what brand disc brakes do you guys recommend?



Phaz

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Sep 29, 2004
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I plan to purchase a set of mechanical disc brakes for my 2004 schwinn mesa.
i can get promax discs for $100AUD for both wheels, are these any good?

also i plan to get a set of alex DM18 rims with shimano deore hubs. is $250AUD a good price for the wheelset?

the stock rims absolutely suck. everytime i get the bike serviced the rear has to be straightened. i buckled it after just 2 hours of purchasing the bike! :D
 
I don't know much about mechanical disc brakes, but hear that the Avid ball-bearing ones are the best around.

My old MTB had Tektro mech discs which worked quite well.

You might find some more opinions on www.farkin.net, another aussie cycling site geared more towards MTBers.

I'm not up to speed with Alex rims, but they are OEM on a lot of lower end MTBs. You might find that they're not all that much better than the rims you have now. One other thing about wheels are that the expertise of the wheelbuilder can make a big difference to the wheel's durability. Generally speaking, a wheel built (or tuned) by a good wheelbuilder will be head and shoulders better than a typical machine-built one.

About the rear wheel, mine tends to be like that too, mainly because my technique sucks. My LBS basically begged me to get freeride rims on the (otherwise XC) wheelset I got them to handbuild for me and now it doesn't really go out of true much at all. I've now graduated to being able to dent the actual rim on botched obstacle-clearing attempts! ;)
 
Phaz said:
I plan to purchase a set of mechanical disc brakes for my 2004 schwinn mesa.
i can get promax discs for $100AUD for both wheels, are these any good?

also i plan to get a set of alex DM18 rims with shimano deore hubs. is $250AUD a good price for the wheelset?

the stock rims absolutely suck. everytime i get the bike serviced the rear has to be straightened. i buckled it after just 2 hours of purchasing the bike! :D


The best option for *mechanical* disks are the Avids. Everything else falls in line behind them. I have zero clue about conversion from us$ to aus$ so I'm useless with the pricing for you. Alex rims are horrible. I'm sure someone somewhere has ridden 1 million miles on a set and "never" had them trued (that's a joke, but someone is sure to say something similar), but they are really bad rims and not likely to be any better for you than the stock rims on your bike. Sun/Ringle' makes some really great rims and many of them are under $45 (us). Nashbar.com bike shop had some great deals on shimano hubs with different Sun rims in their latest mailing (Rhynolite rims).

If you can afford it, there is nothing comparable to a set of pro-built wheels. You can learn to do it yourself as well. It's was intimidating as hell the first couple of times I did it, but once you figure it out it's not bad and saves money. "Zinn and the art of wheel building" made it very easy and helped a ton. Good luck.
 

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