Carbon wheel brake pad advice
 

Hi guys
I've bought some 2nd hand carbon wheels and I need to get some carbon brake pads, someone mentioned to me going for lighter coloured pads like grey may make brake surface wear look worse and it's better to stick to black, any thoughts? Cheers Al

Yes some rim brake pads will cause streaking. However I'd focus first on finding a good set of pads that will stop you e.g. SwissStop Black Prince. Carbon wheels don't slow and stop as well as alloy IME despite various pad combinations especially when wet.

That's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever hears. First you want to use the pads recommended by the rim manufacturer. Some are black, some are grey (Zipp), some are red (Roval), some are blue (Envy/Reynolds). If the rim manufacturer doesn't provide or recommend a specific pad then I'd use either Zipp (grey) or Swissstop Black Prince. Carbon rim braking surfaces wear very little but you can get pad material deposits on the rim. If they aren't causing any noise leave them alone.

That's why I've come on here for advice 😂 anyway I've read acetone can clean brake residue off👍

Disc brakes fix this problem also. :D

If you want to remove it yes, acetone will do the job. Lacquer thinner usually works as well.

Thanks 👍

For any carbon wheel go with the manufacturers suggested pads first and foremost and if they really don't recommend anything like cxwrench said SwissStop makes great pads (Black Prince and Yellow King) and make sure you are using a carbon specific compound and get the best you can, brake pads are the worst place to cheap out.

However keep an eye on those old wheels make sure everything is good on them. Never know what happened from that previous owner unless you really trust the seller.

Most of the Carbon rim brake pads suck big time. If you want to stop get Campagnolo Carbon Brake pads. They work well but they work so well I don't know about the wear rates on the wheels. Though mine don't seem to be wearing any differently from the blue pads.

Because braking on carbon rims just sucks in general. Alloy rims are the way to go for rim brakes or if you want carbon disc brakes all the way!

Make sure if your rims are for a specific pad you use that pad. Also note if you don't have Campagnolo shoes using Campagnolo pads is going to be tough and if you do have the proper shoes make sure you are again using the proper carbon pads for the rims assuming they are carbon.

I have largely changed over to aluminum rims again. They are not as strong as deep carbon rims though. To me that is more important than the stopping power which with Campagnolo Carbon pads are almost as good as aluminum rims. The roads around here are so bad that you have to be concerned about breaking a wheel.

Wider tires at lower pressure will help greatly and building a strong wheel will also help. Ultralight stuff is fine and dandy for smooth stuff under really light riders on light bikes but if you are breaking wheels often you need to find a stronger combo but running wide tires really helps a lot.

If you look at the tire pressure guide at Silca or several other sites you would discover that larger tires are not much lower in pressure than narrow tires. the contact patch is controlled by your weight and not the tire size so to hold the size and shape of that patch the tire pressures have to be pretty close, Because of the conditions of the roads in the US now, Campy has started making wheels much stronger. I broke Neurons a couple of times and had to switch to Campy's stronger Neutrons. Wheels and/or spokes breaking entirely disappeared with deep carbon wheels. And braking had no loses under clincher carbon wheels with aluminum braking surfaces. I no longer even make an attempt at tubeless tires since they are heavier than a normal clincher tire with a tube in them.

In real world usage as I put wider tires on my bike I run them at lower pressures. Having run gone from 23 to 28 I could notice a difference for instance on the same bike and did progressively go lower in weight but this was before the Silca calculator and a lot of this stuff was as common.

I had a co-worker who ran campy wheels and he never had issues and he abused those suckers badly. However yes shorter spokes lead to a stronger wheel assuming you have enough of them.

I'm just an amateur, but this already sounds too cosmic, what's the point in such a brake?

I use Swisstop Flash Evo Black Prince on my carbon wheels, can't say I noticed any difference in stopping power compared to my alloy wheels. My carbon wheels have only seen dry weather though!