anyone using shimano road levers with BB7's, thinking of swapping out my shimano mechanicals for the avids
You can get BB7 roads to work with the differing pull you get on road levers
Works fine with BB7 road calipers(silver colour) got em on my X.
If they are the MTb BB7s (black colour) you will need a travel agent.
fine - bb7 road version though.
Good here too, though I gave up with the rear - brushed and whined or was too mushy. Not needed anyway.
Road levers like that have a lot more flex than a decent mtb lever so you end up using part of your brake pull simply flexing the lever. This means that you have less effective cable travel and you end up having to set your BB7 pads very close to the disc. That gives a high likelihood of rub because you also have compression in your outer cable to deal with. You do need the road BB7s with 105s.
You can compensate for the lost travel by using top grade outer cable which compresses less (Nokon etc), or use something like Avid Full Metal Jacket (steel tube for part of the outer run).
I take a DIY approach and use aluminium tubing to replace the outer and only use ordinary outer for the bits where it has to flex. This has the virtue of being cheap. 🙂
Doing this improves the brake to where it is as good as with mtb levers.
