V Brakes - Mountain Bike Zen
V Brake Adjustment and Fitting
Your brakes are very important and ensuring they are properly adjusted is a very important skill to learn.
You want your brakes to engage when the lever is pressed in about a 3rd of the way. If they are too tight you will not have enough control and are likely to brake to hard, if they are too loose you will not be able to stop efficiently and this can be lead to calamity.
Most modern cable brakes will have an adjustable barrel screw in the lever so you can easily tighten and loosen the cable for minor adjustment. Turning this counter clockwise will tighten your cable, and clockwise will loosen it.
If you need to make a larger adjustment than the barrel adjuster will allow you will need to go directly to the v brake and pull your cable tighter. It is worth turning your barrel adjuster almost as far clockwise as it will go before doing this so that you have the full range available to tighten in future as cables will nearly always slacken a little over time. It is worthwhile leaving a little room to loosen for fine tuning. Loosen the cable bolt, pull the cable through and tighten back up. There are special tools available to help with this or an extra person can be useful if you can't manage it yourself.
Removal and refitting the brake mechanism is fairly straight forward too. Release the cable from the quick release mechanism to that the mechanism flops away from your wheel. Then remove the brake cable bolt and the post bolts and remove the mechanism. You can then replace the mechanism using the reverse procedure and adjust as above. Take care when refitting to ensure that the spring end is inserted into the pin hole on the post next to the bolt hole as this is what ensure the mechanism has spring action to keep it away from the wheel rim when not being used.
It is possible to have hydraulic v brakes. The main difference between these and cable brakes are that the mechanism which causes the brakes to tighten is operating by the compression of a hydraulic fluid. Hydraulic brakes are generally more efficient but take much more effort to maintain, replacing brake fluid which can be nasty stuff too, and if you get a leak on a ride that may be ride over, on the hop repairs to a hydraulic system are generally not possible.