Currently building up a geared cross bike that will spend most of the time on the road, as a result I am looking for some pretty decent brakes.

The frame is not disc enabled, so thats out.

Cantis are pretty good when setup properly, but I am not great at the spannering, I have used v brakes in the past but find travel agents lose a bit of the efficiency.

So I was thinking about mini-V’s – I know they have less mud clearance but as the bike will not be used off road all the time I don’t think thats a big issue. Are mini-V’s good stoppers and easy to use?

oh and any recommendations if mini-Vs are considered a good idea.

I’m just swapping frames over from my old Tricross. I tried mini Vs, frogg leg and avid cantis. The best stopping power came from mini Vs with swiss-stop green pads. They ran really close to the rim so not great off road but gave the best stopping power of any. As for which ones, they were the Tektro ones that came with the bike. I took them off to try various cantilevers and them ended up putting them back on!

Gone over to discs now, or at least I should have by the weekend.

Double tap!

As with Onzadog.

Mini Vs good for stopping power but rubbish for clearance. I used Froglegs and found them easy to set up but they felt a little wooden. Less power than the mini Vs but better clearance, handy on the road as well as cross.

I’ve got the tectro cantilevers and set up carefully they’re plenty powerful enough, particularly with swisstop green pads.

double tap?? As in sram or something I am not aware of?

I’ll be using Shimano sti if it makes a differnece!

“double tap” geeky bike way of saying the “send post” button was pressed twice and therefore there were two replies of the same text.

I thought it was quite cool 8)

Double tap as in, I hit “send post” twice.

Shame my fingers don’t work that fast when I’m typing. Swidish Chef beat me to it.

Maybe “double tap” comes from reading too many Andy McNab books!

Doh!!

How rubbish are we talking for mini-v, absolute no no for off road??

Cheers all.

I rode mine off road a couple of times. You just need to ignore the noise. I actually found the pads were so close that there isn’t room for the gap with the rim to fill up with muck.

Got some tektro mini-v’s and levers in the classifieds over there —>

I’m running some Campagnolo Veloce Linear mini-vs n the cross bike with SwissStop green pads. Never had a problem and really happy with the performance.

Like others above they run pretty close to the rims but for road riding I’ve never had an issue with that. Only slight pain to start with was I had to trim the noodle bit so I could pop the cable out to drop out the wheel (and Campag levers have the cable release on the levers – SRAM and Shimano don’t so might be even more of a problem).

No shuddering like my old cantis either.

I fitted some Dia Compe Flexi cables to my noodles to allow adjustment for pad wear.

The canti set-up fiddle is only an issue once. Once the straddle cable is set right, then the remaining faff is pad set-up, which is the same whether it’s Vs, mini-Vs or cantis.

The straddle cable thing isn’t that difficult. Just look at someone else’s (which works well) and make yours look the same!

I use Tektro cantis with Koolstops and they work really well on and off-road.

It’s simple mechanics, the less the pads move for a given lever throw, the more power you’ll have until you actually run out of lever stroke. That’s why normal V brakes don’t work but mini V brakes do. Cantis (even with a low straddle cable) give more rim clearance and therefor, less mechanical advantage.

I like mini-Vs for road use on my Pompino.

Cantis are good once you get the knack. Don’t get that horrible sound of your rim wearing away when you’re not breaking 🙂