I was curious about trying out a mafac raid front brake on my AHH (650b) and found a pair for a price I thought wasn't too much. It's still early days yet, but I thought I would offer a few preliminary observations.
First and last, these are big brakes. I have seen the reach on these quoted as starting at 66mm. The RBW geometry charts says reach for my bike is 65mm. I have the pad holders slammed to the top of the slot and I think they will be ok, but I really would rather have more room to go up with them. Of course getting braze-on pivots would allow a bit of latitude on the reach. If you want to run 40+mm tires with fenders, and easily get your wheel out without letting out air, a Raid will do that. I extended the slot in the L bracket on my front longboard about 1/8 inch and have it all the way up. That gives reasonable clearance over my soma GR tire and the brake arm barely touches the fender when I release the straddle cable. I would say there is room in there for a 50mm fender, and that that would be better with a tire that size (~42mm). It seems like the leverage is relatively high since any compliance in the system, or significant gap between the pads and the rim, results in a bunch of lever travel. They can squeal really badly if not toed in enough. Jan Heine has said that they stop squealing after a few rainy rides, but I live in the SF bay area (land of drought) so that's not gonna help me much. I have not yet sorted out how much toe in is needed and gotten that and no more dialed in. I suspect I have more toe in than necessary at the moment. I currently have more lever travel than I would like, so I hope I will be able to sort things out with less toe in, but no squealing, and firm up the feel. The old pads that came with my brakes didn't seem very good. The new kool-stop pads from Compass bikes seem like, well Matthauser pads. So not much to complain about there. I expect stopping power will go up a bit now that I have the new pads fitted. If anybody else is interested in doing similar experimenting, a guy on the 650B group (nobody I know) is selling a pair. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
