sjanzeir

Nicely done! You've just shown this newbie OP how this forum really works. Did you know that we somehow were able to tell him the same thing, only with a much lower vermin-to-info ratio?

JohnDThompson 

I write as a mechanic who has to service what the customer brings in.

Lombard

DERP!!! You obviously have not read through this thread or you would know that it has been determined that the problem is not his brakes but that they are not set up correctly.

Chuck M 

Thank you Rolla for taking the time to point out the OP's main problem. Addressing the issues he pointed out will be a big step in solving the issues without feeding arguments. The root cause of this is from the Costco employee not giving a damn or not knowing any better. I wonder how many bikes wind up unused after the buyer becomes frustrated with things like this that are easily solved as Rolla pointed out with this problem.

mstateglfr 

JDT has forgotten more about framebuilding, bike design, and bike maintenance than most any of us will ever know, but you go have fun patronizing him.

3alarmer 

...you rang ?

Miele Man

Hey there OP. Is there a bicycle co-op near you? If there is and you go there they would most likely be happy to show you how to properly set up and adjust your V-brakes. Some bicycle co-ops do like you to phone first to book a time to use one of their workstations.

Good luck and cheers

Darth Lefty 

Bicycles are just rife with fussy adjustments. It’s really frustrating sometimes when you just want to go ride. The people who are nostalgic for it are the same people who miss adjusting the points on their distributor caps.

sjanzeir

The points are not on the distributor cap. The points are underneath the distributor cap. A burned out set of points can leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere, but it takes less than five minutes and costs 12 bucks to fit a spare, and you're on your way again. Which is more than I can say for your average modern-day CAN-bus conveyance. In this day and age of 20somethings who take a course or two on OBD2 and run around with cheap laptops shamelessly calling themselves "mechanics," these are dying skills. There was a time when all the maintenance kit you needed to drive coast to coast consisted of a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a spare set of ignition points, condenser, and radiator cap.

georges1

Me too, I have only XT-780-7 V Brakes on all my three MTBs and they provide phenomenal braking under any condition. My Hybrid has center pull brakes good but not as good as the V brakes. I have put longer brake pads on my hybrid for a better braking

Lombard

Breaker points were pretty much obsolete by the late 1970's. Besides nostalgia, there is no reason to own a car of that era. I'll admit I like to bash unnecessary technology like touch screens. But in the grand scheme of things, cars are way more reliable now than anything built pre-1990.

veganbikes

Not to get into a car debate but all the technology in cars some of which quite nice makes it hard to work on and gets into more proprietary territory which doesn't always increase reliability. There is that 1968 single owner Volvo that has around 4 million miles on it and I think the driver died before the car sadly. I think he rebuilt the engine twice, some paint jobs and normal maintenance but not much else. I am sure there are other great examples but that is one that always stuck out.

dedhed

You've never worked on a Ford Flathead 4 or 8 with front mount distributor or even a small block chevy tight on the firewall.

3alarmer 

...I actually drove around in the hippie bus, powered by a flat head Merc, for about five years. Because of the way it was fitted to the bus, there was plenty of room to work on it inside, nest to the driver's seat. Which was a good thing, because I had to change out the mechanical fuel pump at 3 and 4 thousand mile intervals. I think there was a way to repair them, by brazing something onto the end of the actuation arm. But back then, they were cheap to buy rebuilt, and readily available. I haven't thought about that bus in several years...I am a mere shadow of the mechanic I used to be.

Lombard

Old Volvos as well as a few other select cars were reliable and lasted a long time. They are the exception rather than the norm.

3alarmer 

...this is the "repairability" issue, that gets tossed around a lot on car forums and appliance forums. I hung on, fixing all my own stuff on cars, until about 2011, when we bought the LEAF. There are some things on it I can fix, but some of it is just beyond me. Naybe if I were still 20 years old, I'd be more ambitious, but my floor jack sits in a corner of the garage, gathering dust. Now that I look back on it, I never enjoyed working on cars that much. Guy down the street used to teach auto tech at a community college here. He has a couple of very classic sports cars, but when I'm riding a bike on the weekends, he's out driving one of the cars, to keep things lubricated. I would not enjoy that nearly as much.

And let's not even get started on jay Leno and his facial skin grafts.

3alarmer 

...anything is reliable and lasts a long time, if you can fix it yourself, parts are readily available, and you don't mind doing the work. You just end up in some odd places, doing roadside repairs, sometimes in the dark. Even old air cooled VW's were "reliable", if you knew how to fix them. And those were terrible cars. NOw, I think that in California, we just send all our old cars to Mexico or some state in the deep South, with fewer emissions restrictions.

veganbikes

Somewhat yes but not totally

Well yeah the electric cars don't have much to go wrong like a normal IC engine. However yeah fixing yourself is not easy if possible.

That Jay Leno thing sucks, I do enjoy his collection and his passion. Hopefully he gets back to what he loves soon.

wolfchild

The extra cost is well worth it....and no disc brakes are not heavy enough to make any difference in your ride and they're very simple and easy to set up.

dedhed

Yeah, on 1946 2N it's down under the fan behind that generator Easier just to remove the distributor to work on it.

Lombard

Bottom line is newer cars are more reliable, but when they do break, they are more expensive and more difficult (if at all possible) for DIY repair.

Jeff Neese

Linear pull refers (indirectly) to the mechanical advantage at the lever. They're also called long pull. The alternative to linear pull is short pull. It has to do with how much cable the lever pulls and how much mechanical advantage (leverage) the brake levers provide, and of course that needs to be matched properly with the brakes. It has nothing to do with the way the cable lines up across the brake arms.

3alarmer 

...I used to be ASE certified for auto electrical. Even though I took some update courses over the years, and bought a cheap code grabber, the day when I could diagnose and repair an electrical problem in either of our cars (2011 LEAF and 2020 Hyundai Sonata) are long gone. The good news is that the dealerships have these very expensive diagnostic machines, that make it easier to run stuff down quickly. So you save on labor hours and costs. The bad news is that some of the modules you need to replace cost in the hundreds of dollars.

Lombard

I have an OBD2 tester. It's nice to know when I get a CEL, I can find out why. Granted it's usually not something I can repair or something I want to deal with. More a curiosity thing than anything else. And letting a pro mechanic know what I found tips the repair shop off that I am not a target for being duped.

sjanzeir

Of the many reasons that I own and (almost) daily-drive a 1982 Peugeot 504 Familiale (that's a three-row wagon for you Yanks,) two stand out as pertinent to this discussion: breaker points and a Solex synchronous double-barrel carburetor:




Other reasons include the magical ride thanks to its long-travel suspension with rebuildable Macpherson struts up front and quad coil springs keeping the rear off of the solid live axle at the back; fantastic handling thanks to the non-assisted rack-and-pinion steering; the snickety-snick manual (oh, I'm sorry - STICK SHIFT!) transmission that originally was a four-speed and which I had converted to five-speed: the rugged, completely sealed driveline; easily accessible water pump... And it's air-conditioned!

And for being a great conversation starter everywhere I take it!

In July I took it on a three-week, 4,000 mile round trip to Jordan and, apart from a minor issue with the headlights that occurred at the break of dawn on the second day of the trip - and the fact that the speedometer never worked since the five-speed conversion - it was absolutely reliable:







It was reliable throughout the 450,000 miles that the previous - and first - owner had put on it, and it's still reliable now.

So you might want to back off with the patronizing punditry and be a little more open-minded to different people and different strokes.