Originally Posted by
kommisar
I've got a old schwinn mountain bike with chrome-moly main tubes. I assume the stays and fork are hiten. Would getting a better frame with chrome-moly fork and stays make it ride significantly different? Would the cantilever brakes work better on chrome-moly stays?
Honestly, there is nothing that you can do to improve the action of your rear cantilever brake. The problem isn’t with the brakes but with the design of the bike. You can improve the action slightly by going with longer cable housing on the front but that will only be a slight improvement. The problem is the tortuous route of the cabling on the rear brake. The red line in the picture below is the route of the cable. It has two rather sharp bends in the housing to get the cable to align with the brake straddle cable. The cable simply can’t move freely enough.
If the cable could run along the green line, the brakes would work much better but you can’t have the cable just hanging in air and make it work either.
If you are going to replace the bike to replace the rear triangle, you should get a bike with a larger front diamond frame but a change in material won’t make
this frame work better.