[Closed] In praise of Trickstuff

My best guess is that they’re making stuff to very very tight tolerances, which explains the price and often long lead time.

I have messed around over the years with loads of brakes, formula R1 and The One, countless shimano from XT to saint, sram guides and newer codes (the next best imho) and hope. The Trickstuff are just a whole new level. Performance and feel are night and day better than 95% of the others I have used. The lever shape is just perfect.

Just looked at the price on the website, Yikes. My problem is trying to stop myself using brakes, don't need to spend quarter of a bike on brakes that stop me quicker \ smoother. That said, they do look VERY nice so form and function always a win.

I do think most brakes available from the main manufacturers are pretty terrible. They all have issues which would be easy to fix and shouldn't be there in the first place. Too much plastic hardware and whittling everything down to save grams.

I've said this before on here but Hope are perfectly placed to take a look at how incredible the Trickstuff brakes are and increase the power of their own offerings, considering they can design and build whatever they like. I still use Hope because they're the best of a compromised bunch and they're the easiest to live with in terms of servicing and repairs. It's a shame the V4 DH brake doesn't have a lot more stopping power.

I almost went for the Maxima brakes when they were on Kickstarter but I'm just not riding enough due to injuries and work stuff. I'll definitely consider them again if I get back to some kind of regular service.

Hold up, you paid > £700 for brakes?! Are you a dentist? 😉

Then again, nothing compared to fancy car brakes!

Would love to try the trickstuff stuff!

Anyone able to explain to my why Hope are so far off that level? If it’s all due to quality control is there a chance that some hopes might actually be lots better than others?

I don't quite get all the Hope comparisons, is it because they come in shiny colours? Or just because spares are available?

Reassuring the £700 brakes are good though! Hopefully if they are really that good they push the competition forward.

is it because they come in shiny colours

Trickstuff don’t anymore. In a bid to reduce (or stop extending) lead times. It’s silver or black now. Though if the screw up the anodising/cosmetic finishing on a batch, they will do a blacker black that’s put back through the CNC, then given a matte anodising, and offered to those on the waiting list.

The reservoir cap on the maxima is still gold (coloured 😉) though.

Despite being the best of the best, they are very much a heart, rather than head purchase. The best of the other major players aren’t exactly lacking, and you’d be more than happy with one of those options, for a third the price.

That said, they are very addictive and I’m unlikely to go back to the others for a long time.

The Hope comparison is due to:

1) they are both largely CNC’d.

2) they are both independent engineering companies specialising in brakes (OK I know Hope do more besides).

3) they have a similar approach to customer care and model years (ie they don’t have them and make tweaks and modifications when necessary).

Nothing against Hope, but Trickstuff definitely take it to a whole different level. I guess Hope are more ‘masstige’ vs Trickstuff being ‘boutique’ but on paper the products and businesses are similar.

I guess in the context of suspension forks going for £1k+ these days a set of amazing performing brakes for £900 (remember to include the rotors, bleed kit and oil!) doesn’t seem so bad. Yes, I know it is an indecent amount to spend on a hobby, but I hope to be using them for many years to come.

All this talk & no pics!!?

I think people compare them to Hope (for mostly what he said ^^^) as a company that designs and builds everything in house and prides themselves on their ability to think fast and respond to new challenges. To me it's interesting when they choose not to bother. The keep selling under powered brakes year after year. I say this as a 20 year Hope customer currently riding E4's.

Sram and Shimano are locked in a battle for oem supremacy. I'm not really sure what their current products are like. I'm sure they work incredibly well for a while before tapering off and ending up in the bin. They're made to be replaceable not rebuildable which is why I wouldn't consider them for myself.

I love Hope, I just wish they were better. As an outsider it seems like they easily could be if they chose to.

Basically I want Hope to come out swinging with an immense new brake before I have a few too many shandys one night and order myself a pair of Maxima's. Please!

When we visited the factory a few years back, (  https://www.singletrackworld.com/2018/07/talking-trickstuff-factory-tour/ ) we were all blown away by the attention to detail. Basically, Klaus isn’t concerned about making mass market brakes, he just wants to make the very best and to hell with the cost.

It’s tiny things like making the rotors slightly fatter, increasing the amount of fluid stored in the reservoir by fractions of a millilitre, double cartridge bearings on the levers and so on. Marginal gains, but applied to every single aspect of the product.

They make every other brake on the market look like a kids toy, and if I was putting together a dream build with money no object, they’d be what I’d use without a shadow of a doubt

Read the stw article and quite fancied some of their brakes, til I saw prices 🙁

They’re made to be replaceable not rebuildable which is why I wouldn’t consider them for myself.

sram seem better than shim in this, rebuilt a guide lever with new seals after it went squiffy, presume callipers are fixable too. (binned a few useless leaky shim callipers tho)
Are the current hope brakes significantly more powerful than the old mono m4s? Always liked the modulation and longevity, but power was underwhelming (and lever pump)

“Anyone able to explain to my why Hope are so far off that level? If it’s all due to quality control is there a chance that some hopes might actually be lots better than others?“

I haven’t designed a set of brakes (although fluid mechanics and thermodynamics were two of my favourite subjects when studying mech eng so I’d certainly enjoy trying it) but I do design and manufacture high-end pro audio speakers.

When I said about working to tighter tolerances, what I mean is that you design a product which can only be successfully manufactured if these tolerances are consistently achieved. We
do this with loudspeakers - we’re really pushing the limits of optimisation, far beyond what generic manufacturers do. It increases the cost so much but then we keep the price within reach by selling direct. Imagine what the Trickstuff brakes would cost with retail mark-ups added!

