Never been too impressed with these brakes. However after giving my bike a refresh I decided to give them one last go. Fitted 203mm rotors, fitted kevlar hoses, bled them and fitter superstar kevlar pads, felt better.

Then at the weekend I borrowed my mates bike and his Hayes Stroker are unbelieveable! So much more power!

Do I get a set or are there even better brakes about? The only other thing my Oros have I like is the matchmaker clamp for my x9 shifters

I remember my oros as having lovely feel and modulation and they stopped me well enough without the need to lock up at every touch. I currently have strokers on my 4x and they are OK but definitely not any better imho.

Some decent pads might help…

My Oro’s were great until I tried to bleed them. Never worked since.

Yes I’m open to pad suggestions

If u think strokers are powerful get on a set of well setup avids they will have Machmaker for your shifters aswell

Yes I’m open to pad suggestions

POSTED 4 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

Formula’s own?

I used K24s for a few years and they are really nice, but not a touch on shimano.

Pad wise i think the sintered give much better performance than kevlar.

I love my oros. It’s a shame all the lever pivots are now baggier than a baggy thing now tho. Still work lovely

I used the superstar kevlars in oros, they were spot on (alps trips, downhill racing- nobody in the history of biking ever braked as long or as hard as I did racing the fort william endurance dh on my trailbike 😉 ) Certainly no lack of power. The kevlar hoses were probably a waste of money sadly, most oros used a braided hose as standard.

You do have to bear in mind it’s an 8 year old design, and I think the last ones made were in about 2010, but even so they are imo a better brake than Strokers, comparable on power with more feel. I upgraded mine to The Ones and yep there’s a fair performance gap, but there should be!

So… Either they are broken, or set up wrong. And frankly most things that would rob them of all their power would also have other noticable side effects- leaks or drag. They’re not the most intuitive to bleed- by which I mean, I’m a pretty good diy spanner and I bled them how I wanted to rather than as the instructions said, and that didn’t work out 😉 Then I followed the instructions, and it all went swimmingly.

Whereabouts are you? If you’re Edinburgh-ish you could come over and I can take a look…

I’m in Leicester I’m afraid, basically being an engineer I’m pretty confident in bleeding them.

I put on kevlar hoses as I got them 90% off at Wiggle recently, all the improvements I have made should make them mega brakes! Used them last weekend at Degla, and gave them some good work.

Maybe its the fact that Hayes have bigger levers, but the difference was pretty large.

Are the discs ok, any chance they have been contaminated? As any easy check you could wip the discs off and scrub them with wire wool and meths, or stick them in the dishwasher 😆

Rotors were brand new 3 rides ago, and I get loads of brake cleaner from work so always give them a good soaking

white91 – Member

I’m in Leicester I’m afraid, basically being an engineer I’m pretty confident in bleeding them.

Fair dos- just saying, if I was a less experienced mechanic, I’d have done it right first time… because I’d have followed the instructions instead of doing it like I would other brakes, which didn’t work well.

I ran oros on two bikes for about 4 years. They were light, even by today’s standards, pretty powerful and modulation was excellent. They had a really nice lever design. They managed heat very well and never, ever faded on me.

However, they wore quite badly, needing frequent TLC. Lever pivots went sloppy, pistons went sticky easily and frequently. Bleeding, whilst not difficult, was quite involved compared to some and needed to be done frequently – the brake fluid seemed to become contaminated very quickly, and you had to be very careful to do exactly what the instructions said to the letter.

Eventually I replaced them with the latest xt brake, which is heavier, more powerful and easier to live with.