cbfight

I acquired a set of BR-6500 brakes from ebay for a training bike I am building up around an old Giant OCR 2 frame I got. Everything was going smoothly until I found out I could not get the front brake to contact the rim's brake strip center- it would always contact half on the brake strip, half on the tire. Not good. Flipping the brake pads around so that the tire centering tabs were facing up somehow got me enough reach to run the brakes, thankfully, but I still found it very weird. Anyone else have similar experiences?

pmt

Sometimes some people will file the bottom of the caliper where the pad bolts go through a bit with a round file to get a little extra drop. I've done that a few times on a few builds.

operator

You might not want to do that. The curvature of the pad/holder will be in the wrong direction. There are two options if they still hit

1) Evaluate the possibility of modifying the brake bolt slot to allow further extension (whether there's enough even after mod is up to you to figure out)
2) Cut chamfer into the upper half of the pad so that it does not hit the tyre
3) Buy a front brake with the proper reach.

I doubt there's enough to take away if half the pad is still hitting the tyre.

cbfight

It ended up being a case of the reach being off by a 2 mm (approx) and the brake pads being severely worn, within half a mm of the wear groove. I replaced the pads with fresh ones and filed down the slots by a about 1mm and everything works alright now.

Thanks for the tip about filing the slot down. Was considering it but wasn't sure.