V tight, and where fluid gets cooked.
Also… pulling full power with one or two fingers means you can break V powerfuly from the hoods or keep 3 fingers on the drops while descending.
For drop bars Shimano hydros are the best. End of story. Campagnolo being a close 2nd. The only cable discs I’ve owned or serviced that are close are the Growtacs. But I hate everything else about Shimano shakes. I doubt I’ll ever go back to Sram hydro for drop bars as I’m about to divest of my only remaining DOT bike.
The Growtacs are about as fuss free as a mech disc can be and are significantly better than everything when it comes to power and modulation except the now discontinued Hayes CX (which to be clear are still inferior but absolutely best of the rest). Hayes had a more positive feel at the bite point but less power than the Growtacs.
This is all with Sram mechanical levers. Shimano SLR levers are just worse at mech discs across the board.
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Dry dicks are terrible, get wet dicks
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what.
I don’t think I’ve ever adjusted the pads (aside from replacing them) on either my sweet fixie (~5000[1] miles with discs, 500 of which were with a shimano hydro setup) or my travel bike (~4500). (Didn’t do that with hydro disco either, but I only put about 500 miles on it before I gave up trying to find the needle of superior performance that everyone claims hydro has going for it.)
The super-SLR brake pull that Shimano’s di2 brifters use hauls in an amazing amount of cable, and I can skid the back wheel with one finger (and lemme tell you it’s hard to remember to throw all my other fingers out of the way so I can do a reverse lifted pinky pose.)
I use compressionless housing (continuous run to the back wheel on the disco travel bike, two segments on the sw8 fixie) so maybe that’s why it works well for me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1: lemme tell you ridewithgps’s running down of their feature set for non-paying customers is less than optimal. No longer a gear index page (at least one that’s not easy to find), so I need to search my rides for a particular machine, and /then/ I can get to the gear page for it and only it.
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If you can take some plastic syringes you buy off Amazon with you, I think you’ll be good. Maybe I would lean toward DOT fluid over mineral oil if you can’t order bike parts in Costa Rica, or buy a bottle of mineral oil before/during your stay? I bleed my brakes maybe once a year on mtb. Once every ??? on drop bar bike. My drop bar bike is definitely due lol. Literally do t remember when I bled those brakes.
In the “well actually hydros are easier” camp
Have never bled in the 30 months I’ve had my 105, and doesn’t seem like it’ll need it soon
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At least, with the shimano ones that I had since there was no automatic pad adjustment as the pads wore the pull got longer… To the point where it would pull to the bar but not be breaking much. Add to that that the pad adjustment required a very small allen that was not included in my multi tool, and the fact that it was unilateral from the outboard pad, and it became a huge pain…
Eventually, the difference in pad thickness became so noticeable that I would have to adjust the entire caliper in order for the throw to still feel good.
Whereas with hydros, there is automatic bilateral pad adjustment as it wears and you literally never think about it, and it feels the same every single time.
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So I’ve missed that pitfall by using Spyres.
on the website click “more” from the left hand menu and then all your gear is on the right hand side of the page
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but the hydros work so so well and self adjust.
i was never particularly impressed by spyres, but my disdain was your gain!
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I’ve committed for the Grotacs. I think for this bike it makes sense, but I’ll try hydros on the next build.
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Yeah, if they work as well as good cable-pull brakes, it becomes a matter of how you can fit them into your bike clutter. I’ve got a huge amount of cable-pulled infrastructure, so the idea of tearing it all down to get something that works as well it’s just not going to happen (hydro di2 brifters are stupid expensive, even for the allegedly obsolete 11-speed models) and that means the pair of magura rim brakes I’ve stockpiled are still sitting there slowly evaporating brake fluid while I wait for non-r785 (those fuckers are pinchy) levers to become less than a kings ransom, or even cheaper than a premium single-sided cable pull brake like a growtac)
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i’m sure it’s gone now, but there was one of these in my size for $300 built up on craigslist. I almost sent the seller a message before realizing I don’t have any desire to own a road bike
Oof, I have no reason to own that.
And yet…