Calipers That Will Not Adjust Straight

[PCeBiker]

... I have no O_rings, lipping, warping, bent, extra washers, anti-seize, silicone or the need for a business card.

I have lots off that stuff, then I added solder, plastic, and lots of velcro straps.

 

[Marcela]

Okay, gotta ask. What is with the wound wire on the spokes?

 

[PCeBiker]

Oh, Tektro E10.11! That explains it. They've got stuff added to make them last longer. If you buy pads that don't last as long, that could solve your problem!

I thought that they were "soft" pads because they're not metal pads ?

I've wondered about grit. Maybe in damp weather, it could stick to the rotor, than get stuck in the pad.

This s*it is like multi-grit grinding paste,..

Even airborne dust and grit gets tossed up into the grinding/chopping blades of the rotor.

I see the wear on your rotor extends to the edge on the right bit is a couple of mm short on the left.

Yeah the pad isn't centered properly and is extending past the braking surface and into the spokes,..

Ohh,.. for reference sake, the rotor is ~1.8mm thick.
I've got my camera all zoomed in so the lip looks huge.

Suppose a squealing sound wakens you at 3 AM,.. it's your extended life Tektro pads.

My brakes have never made any noise.

Interestingly my first e-bike would ring like a bell when I applied the front brake.
The fender would ring like a symbol on a drum set with the vibration from braking.
I didn't need a bell.
I could tap the brake and ring my fender.

I decided that it was annoying and jammed little pieces of rubber into the fender braket attachments and that stopped the ringing.

A bit like you guys and your bell, but in reverse.

You've got to get those pads out

It looks like you've got the same rotor as I'm getting, and the same caliper too ?

What brake pads are you using ?
From what I gather regular pads are dirt cheap but wear out fast.
I don't care about that, I just don't want to wreck my new rotor.

That box with 4 sets of pads and tools is eleven bucks now, but it's got chunks of ropes, and metal in them, maybe tree bark too ?

Do you need more brake lever pressure with "regular" pads ?

 

[PCeBiker]

Okay, gotta ask. What is with the wound wire on the spokes?

Wheel balancing weight.

@PedalUma and I like to get all dorked out and true our tires using pastels and grease pencils.

I took it a step further and balanced my wheels as well.
I tried fishing weights, but they were too hard to work with.

The solder is really easy to roll around the spoke, and to add or remove some.

To fix a warped rotor, I just find where the rotor is rubbing then grab a nearby spoke and rotate the wheel holding the spoke noting where the bend is relative to the spoke.


I haven't spat on my tires yet.
Maybe I'll give that a try ?

But I'd end up with spit all over the wheel while I was chasing a warp around in circles.

 

[PedalUma]

I rule!

It is so very true.

But then the guillotine was invented. As you have often reminded us.

 

[PCeBiker]

I see the wear on your rotor extends to the edge on the right bit is a couple of mm short on the left. If you used Bicycle Rider spacers to move the caliper left, You'd have a lip on the right.

I don't need to move my caliper left or right. My rotor is centered between the pads.

I need to raise my caliper up to raise the pads about 2mm.

This direction,..

Cardboard spacers wouldn't work much better than cardboard pads and rotors.

 

[Marcela]

Wheel weights. Lol. You guys must go really fast. Or is that to keep you from rolling forward or backwards at the stop lights.

 

[spokewrench]

I don't need to move my caliper left or right. My rotor is centered between the pads.

I need to raise my caliper up to raise the pads about 2mm.

This direction,.


Cardboard spacers wouldn't work much better than cardboard pads and rotors.

I was talking about left and right in your photo of your disc. That seemed the least confusing way to put it. If your spacer arrow points up, what you call moving the caliper up is what I call moving it aft.

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Hmmm.... no cardboard. I don't see how any genuine bicycle rider could do without Bicycle Rider Spacers. I used them to center my pads left to right.

I think I see what you're doing wrong. If you're like me, you're concerned with the danger of inadvertently locking your brakes on wet ice. Rolling, you get a coefficient of friction of .05, but if your brake locks, it's virtually nothing, and that could impair control. To ensure that I can brake with a delicate touch, I spray pads and rotors with silicone spray rated at 400 F or 200 C.

