groghunter

@west2east: My point was that I'm surprised that they didn't build the company from the ground up to bring the concept to only minimum viability, in order to generate an acquisition bid. Their initial offerings and marketing felt like it was geared toward that, vs running a business that actually delivers products to consumers. Or in the words of a great thinker of our time: 1. Start up. 2. Cash in. 3. Sell out. 4. Bro Down.

That Myriam Nicole shot (over the text about Manon's 2014 win) is what photographer dreams are made of.

100%. it's always wild to me how incumbent brands have such a hard time pivoting on things like this. that said, both brands have a history of doing this, but eventually releasing something that outcompetes the small player, or buying the small player, just way late. I've honestly been shocked that neither brand has snapped up Classified, as well as being surprised that Classified actually seems to want to sell products, rather than being a startup that exists only to be acquired by one of the two.

I'm seeing a lot of discussion about "it's better if you like to get your bike off the ground" comments followed by "most people don't ride like that which is why 29ers have won" responses that i want to push back on a little bit. I am not a rider who measures their bike performance based on airtime. even then, i still prefer 27.5 wheels. specifically, what i like is the way they corner. on flat twisty trails, i find myself having to really muscle a 29er in a way i don't have to with a 27.5. tl;dr, it's not just the freeriders and trials pros who want smaller wheeled trailbikes, even if we are the minority.

There's a couple holes in the above that i want to fully address: yes, this is all theory, and in practice, the rotor being centered between the caliper sides is a good starting point. but locating it against a flexy rotor has been, in my experience, very dependent on two factors: how straight the rotor is, and the single most important factor in how easy a brake is to align IMO, [i]how much the brake hose is pulling the caliper out of alignment[/i] which is going to widely vary based on the bike and how the hose was routed by the mechanic. maybe newer thicker rotors are making this easier, (i haven't had a chance to try any) but my experience was, even using an alignment tool 3d printed to the specific brake, the pressure from the hose routing is almost always strong enough to flex the rotor, rather than pushing the caliper into alignment. IME, even bikes with external routing temporarily unclipped (which you should always do when aligning brakes) exhibit this behavior to some degree.

@schihim: You asked two questions, so: Pistons never have the same amount of friction, [i]and[/i] friction is not the only thing that affects piston travel, in fact it's not even the most significant effect on piston travel, as your piston is generally not actually moving within the seal, the seal is flexing to allow the piston to move through it's travel. the piston only has significant movement against the seal when you're setting the piston gap/pad gap. tl;dr, go look up a full explanation of how seal glands work, it's actually a really interesting solution to an engineering problem. Fluid path does not change pressure, in [i]stasis.[/i] in a dynamic system however, flow restrictions affect [i]displacement[/i], and since there is multiple paths available for the fluid to move (near side piston, far side piston, or any of the pistons in a multipiston brake) you end up with fluid displacing one piston more than the others, if extending that piston by an extra .2mm for example, is the path of least resistance vs pushing the other piston further. Brakes are designed around this fact, when you're designing a multipiston caliper, you can use several different strategies to try to compensate for how far the piston is from the fluid inlet. they just don't design it around a perfect alignment, because there's [i]no need to do so[/i] because instead of chasing that unachievable goal, you can just make the brake mounts have adjustability. it only become a problem when hyper-obsessives like us start thinking our brake rotors need to be perfectly centered in a caliper in the shop, rather than centered in the dynamic system of imperfectly moving brake pads in combination with an imperfectly straight brake rotor. And we haven't even talked about things like seal contamination, debris in the seal gland, seal age and all the other factors that affect a brake in real life that an engineer can't actually control.

@sherbet: The Birzman tool is one of the ones i was referencing. I never got a good result from it, and I found two things that worked against it: 1. it assumes that the pad gaps should be exactly what the thickness of the metal they used in the tool is, which i found to almost never be true on one side or the other of the caliper. as i diatribed about above, the pistons almost never have the same travel, so assuming both pad gaps should be the same leads to madness trying to use a spacer like this. 2. i found that no matter where you put the spacer on the rotor, you weren't going to find the spot that rubs, either on one pad or the other. you have to adjust the caliper to the plane that both the left and right high spot describe as they rotate, which makes the rotor effectively thicker in rotation than it is sitting still. and given it's a matter of rotor warp, if you find the high spot on the left, you're on the low spot on the right, and vice versa.

I thought about this too when i saw this tool, then immediately realized why it won't work on most brakes: The problem is most brakes don't have completely symmetric piston travel. one piston might travel, for example, 1.8mm and the other might be 2.2mm, primarily because the fluid inlet is on one side of the brake. This also isn't consistent between copies of the brake, due to sticky piston seals, debris, etc. This is even worse on multi-piston brakes because then not only is there variance between each side, there's variance between pistons on the same side. So what you really need is to get the pads to the CORRECT alignment for that brake, accounting for slightly less or more pad travel on each side and any other factors unique to that brake caliper. the simplest way to do this is the way we've been doing it for the last 100 years of hydraulic brakes: you engineer enough retraction of the pads to clear the rotor in your seal gland design, and optimize the fluid pathways as much as possible to make pad advancement as symmetric as possible between all the pistons in the caliper. this doesn't work perfectly, but it's part of the reason that brake calipers have adjustable mounts: in order to help adjust for any variance in the actual caliper function. some brakes just suck at it, and we use rotors on bikes that easily warp enough to cause brakes to rub. This all has to fit within making the brake affordable too: creating fluid pathways in a brake caliper is a complex task, and it would be very easy to design a caliper that had perfectly symmetric fluid displacement, but was impossible, or wildly expensive, to actually manufacture. There's even been a few tools designed to try to do what you want, that this reminded me of. they never worked well, because they were trying to get the brake to a level of symmetric travel that the brake could never actually acheive. Lastly, it's worth pointing out that the tool being shown here isn't meant to align brake pistons for "normal" performance: this is basically the trick of taking the wheel out, and squeezing the brake just enough to advance the pistons slightly, so that your pads have less travel before they hit the rotor, and your brake lever has shorter travel before the bite point. this is just a way to that in a controlled manner using a consistently sized set of spacers. Edit: holy heck that ended up a wall of text, sorry.

right, but for winter use, rear suspension isn't critical (and shocks don't love the cold) which means FS fatbikes pretty much are dead. That said, i still think about the time i demoed a bucksaw. that thing was an absolute blast.

Poll is missing a "I don't ride bikes, i just come here for the comments" option