Garage Mechanic Tip: How to Rejuvinate Braking
There are still a lot of us with V-brakes or canti or caliper brakes. Any ride in wet conditions is going to trash your braking surfaces. ...
https://iskablogs.blogspot.com/2005/03/garage-mechanic-tip-how-to-rejuvinate.html
There are still a lot of us with V-brakes or canti or caliper brakes. Any ride in wet conditions is going to trash your braking surfaces. The pads and the rims. It is important to work on both and bring them back to life in order to keep your braking strong.
Rims:
Scothbright pads or steel wool have been popular for removing the crud off your rims. But lately I have found the gold standard. Mavic makes a soft brake stone, that they would like to charge you $30 for. It is a rubber compound with grit impregnated in it. So it is like a sanding eraser. I bought a wheel from a guy that had used this Mavic stone on the rim, it was like brand freaknig new.
But hell if I am paying Mavic $30. Here's the secret. Klingspor distributes a sanding block called SANDFLEX. It comes in 3 grits, fine, medium, coarse. I believe that the Medium Sandflex block is identical to the Mavic Block. For those who live in England there is the Garryflex brand of sanding block that is the exact same thing.
You can get the Sandflex blocks for $3.95 at McFeeley's
This thing works much better than a scotch brite pad. It requires some elbow grease but the result is phenomenal:
I hope you can make out the shiny part of this road rim. That is where I used the Sandlex block. To the right and left you can see the darker area that hasn't been touched.
Brake pads.
After a muddy wet ride, your pads can end up looking like this:
A file works pretty well, but I like to use a 1x30 belt sander. I've had this tool for more than 10 years, and it gets used a lot between woodworking, metal working and bike stuff. A brand name one can be pricy but you can find them on ebay and knockoffs at Harbor Fright, Northern and other places for fairly cheap. They are awesome for cleaning up brake and der. cable housing after cutting them.
Some come with a disc sander that works wonders on pads too.
*(wear your eye and hearing protection of course)
If you have slotted cable guides, and slots in your brakes you can take off the entire brake arm, rather than undoing the brake cable and having to readjust the cable or removing just the pad which is a PIA to put back.
The result:
Almost good as new! Reinstall arms, put back cable through slots in cable guides and brake arms, and your back in business w/o having to readjust pads or cable tension. Unless you wore your pads down in the wet gritty ride and you couldn't brake the last 1/2 hr of the ride because your levers went all they way to the bars...
cya
Rims:
Scothbright pads or steel wool have been popular for removing the crud off your rims. But lately I have found the gold standard. Mavic makes a soft brake stone, that they would like to charge you $30 for. It is a rubber compound with grit impregnated in it. So it is like a sanding eraser. I bought a wheel from a guy that had used this Mavic stone on the rim, it was like brand freaknig new.
But hell if I am paying Mavic $30. Here's the secret. Klingspor distributes a sanding block called SANDFLEX. It comes in 3 grits, fine, medium, coarse. I believe that the Medium Sandflex block is identical to the Mavic Block. For those who live in England there is the Garryflex brand of sanding block that is the exact same thing.
You can get the Sandflex blocks for $3.95 at McFeeley's
This thing works much better than a scotch brite pad. It requires some elbow grease but the result is phenomenal:
I hope you can make out the shiny part of this road rim. That is where I used the Sandlex block. To the right and left you can see the darker area that hasn't been touched.
Brake pads.
After a muddy wet ride, your pads can end up looking like this:
A file works pretty well, but I like to use a 1x30 belt sander. I've had this tool for more than 10 years, and it gets used a lot between woodworking, metal working and bike stuff. A brand name one can be pricy but you can find them on ebay and knockoffs at Harbor Fright, Northern and other places for fairly cheap. They are awesome for cleaning up brake and der. cable housing after cutting them.
Some come with a disc sander that works wonders on pads too.
*(wear your eye and hearing protection of course)
If you have slotted cable guides, and slots in your brakes you can take off the entire brake arm, rather than undoing the brake cable and having to readjust the cable or removing just the pad which is a PIA to put back.
The result:
Almost good as new! Reinstall arms, put back cable through slots in cable guides and brake arms, and your back in business w/o having to readjust pads or cable tension. Unless you wore your pads down in the wet gritty ride and you couldn't brake the last 1/2 hr of the ride because your levers went all they way to the bars...
cya
