Has anyone else had the sprung clip thing that holds the pads on Avid 3 brakes apart bend round, and sheer off inside the calliper of the brake before?

I'd just finished a bit of flat bridleway, and had stopped before heading up hill, noticed a strange scraping noise, a bit of swarf type stuff (I'm guessing the rest of the arm that's folded over) dropped out of the calliper, shortly followed by the spring clip and the pads!

A normal one (for reference)

A broken one (as of 5 minutes ago!)

happens quite often, either when pads wear out to a certain level and spring hits rotor, or when pads weren;t installed correctly.

Yep – I just pulled one out last night. The left hand pad had worn out and the spring came out just like your pic.

That's ok then, I thought I'd achieved something speshul for a while!

yep, happens often, as above, when the pads wear down too far. have they been a bit noisy recently?

Not especially, and there seems a fair bit of pad left too. Guess I'm just lucky 🙂

Yeah I got this all the time on my juicy threes even with new pads. With a bit of mud and pine needles etc the springy bit tends to go walkies and gets muched by the rotor.

It never caused the pads to fall out though – the metal bit at the skinny end of the caliper held them.

Sheesh I hated those brakes… 😉

Spooky! My friend had this happen with his Formula The One rear brake last night. I impressed him slightly as I straightened it out with my teeth!

did it to mine a while back when the pads were worn