If you think about a MTB brake, it’s not a complicated thing conceptually. You’ve got a lever, then a master cylinder and piston to push the fluid, then a caliper whose pistons are pushed by that fluid. You can’t add power to the system, only reduce losses. Any increase in force at the pads comes either from increased travel at your finger (mechanical plus hydraulic advantage) or from decreased losses.

You’re working with a feeble amount of force at the braking finger. Everything needs to be very light because it’s going on a bike. And you may be dealing with a huge amount of heat because this brake has to stop a big person overbraking on an alpine descent. So executing a bike brake is actually very difficult. But every loss you can remove will improve feel and power. Things like: Lever flex, lever pivot friction, master piston friction, caliper flex, brake piston friction. There’s loads more, especially when you look at changes in behaviour as the brakes heat up.

Some years ago when I was working on our first ground-up speaker designs I said to the chief engineer at our main OEM supplier (they make the drivers for us, we do the rest) that marginal gains were so important. I remember it was in the run up to London 2012 and there was loads of stuff about our cycling team talking about this and I realised that this was exactly what I’d been trying to do with these radical new models. All these few percent improvements added up, especially when using the gear near its limits because by moving the limits up (through improvements in thermal management, mechanical limits, compression, distortion etc) you could keep using the speaker within its more linear range.

But the things we did, you just couldn’t make it work in mass production or with normal mark-ups through the retail chain - or with the usual shareholder profitability goals or a load of big management salaries to pay!

but I do design and manufacture high-end pro audio speakers.

What’s your company called out of interest?

It’s tiny things like making the rotors slightly fatter

Interesting. I went for the slightly thicker, slightly heavier HD rotors rather than the lighter UL rotors. 2.0mm rather than the usual 1.8mm thick, which doesn’t sound much but is visibly beefier. Having used fancy 2 piece rotors for so long they don’t look all that special but I do think that the improved heat management contributes to the braking.

As you say, maybe a series of marginal gains but they do add up.

I don't suppose anyone has disasembled a maxima lever and caliper to see what the surface area of the piston in the lever is compared to the surface area of the pistons in the caliper?

I expect there will be a much larger difference between the two compared to a 'normal' brake, and that's probably all there is to it, no magic, just science.

In car brakes, the good ones, the caliper is machined out of a single block of metal to achieve higher stiffness (a mono block caliper) , but that doesn't look to be the approach taken by trickstuff on the maxima, it looks to be two halves bolted together, like most normal brakes.

Whereas the hope e4 (and presumably v4) is a mono block caliper. But clearly the hope brake is less powerful than the maxima

I am left questioning what they do so differently to the big brands and how they are able to make something so much better. Build quality? Materials? Design? Not sure, but whatever it is, it certainly works.

They're 850 Euros.. That helps them do a good job : )

I'm totally in favour of buy once, buy well and enjoy it for a long time though, and buying kit from brands that support those products well into the future - if they're good and within budget it's money spent wisely. More of that and less throw-away tat.

“What’s your company called out of interest?”

We’re Barefaced Audio. Awesome bass and guitar cabs. Amps currently in the R&D phase (we take forever to get new products done, been working on them for a few years...)

I don’t suppose anyone has the bleed block? And can measure it? It seems it doesn’t come with the bleed kit, much like the brake fluid, obvs.

As brilliant as the brakes are, the website, and trying to get all the bits you need for them, is utter dogshit.

You’d think a £1000 set of brakes would come with a bleed kit? Nope £25 extra.
You’d think that bleed kit would come with a bleed block? Nope, another £7. And brake fluid? Also nope, another £13.

Plus delivery, via courier, from Germany each time. Rant over.

In car brakes, the good ones, the caliper is machined out of a single block of metal to achieve higher stiffness (a mono block caliper) , but that doesn’t look to be the approach taken by trickstuff on the maxima, it looks to be two halves bolted together, like most normal brakes.

It probably varies/is marginal, Shimano claimed to have found that the 2-piece caliper were actually stiffer when they went back to it for the M9000 groupset. Probably something to do with Steel (bolts) being stiffer than the aluminium caliper and you need at least one anyway for the banjo connection so it may as well be structural.

As brilliant as the brakes are, the website, and trying to get all the bits you need for them, is utter dogshit.

Agreed. The website is junk. I'd order some brake pads but I can't tell them apart. No descriptions for the different numbers or compounds.

I've got no idea what some of their weirder looking products do.

I was also wondering what was included with the brakes but it sounds like nothing! So the brake in the one tiny picture, with zero description, is all you're getting anyway.

I was also wondering what was included with the brakes but it sounds like nothing! So the brake in the one tiny picture, with zero description, is all you’re getting anyway.

Yeah just the brake, no rotors, no mounts etc pads included though. Though it’s worth noting that if you do get through the website and place an order direct with them, you don’t have to pay for it until it’s ready to ship. In that time you get an account manager type person that emails you your order, and you can ask questions/add to the order etc. I did ask for everything needed to bleed the brakes after fitting to an internally routed frame, so they added a bleed kit, which I doesn’t include fluid, or a bleed block...

Are they mineral oil outta interest Tom

Yeah. They do sell their own version, bionol, but it’s mineral oil based and you can use mineral oil in lieu of bionol.

This is from the STW article above...

"In comparison, the Direttissima can run Bionol, mineral oil or DOT 5.1 fluid, which makes it attractive for riders who like to travel."

Looks like you can bung anything in, in a pinch.

Good to know guys for when funds allow eewings & Trickstuff kit

looks like I need to do my own dentistry from now on in order save