Quoted message said:I just put on some new brake pads with a glossy mold surface on the
contact face as manufactured. As I rode down the street with
squealing brakes I came upon a road crew that was mixing cement
(powder) with the subgrade of a street to be repaved and rode slowly
through the three inch deep cement powder.
I was surprised to notice that my brakes had become silent and that
there was no apparent side effects, the brake pad faces being clean on
inspection. I would not have guessed that this works as well as it
did. Try it you'll like it! Of course a light dusting with cement
powder on the rims will suffice. It doesn't require piles of it on
the road in front of the bicycle.
[email hidden]
I've been a proponent of this for a while - After lots of dry rides, my MTB
black Koolstops got glossy. It wasn't until a mud/rinse off/mud/rinse off
cycle that the brakes worked wonderfully:
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I rode my MTB doing trials today in the rain, and as expected, my V-brakes
did absolutely nothing for me. I rode a while longer with the rotten
performance, and as I stopped on campus for a minute, I noticed some fine
clay mud nearby. Just for fun, I smeared some onto the rim surfaces front
and rear, and rode with SCEEERRRRKKKKKK the whole time, but noticed a
dramatic increase in braking power. I smeared more and more mud on the
rims, and the friction increase a little more.
The rain had stopped by now, and I had called my friend to come riding with
us. I wanted to show him my discovery, so I figured that I'd wash off the
rims in a local display fountain to get them to their crappy performance
from before. After washing off the mud and scraped-off brake pad material,
I expected the brakes not to work, but to my surprise, they worked just as
well as before. The big surprise came when the wheels and pads dried off -
they're comparable to my disc brakes! They may not be quite as linear and
therefore more grabby, but they definitely had more power than I needed.
My theory is that the sheen of deposited rubber on the rim and the glaze on
the pad had been scraped away by the fine-grit mud and thus allowed a clean
pad-rim interface.
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Phil, Squid-in-Training