When I happen to ride through a pile of carborundum grit, this miracle coating keeps it from sticking to my rotor or pads. If you would do the same, you would no longer have to worry about rotor wear.

 

[PCeBiker]

Wheel weights. Lol. You guys must go really fast. Or is that to keep you from rolling forward or backwards at the stop lights.

I like to ride no-hands and everything was fine until I strapped a second battery to my rear rack then I started getting a shimmy that would go out of control and crash my e-bike if I didn't grab the handlebars.

I spent months trying to stop the shimmy, including truing and balancing my wheels/tires.
(If I leaned my e-bike over on the side stand and spun up the rear wheel, the e-bike would shake.)

After my rear rack broke off the e-bike, I managed to attach the second battery to my top tube (using polymorph plastic) and the shimmy was gone.

I replaced my rear rack with a Topeak rack and bag, but I still can't put any weight in it.

There is a battery bracket available but it would make the battery about an inch taller and four inches longer, I didn't have the space for it, and I'd still have to attach the bracket securely to the top tube somehow?

Now I can ride no-hands through 2" deep potholes and just float right through them.

My e-bike only goes 20 mph, but I'm sure I could spin up my wheels to 200 mph and they wouldn't shake.

Interestingly, I had a motorcycle that would go into a speed wobble at 140 kph, and it would also happen at 70 kph if I rode no-hands.
It's that whole resonant frequency harmonics thing,..

That front wheel turned out to be way out of balance.

 

[PedalUma]

@PCeBiker, Keep weight low and centered. Where a nautical engineer would put it on a sailboat. Do not place it out at one end or up high. A few years ago a friend Lisa flipped her bike on a downhill turn because her battery was on a rear rack, up high and on the tail. Like a pendulum the weight wants to swing forward when descending or braking. The back of her bike wanted to be in front. She crashed. The Aventon Adventure 2 has a sympathetic resonance problem between the tire tread and the rotors at 12.5 mph.

 

[Marcela]

If you think of a grocery cart, when it is tweaked, not tweaker, and one of the front wheels carries less weight than the other front wheel, it will shimmy. That is the same principle on the bikes. If there is not enough weight on the front wheel, or the caster is not enough, it will shimmy. At speed, aerodynamic drag may transfer weight to the rear, in this case, shimmy may occur. Remember as a kid, the front fork was curved and you could ride no hands around corners and all through the neighborhood, somewhere along the line someone thought it was cool and fast to take that out and make it twitchy.

 

[PedalUma]

Dutch style bikes have a fork that extends way out and also a lot of space between the seat tube and the rear wheel. Road bikes do not. They are more like fighter planes than land yachts. One of my eBikes has a curved fork like you mention. It also has a coaster brake. The wire from the water bottle provides the mid-drive its juice. I gave a woman a beautiful custom classic Dutch mid-drive with an IGH. She gave it back and it sold yesterday to a Google engineer for $2300. Before restoration and conversion I had purchased it for $100. I love bikes with classic lines.

 

[spokewrench]

Interestingly, I had a motorcycle that would go into a speed wobble at 140 kph, and it would also happen at 70 kph if I rode no-hands.
It's that whole resonant frequency harmonics thing,..

On a motorcycle, no feet is the way to go. Gotta hit "watch on youtube."

 

[spokewrench]

Remember as a kid, the front fork was curved and you could ride no hands around corners and all through the neighborhood, somewhere along the line someone thought it was cool and fast to take that out and make it twitchy.

It looks as if @PCeBiker 's bike has about 27 degrees of rake and 5 inches of trail. (That's what they're called on a motorcycle. Bicycle people have different words.) That would help the bike stay upright with no hands, but with no hands and the seat not far behind the pedals, the rider would be unstable. The rack also looks unstable if loaded. The instability of the load would make the bike steer itself back and forth trying to stay up.

 

[spokewrench]

Interestingly, I had a motorcycle that would go into a speed wobble at 140 kph, and it would also happen at 70 kph if I rode no-hands.
It's that whole resonant frequency harmonics thing,..

That front wheel turned out to be way out of balance.

