"Isn't modern bicycle technology absolutely wonderful?"😍

[bikeworkshop]

Do you want to see a picture of my 95 colnago master?
Unfortunately it doesn't illustrate the point of this thread...
unless you want:
Better brakes
Wider gear range
Smoother shifting
More grip
Stiffer frame

However, it looks about 1000x better than a flashy carbon piece.

Like comparing a 50s Italian matinee idol to a present-day teenage first division footballer

 

[wynne]

Do you want to see a picture of my 95 colnago master?
Unfortunately it doesn't illustrate the point of this thread...
unless you want:
Better brakes
Wider gear range
Smoother shifting
More grip
Stiffer frame

However, it looks about 1000x better than a flashy carbon piece.

Like comparing a 50s Italian matinee idol to a present-day teenage first division footballer

I've been riding a 2003 rim-braked road bike recently - a lot of times in the wet. I pick and choose the modern technology i like which includes modern wheels set up tubeless and 1x11 drivechain with clutch mech and NW chainring, carbon bar and seatpost.

I have disc brakes on lots of bikes but i don't particularly want them on my road bike. According to strava i hit 46.8mph on a twisty downhill section last sunday. I never have a problem with the rim brakes or felt like i lacked power or control. Nor did i feel my frame lacked for stiffness - and i'm a solid chunk.

I think we are too persuaded by marketing that we need all these "upgrades". I work as a wheelbuilder and i see huge numbers of our regular clients come in and say that they're not sure if it's worth getting another set of rim brake wheels since they feel they want a new bike because they "need" discs. It makes no odds to me what they want to buy - we build far more disc-brake wheels than rim-brake these days - but often after a bit of discussion they happily stick with rim-brakes on bikes that they may already have spent £10k+ on. It's a bit like those scenes in old films where a person becomes hysterical and someone slaps them in the face. Being regular customers we see them fairly often and they come back and say how they've fallen in love with their bike all over again with its new wheels. Maybe they just wanted to spend some money...

All that said, if i'm buying a new offroad frame it's going to be disc-brakes all the way. My favourite bike of all time is a rim-braked cross bike but i can't ride it offroad round here through the wetter months - it clags to a halt after a mile or so.

 

[clubby]

I have disc brakes on lots of bikes but i don't particularly want them on my road bike. According to strava i hit 46.8mph on a twisty downhill section last sunday. I never have a problem with the rim brakes or felt like i lacked power or control. Nor did i feel my frame lacked for stiffness - and i'm a solid chunk.

The kind of know what you mean but my experirnce is different. I’m 95kg and even on a stiff carbon road bike and aero wheels I could rub rim brakes. Power in the dry was more than enough but not consistent in the wet. There was that moment when the water scraped off and nothing much happened before they started to bite. Don’t have that with discs. Also found that disc wheels need trued less often. Not sure if it because there’s no heat cycling under heavy braking or more likely it just doesn’t matter if you are a few mm out of true with disc brakes.

My (only) road bike is a 10 year old Tange Prestige Charge Plug and is used mostly in winter. I’m only on my second set of pads on the front disc and still on the original rears. Never been bled either.

Agree that rim brakes look good though. My last rim build was full 11 speed Ultegra and the design and brake feel in the dry was amazing.

 

[MattiThundrrr]

Every one of us knows which is faster.
Every one of us knows which feels better.
Do you want a better experience, or better lap times?
You choose, I can't afford either

 

[brocklanders023]

I'll be honest, I get a better riding experience on my modern stuff. For me the only way retro beats modern is if I'm standing, looking at them and even then it's bike dependent. Other opinions are available.

 

[bikeworkshop]

A lot of collectable stuff doesn't work very well.
It was superceded.
Part of the development history.

But sometimes the riding experience includes a cloth cap or a historic route, or a stop for a drink or two.

 

[Cloverleaf]

A lot of collectable stuff doesn't work very well.
It was superceded.
Part of the development history.

But sometimes the riding experience includes a cloth cap or a historic route, or a stop for a drink or two.

Exactly. I've ridden hundreds, probably thousands of bikes. Most have been high end, and at the upper end of technology in both DH and enduro. And they're wonderful for what you can do with them and the lines you can take, suspension and brake technology really has transformed modern bikes, as have 1x setups to stop dropped chains, better metallurgy to make bits last longer (7000km on my SRAM X01 12spd cassette) etc etc. But like modern cars being appalling things that remove all sense of what's going on around you through more sound insulation, god awful electric PAS, overly assisted brakes and steering etc, it removes the tangible feel that makes something have soul, like my rim braked Trek or my dad's Cannondale. But this beigeness is obviously what the masses want, both those who hate driving and would welcome self driving cars, and those on bikes those who don't want to have to put any effort in to ride those more technical trails that allows them to inflate their egos to their mates and on social media, even though it's the bike doing 90% of the work.

That said for all the talk of soul, I don't want to ride or drive old stuff all the time. I love thrashing the old MG midget down country lanes, but that's been modified to work properly and go significantly faster, as has the Impreza. And yet the total mileage on them is just a few thousand miles a year. My daily which is auto and all those things I dislike is my regular car for a reason. Not least that it takes no tinkering while still being pretty quick. But it has no soul, it's heavy, and if you properly push on in it then the tyres and brakes take a pounding - even 370mm discs and 255mm tyres have their limit. My Megatower gets the absolute shit kicked out of it every time I ride it and yet the only failures I've had on it are some rear spokes. But at anything less than 9/10ths it just feels dead. But of course you couldn't have ridden anything that hard even ten or fifteen years ago without regular breakages, even stuff that was only designed to go down. There's a reason we all went through so much old stuff back in the day, and that's because it was by and large, crap.

 

[bikeworkshop]

Some of that old stuff was properly incredible though
We had a customer the other week had done over 50,000 miles on his xt m700 hub

 

[Cloverleaf]

Some of that old stuff was properly incredible though
We had a customer the other week had done over 50,000 miles on his xt m700 hub

That's true, the hubs on my dad's Cannondale that I've just restored have something like 12k miles on them and are still on the original bearings, and they still feel better than modern stuff. I think some stuff lasted longer but didn't work as well too; my M950/2 XTR mechs lasted forever (although I will die on the hill that says M737/9 ceramic bearing jockey wheels were the best), but the M9200 XTR 12spd functions better with the clutch and such. And because it controls the chain better chains, cassettes and chainrings last longer. The 8/9spd one feels like engineering perfection though in a way that's hard to quantify. Modern stuff has plastic and carbon in it and feels flimsy, even though I'm not sure I'd ever have got 5000km from a single mech with what I put them through these days. I seem to recall one season of an XTR mech on the DH bike and it was dead, and the main pivot was usually filled with sediment and grime.

Going back to the hubs, proper cup and cone bearings are amazing. Lower rolling resistance and if you look after them they last forever. Sadly most people now don't want to have to 'maintain' things in a preventative manner even if only nipping a bearing up, but would rather just swap a set of cartridges out every year.

 

[bikeworkshop]

Sadly most people now don't want to have to 'maintain' things

There has been a trend towards performance/ Light weight at the expense of longevity and user maintainability.

On the one hand, this is what riders (and the industry...)asked for, but on the other, it's why a lot of us are on here!

Same with almost everything.

I could've almost dismantled my series Land rover with a 9/16 spanner and a hammer.
Neither of these work on my electric car
(But it's around 4x as efficient and 4x as quick off the mark - and you can hear yourself think! Not always a good thing obvs)