Tweaks
Tweaking the GT a bit – higher trail disc fork, disc brakes to go with the fork (the front is the only functional one right now; I need to fabricate and braze mounts for the rear brake), and Lauterwasser bars to hold the existing brake levers (they need to be recased in drop levers, but until I do that a pair of mustacheish bars will keep them from flopping around and getting tangled up in the wheels.)
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The curse of 650b is that once you get away from the 27.5" mtb crowd it’s pretty much all historical reenactment, and those people are willing to pay a premium for stuff that looks old. So basically every rim-brakeable rim out there is hideously expensive – admittedly most of the disc brake rims available are also hideously expensive, but not all of them are.
So on this wheelset I spent $75 for the hydraulic brakes (instead of $60 for rim brakes + kool-stop pads), but that’s made up for by spending $25/rim instead of $60/rim. And that puts the old wheelset into storage as spares for the Trek, the Murray Baja Experience!, and Russell’s Kogswell. It’s worth the experiment!
You also get to keep the rims for longer. :)
Completely worth the experiment; despite the aesthetic issues, disc is better brakes-as-brakes.
I’m not sure; rim brakes are just very large disc brakes :-) But, yes, it is nice that the rims become less of a wear item given that I burn through a rear rim in about 15k miles.
Rim-brake-as-very-large-disc is a wonderful rhetorical response. :)
Still, I’m pretty sure the engineering is easier when the brake rotor doesn’t have to support a tire….
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Nice to see you trying disc!
I have zero experience with hydralic; hope it behaves itself. (I will recommend the bejesus out of Avid BB-7s; saved my life at least twice.)