replacing brake pads on the road

[22camels]

To replace a v brake pad I need to pull out the retaining pin from the old pad - something which I have so far managed at home with the help of pliers - the pin is usually too firmly wedged to be pulled out by hand.

I am going on a tour where I may need to replace brake pads and will carry replacement pads. I would rather not carry the pliers - they weigh 210g.

What do people use to pull out the pins?

[tatanab]

Anything sharp enough to go into the rounded end of the pin, or push the pin through from the other end. If the pin has been folded over it is more difficult and probably cannot be used. Truthfully, the pin is not needed anyway unless you are of the habit of mounting your brake shoes facing the wrong way. For reasons of clearance, I have some where I have shortened the pad and shoe right up to the pin hole, hence no pin being used. No problem at all.

[Brucey]

the pin sticks out underneath, so you can usually push it out from below, and then use something else ( a small allen key, a metal tyre lever, a knife blade, a screwdriver...) to lift the pin out.

I usually remove and fettle the pin/hole before I install new brake shoes of this sort, so the pin comes out more easily. I also install them flush at the top, with the end overhanging the outside of the shoe; this way the pin cannot damage the tyre and is less likely to get snagged on anything.

The pins are easy to lose, so it is a good idea to carry a couple of spares. I would not use these pads without pins because not all inserts are (or remain in use) a tight fit. Because the fronts usually slope backwards, If they are loose, they can just fall out.... and even if they are fairly snug, they can get pulled out backwards if you put the brake on lightly to stop yourself from rolling backwards when stopped on a slope.

Needless to say you can buy tiny pliers that weigh next-to-nothing; in 4" length, 50g would be a fairly heavy set.

cheers

[22camels]

thanks for the tips! I'll have a play around..

[irc]

Or alternatively switch to standard pads where you replace the whole thing. More fiddly but only needs an Allen key.

I find the £1.75 per pair Bell V pads from Asda give great performance.

[chris_suffolk]

I use a paper clip on mine, easy to remove if you leave a couple of turns of the clip showing

[drossall]

Or alternatively switch to standard pads where you replace the whole thing.

Or carry spare pads fitted into shoes. I would always re-use the shoes when changing pads at home, but not on the road.

[mattsccm]

Now here is a questions. Until recently we used brake blocks not pads. To my mind pads refers to something that is used with disc brakes.
Block and shoes.

[Mark1978]

The answer of course is just to take a set of spares with the pads fitted to the shoes.

I've never been able to figure out how to change them anyway so replace the entire unit.

[Brucey]

re 'blocks' vs 'pads'.... I've been wondering about this too. I confess, I'm a little bit conflicted.

I've always said 'brake blocks' in the past. I think that this is a hangover from the days of spoon brakes and similar where (often) a solid block of some material is pushed against some part of the wheel. Until not that long ago, railway rolling stock still used what was effectively a variant of a spoon brake, where the 'block' was actually a wooden block.

The thing is, that anything 3D that is 'block-shaped' by definition is roughly like a cube. Certainly IMHO it shouldn't have one dimension very much smaller than the other two, else in most materials (wood, rubber, stone etc) there is another, better word for it that might be slab, sheet, or plank, etc.... or in the case of a brake part, 'pad' perhaps?

What we used to call brake blocks were certainly not 'pad shaped'. But the inserts we fit into our brake shoes nowadays often are more pad-shaped than block shaped, so I do struggle to call them 'blocks', because to do so seems somehow wrong, slightly obtuse, even.

Am I alone in this?

cheers

[PH]

I have some thin pliers, never weighed them but not heavy. Multitude of uses the most frequent seems to be pulling thorns out of tyres.

[Mattyfez]

That's a weird thing I don't get about modern bikes, why do they not all have disk brakes?

Ok there may be a tiny weight disadvantage, but disks and calipers work so much better and you don't need to worry about rim wear. There's a reason all modern cars use this system over the old style brake shoes.

[Brucey]

er, a rim brake is already like the world's largest disc brake...? Disc brakes are not always 'so much better'...?

As well as the obvious weight, here is a fair bit of hidden extra weight with disc brakes, and I've yet to ride a bike with them and vaguely skinny tyres that I thought rode remotely well. Others have told me that they exist, but then they buy bikes that I wouldn't to start with, so maybe their yardstick is different to mine.

BTW when it comes to cycle componentry you can always get people asking;

'why aren't all bikes fitted with *insert part type here*, they work so much better when I'm *insert highly specific circumstance here*'.

Normally the answer is in the question, somewhere.

cheers

[Mattyfez]

One could counter that with, rims need to be built up to withstand the brakes.

From an engineer perspective and a rolling mass perspective, it makes more sense to have disc brakes.

[Brucey]

in theory you could argue that if you wanted to, but in reality it doesn't seem to work like that. Rims for disc brakes need more spokes or more reinforcement where the spokes are mounted, because the spoke loadings are completely different (much, much worse) under braking. By contrast the extra 0.3mm thickness for the brakes to rub off seems like small beer to me.

I see lots of knackered disc wheels, usually rim failures, even though the rim fitted isn't any lighter than a rim-braked rim.

cheers