Rim brakes are back! Or have they always been just lurking in the background?
Alex and Hank discuss why rim brakes have suddenly become cool again, but also why they can be quite practical even in a world of disc brakes.
Alex and Hank further discuss how there seems to be a possibility of a security threat with wireless shifters too, which is quite scary!
00:00 Welcome to the GCN Tech Show – headlines
00:34 Rim brake love!
07:21 Hot and spicy tech
07:33 GCN x Camelbak Limited Edition bottles
08:01 Wireless shifting threat
14:09 Tour de France Avec Zwift bikes
17:28 #AD Silca chain waxing endurance chip and speed chip
19:27 Precision Fuel & Hydration strategy stickers
20:29 C-Bear bling pulley wheels
22:13 Comments of the week
26:44 Bike vault
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What are your thoughts on rim brakes and the wireless shifting threat? 🔐
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43 Comments
What are your thoughts on rim brakes and the wireless shifting threat? 🔐
Cable-actuated disc brakes – best of both worlds?
I watch both the GCN and GCN Tech shows and absolutely love them!! However, I've noticed there's often quite a bit of overlap in the topics. It would be great to see them explore more varied subjects to keep things fresh and distinct between the two.
28:24 first guy with the felt bike needs to wipe the sweat off the camera when getting the phone out the back pocket, picture looks greasy as fook
did all my racing career with rimbrakes and downtubeshifters. back then aswell we had xc race bikes and cross bikes with cantilevers and v brakes. only once i had a mid level mtb with disc brakes for commuting, luckily it got stolen.
I only ever ride my road bike in the dry. Rim brakes with good quality pads are more than good enough for my needs. I'm pretty sure this goes for the vast majority of recreational cyclists.
Is there a chain waxing chip designed for an indoor setup?
I am bike mechanic and like everyone moved to disc brakes. However in the last year I have gone back and have just completed my fifth top spec rim brake bike in my collection. So happy everyone is selling their top spec rim bikes for me to snap up. I am definitely back in love with rim brakes.
Disk for motor bikes or at best DH. never, be it wet or dry or mud evwr were my rim brakes not capable of coping with my stoping needs
Would like to see a video on casual road/city/gravel bike that is budjet friendly (so not too cheap and not too expensive) and the smart ways to save money while buying it and yousing it
Will we ever see anti-lock brakes on a bike? How about regenerative breaking on an E-Bike?
Discs also allow for wider tires, carbon rims are less expensive to manufacture due to no brake track and carbon wheels don’t wear out as quickly for the same reason.
It would seem an easy fix to get them to only send a code to connect via Bluetooth when in pairing mode. No code no connect. I would rather have to do that every time than leave them open to hack.
Your rims shouldn't be your rotors? No vehicle stops from grabbing the rims? Any problems with your rims completely effects your braking ! Your heating your tires, your handling is all over the place! We are motorcycles ! With a different power source!
Welcome to the club of high performance.
wireless shifting hacking story is the most recent (of many) nonstories presented on GCN
If I couldn't have hydraulic disc brakes, I'd rather have cable operated disc brakes than rim brakes.
I love my Ritchey Logic with rim brakes. It's just fun and you can't hack it!
Sounds like Mark cavendish got hacked last year when he was going for the record sprint
Why do people keep saying disc brake bikes are more difficult to maintain? They are actually pretty simple. They are different and so there is a learning curve. But, they are not hard at all. And every time I hear anyone say they are traditional or "old school", I remember when cassettes were expanding beyond the 5 speed cassettes. "Eddie won five on five." If Eddie has 7 or 9 (or 12 like we have now), he would have used them. If people are so traditional, they can go back to downtube shifters and five speed cassettes along with the really crappy rim brakes from the era. I have no desire to go back to them.
over 30,000 miles on my original rim brakes (replaced the pads, obviously). Still going… well… stopping fine. 1,300 miles on 105 hydraulics, seal blew and had to completely replace the caliper. Rim brakes for the win all over the place!
I suspect the biggest risk is hacking by the same people who throw thumbtackson the corse and glue themselves to the pavement to delay a race at a critical point.
Just love the energy and passion that Hank brings to any video he is in, keep up the great work!
Too bad you couldn't get a pic of Justine Ghekiere's polka dot bike from stage 8. Way better than Pieterse's, with those dramatic oversize dots!
If I’m spending my own money on expensive bike equipment I’m buying what makes me happy. I really don’t care if someone else likes it.
