One of the problems of a compact folding bike design is where to mount the brakes. On my NWT they are mounted on the chainstay instead of the seat stay as with most normal sized bikes. This has lead to a bit of a problem I hadn’t noticed before.
As the crank rotates it passes by the brake lever pretty closely. When I first put the new brake on I didn’t have a problem, but as the new cable stretched out a bit suddenly I ‘clicking’ the brake as I went by, though only when I really mashed.
Naturally this is not a good situation.
I’m not sure if this started to happen because…
1. The new brake was wider
2. The crank had bent slight in
3. The crank was mispositioned slightly on the bottom bracket
4. I’m an idiot
5. Something else
#1 didn’t seem like the problem – I checked it against the old brakes and they are pretty much the same thing; the new ones being black the old ones being silver. That’s not it.
#2 is possible I suppose but it doesn’t appear to be the problem. Once of these days I’ll look into it but visually it seems fine.
#3 is also possible but I don’t have the tools to do anything about it at the moment.
#4 is true, but still may not account for the problem
#5 is probably partly correct as well
Now keep in mind that this really only started happening and as I’m riding regularly I needed to do something to ‘save the day’ as it were till I’ve got a bit more time to figure it all out.
The answer was pretty simple, at least as far as getting it working. I’d kept my old brakes because there really wasn’t much wrong with them. Actually it’s not even the brake I needed, just the old pads. I ended up simply took the smaller adjusting washers off an old pad and used it in place of the larger set on the new pad. Thus I have a pad with two smaller sized adjusting washers…
This let me keep the brake arm adjusted much closer to the wheel and out of the way of the crank. Of course that threw the balance of the rear brake off a little but for now the adjustment screws have allowed me to keep both sides working.
I’ll still have to work on this a bit over the weekend and find a better solution or confirm that my solution is okay, but for now I’m good. I’d put a picture here but I did this last night with bad lighting and today my bike is locked up in our cage at work and a picture would show my u-bolt not my brake.
If there’s a moral to this story, keep all your old parts around that aren’t totally trashed. You may need bits and pieces.
Aloha!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…
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