In May of 1970 I'd had my old bike 3 months. Before that I'd had a new bike that would only do 70 or so, so I was a novice on the old one. I was chasing a Porsche on the Blue Ridge Parkway. After running some 35 mph (55) corners at 80, (130), I thought 90 (145) would be fun. I lost control. My first thought was that it wasn't safe to be over the centerline in a blind corner at that speed. The oscillations quickly got worse. Most corners were edged with posts and cables, but this one had standing rocks, which put me in mind of Bo Diddley: "There's a tombstone in the graveyard's mine, I'm just 22 and I don't mind dyin'."

In this case I did mind because helmet fragments were sure to be found, and newspapers would present that as proof that motorcycle helmets should be banned because all they did was encourage the stupid to be reckless, and nobody ever met a biker who wasn't stupid.

It would have been stupid to brake with my handlebar almost dragging. Speed is a biker's best friend. Rolling off the throttle was like pulling a ripcord as the wind load slowed me almost instantly to a safe, sane 80 (130).

I balanced my wheels after that, but the lesson didn't stick. In December of 1971 I was on Connecticut 9, and when I hit 100 (160), it felt as if I were on cobblestones or the kind of corrugated pavement used to waken drivers who drift out of travel lanes. That's what I thought it was, but it happened only each time I hit 100, and all I saw was smooth pavement. I realized my tire was bouncing along like a basketball. Fortunately, I carried the tools necessary for balancing, although I had to stop to do it.

I became so balance conscious that when I bought an e-bike, I considered snipping off the valve stems for better balance.

 

[PCeBiker]

,.. I considered snipping off the valve stems for better balance.

Most fat bike rims have holes cut in them to reduce weight, but they don't cut a hole opposite the valve. That helps to compensate for valve weight, and gives them a full surface to weld the rim together.

Car tires usually have a red dot along the bead somewhere that indicates where to line up the valve stem.

I didn't like how my Mr Tuffy tire liners had 4" overlap when I went to install them, so I got all carried away and cut 2" off the end and installed it on the opposite side.

 

[Gionnirocket]

Ok... I think we've overthought the livin' shitz out of this... Can we please get back to some vado consumption

 

[PCeBiker]

,.. Can we please get back to some vado consumption

That's what causes my overthought and stagnation, so I buy more stuff on AliExpress and Amazon instead of actually fixing anything.

 

[PCeBiker]

If you think of a grocery cart, when it is tweaked, not tweaker, and one of the front wheels carries less weight than the other front wheel, it will shimmy.

I used to smoke Vados and wobble around on my two-wheeled skateboards thinking about caster angles and such.

The Ripstick is a two-wheeled skateboard that pivots in the middle.
The two wheels are on casters but the casters are mounted at an angle.
This is a similar Waveboard where the casters are mounted at a lesser angle than the Ripstick,..

It's pretty cool the way it works.

When the caster moves to either side, it pushs the board up which gets turned into forward motion if you have the front half of the board tipping one way while the back half tips the other and your wheels are casting about in the right way at the right time.

The Waveboard turned out to be slower with its shallow angle and the board had to swing way out with lots of lean to get going fast.
It was like being stuck in first gear on a bicycle and your cadence can't keep up.

So I made my own high speed caster angle ,..

I kept breaking stuff and had to weld my trucks back together a few times.

If you think of a grocery cart,..

Oh, I did think about grocery carts, then found a grocery in the river.

I decided to rescue the casters from their watery grave and set them free to roll away from their two-dimensional planar existence as slaves to the cart and gave them a new 3-dimentional range of movement on a homemade wobble board.

It worked, but it way REALLY Unstable and wobbled really slow.
I was half a foot above the road.

I also scored a couple of kids bikes from the garbage with the hopes of welding up a wobble board with 12" pneumatic wheels, but I suck at welding then get real lazy and forget everything when I get into the Vado.

 

[PedalUma]

Ok... I think we've overthought the livin' shitz out of this... Can we please get back to some vado consumption

I smoked my Vado. It has 10 feet of half inch bungee wrapped around its lower battery and I still need to get off and kick that spot whenever it stalls. Get to use it for free as a demo bike. I fix other people's bikes all day and never have time for my own We built a 2025 Vado today. It is effing beautiful.

Smoke a Vado and listen to some of this.