"aerodynamic abilities" of disc brakes?
I used LTWOO R2 brifters with 105 rim brake shoes – and they were plenty sufficient in absolute downpour down the mountain descents in Japan.
I do get the love for the disk brakes if you're competitive cyclist, ride lots of gravel or want carbon wheels. But many of us cycle for fitness, and don't care that much about ultimate efficiency. Clean chain, clean aluminium rim, quality tyres, TPU tubes, good brake shoes – that's all I care for. I want aero – I get lower.
Cheap, efficient, easy to maintain – I don't see reason to go disks anytime soon.
All the Dura-ace cranksets that Alex has in his spares box and he can't even put one on his wife's new bike!
GCN are not reading the room on chain waxing. Not everyone can wash their bikes outside. I switched to chain waxing because of apartment living, makes life so much easier and cleaner. Couldn't care less about the watts.
Once again, false claims. Stopping power for disc brakes mean nothing if they have the same size tire as what most rim breaks are. Extremely misleading and I’m sure you’ve been told these arguments and points to harp on by the industry. Everyone knows that stopping power for rim breaks is insane and will have you sliding out easily. It’s about the contact of tire on ground this brakes allow a wider tire so talk about that. It’s not the breaking power you shills
Alex why are you so obsessed with rim brakes, I have a Bianchi with rim brakes weighing 6.9 kg and I wouldn’t as an amateur cyclist be cycling 60 km hour in the wet, Tell you what guys I challenged you to an alpine descent on your disc brakes and me on my rim brake bike.
Hed Ardenne Black stop as well as disk
Talking about hacking wireless shifters, does anyone remember Mavic's mektronic? I remember hearing stories of two riders with the same groupset but it wasn't shielded well, so the radio signal from the first person's shifter would reach the second persons derailleur and it would shift the wrong one!
But we can all agree, the ultimate way to forever block the option of hacking gears is going back to mechanical
Im currently using rim brakes on my Monaco after a upgrade to 105sc dual-pivots,I've just installed Shimano cartridge brake shoes and the stopping power is great.💯👌🏻✌🏻🚴♂️
Of course WIRED would write an article showing the vulnerabilities of WIRELESS shifters 😂
in 2023 Cavendish had a problem of the rear d shifting from smallest sprocket to the next, thats why he didnt win his 35th in 2023. Maybe someone sabotaged him?
I like disk & rim, but as Hank pointed out rim in a crit……..omg, they both have their pro's & con's
look it's like this….not just saying this but the last bike in bike vault is bloody nice
Getting fed up of seeing canyon frames picked out everywhere publicity affords. There is nothing special about them, nothing. Oh, young man tone the voice down, the microphones are working fine and turn that hat around it hasn't been cool for 20 years. Then keep hold of the brim, firm grip now, elbow up and toss the thing into the bin – seriously let it go.
Rim brakes have always stopped me. I am not going to miss a bike rice because I failed to charge a battery. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So I’m a rim brake and mechanical shifters vote.
I always imagine that people who prefer rim brakes over disc brakes also prefer drum brakes on their cars as well xD
The disc maintenance issue is only a learning curve issue. Once you know how to do it it's not really harder. Very few are going to buy a bike that expensive & at a disadvantage to many bikes that are much cheaper!
I don't understand what the benefit of wireless shifting is for anyone in a bike race. It's heavier and can easily be hacked by anyone with $400 device. I mean thieves can unlock car doors by listening to key fobs on the hook behind people's front doors. Are we really waiting for some dude with malicious intent at the finish line of a bunch sprint to activate one of these devices to cause chaos and carnage when a simple wire defeats them?
I think both disc and rim brakes work especially the last generation of Shimano dual pivot rim brakes. They really were a huge improvement over anything else I used. I genuinely don't have a preference, as weird as that is to say, but the one thing I hate is internal cabling. It looks cool, no doubt, but it's so much harder to work on. I love being able to swap cables out and I really prefer the feel of mechanical shifting (and it's way cheaper). This is my biggest reason for using older frame sets, more so than the disc vs rim brake thing. A manufacturer needs to make a decent specced bike with external cabling, the whole rim vs disc thing is less important than that in my opinion.
Disc brakes are the only tech upgrade that made me swear like a saylor and loose every motivation to ride my bike. Went back to rim brakes and my disc bike is now only used on the rolers.