Another good reason to not adopt disc brakes on road bikes.

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Drago

Legendary Member
In a roundabout way, MJR touches on a good point. For all but uber high performance bikes, hub brakes are simple, very effective, extremely low maintenance, and unaffected by the weather, but never caught on. Only a few niche makers like Pashley or Cleland really embraced them. Strange.
 

screenman

Legendary Member
In a roundabout way, MJR touches on a good point. For all but uber high performance bikes, hub brakes are simple, very effective, extremely low maintenance, and unaffected by the weather, but never caught on. Only a few niche makers like Pashley or Cleland really embraced them. Strange.


Can a hub brake get rid of heat well.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
I can't see how a neighbouring car can knock a disc on either a cycle or motorcycle without first destroying the fork. And car discs are just as exposed to the elements as any other.
Whereas two bikes parked next to each other can easily hook disks, or lean a fork or stay or pedal onto a disc!

Car discs are slightly sheltered by the car body. Not perfectly but more than on bikes.
 

Crankarm

Guru
Location
Nr Cambridge
Disc brakes every time now for me. Riding a fully loaded touring bike down a long long steep mountain descent definitely disc brakes ideally Shimano SLX and above or Hope brakes. Rim brakes are now such old inferior technology.
 

Randy Butternubs

Über Member
Indeed they can. Plenty of smallish capacity motorbikes still use them quite adequately, and they have to manage mass and velocity far in excess of a bicycle.

Drum brakes stuck around on cheaper motorcycles for a long time but only on the rear which sees very little use, as on a bicycle. Nowadays even the cheap Chinese marques seem to be speccing discs front and rear.

I've owned a couple of motorbikes with front and rear drums but they were clunkers from the early 80s. The braking was truly shocking on both despite new pads and continuous fettling.

That's not to say they don't work for bicycles. I've been tempted to try them for a while now but I've been put off by the mixed opinions they generate.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
Absolutely, most motorbikes and even scooters have gone disc. However, the question posed was can bicycle drums handle the heat, and motorcycles were cited purely as an example to show that they most assuredly can.

Discs on cars and motorbikes are brilliant, but they have mass and performance that makes the disc far better suited than the drum. The bicycle suffers neither of those, so it just seems odd that the drum never became more ubiquitous on bicycles. Probably comes down to the filthy lucre.
 

si_c

Guru
Location
Wirral
Definitely a big disc brake convert, as a larger chap, the consistency of the braking in wet or dry weather is what I'm after.

As for pad wear, I get around 4000mi between pad replacement in summer and 2000 in winter. I use metallic pads. A replacement set costs around 15 quid for two sets using after market replacements.
 

smutchin

Cat 6 Racer
Location
The Red Enclave
I had a test ride of an Airnimal recently that had a rim brake at the front, disc brake at the rear. Weird.

To be fair, it wasn’t a full production model - they were waiting on the new disc fork.
 
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