Hey everyone and welcome back to another Tuesday tip where in this video I'm going to be showing you a little trick to help your
brake cables last longer
So this is a video that I've been wanting to make for quite a while now and I actually did make a video talking about
this tip almost two
Years ago but in that video I didn't show you guys how to set up the cables this way I just talked about the tip
and showed it
so
almost two years later I finally have a reason to replace this cable which is the cable that I showed in the
Original video because it's got a little bit of fraying here so I
finally have a reason to replace the cable and show you guys how to do this tip from the beginning to the end and
Hopefully this will help you to make your brake cables last as long as mine have for me so there's a couple points that I
want to get across Before we jump into showing you guys how to do this
One is that I'm going to be showing you this on a dual lower gyro cable setup and that doesn't mean that it won't work
with a straight cable or a single to double gyro cable setup and I'm sure that it probably would but I just
haven't tried it yet so I'm going to be showing you guys with what I have what I know and what I've used for the
Past couple of years so if you do want to try and set it up with one of those setups
I'm sure that you could follow along with this and tinker and modify things as you need to
Along the way before we get too far into this one let's show you guys exactly the cable setup that we're going to be talking
about in this video
Everything from the front to the London mod is pretty standard as far as do lower gyro cable setups and go
But where we have a difference is back here by the brake arm
Obviously you can see that the cable is doubled up here and we have a strange
bolt that some of you might not recognize but some of you might and
If we take the NARC out of the brake arm you'll see that the Nerf itself is
moving on the cable and that's because there's no
Set screw in this NAR p-- and what I figured with this is that if we brought the cable down and?
Looped it through an ARP with no set screw in we would be eliminating a pinch point
where the cables usually break in using an ARP and then in adding this bolt here
We would just be kind of pinching the cable together in a different way that as you can see has caused
zero fraying
Whatsoever with this cable and what this actually is if you didn't recognize it yet is
actually a bolt for a
Straddle cable and what it is is a bolt that has a hole through it we'll be showing that a little bit in more detail
later
but yeah so basically what we've got is just a cable that comes down through an ARP loops back and goes through the bolt and
it just tightens onto itself and allows for a lot less of a
pinch point on the cable and it just makes them last a lot longer which is why I'm
finally having to replace this cable after
Two years pretty much of riding it frayed the way that you see it here so with all of that out of the way
We can move on to actually showing you guys how to set up your cables this way
Whenever you're installing a new brake cable or setting up your brakes or doing anything in regards to your brake pad
spacing in relation to your rim there's two things that you need to make sure that you do
before you actually mess with the brake cables and get everything tightened down the first of those is to make sure that your wheel is
centered in your frame and
True if your wheel isn't centered or true you're going to have
Discrepancies and where your brake pads sit and you're going to set things up
In a way that's going to cause you to have to do a lot of adjusting in your barrel adjusters or
it's gonna make you have to start over and if you start over
after tightening a cable down you already
weakened it in one spot and you could cause it to not have as long of a lifespan as it could of if
You did all of these things
in the first place the second thing that you're gonna want to make sure that you do once your wheel is
Centered in the frame and true is to make sure that your brake pads are exactly where you're going to want them when
everything is done for all of the same reasons that we our wheel to be centered in the frame and
true it just
saves
Time and hassle in the future and is really the proper way to do things so that you don't have to worry about anything else
whenever we get to the brake cable side of things and
Speaking of the brake cable side of things let's give you guys a little bit closer of a look so that you can see all
of the details necessary
to get these brake cables set up the way that I have them here all right so I've got my wheel centered in the frame
And I guess the next step for me and not necessarily you is to get rid of my old
Cables so I'm going to be taking my park tool cable cutters here and just cutting off
the old cable and I'm cutting it as
Close to this bolt as I possibly can because I might be able to reuse this cable later
got the cable cut off so now we can take it out of
the housing and
here's our old cable toss that to the side and
Now, we've got our new cable which we need to put in and feed through our housing one thing that I want to make sure
That you guys do in setting this up is
Bottoming out your barrel adjusters
Anywhere that you have them where you're setting up the new cable because, we don't want to set this up
with the barrel adjusters all the way out and then eliminate any future adjustment that we might have
And if you guys notice this
weird-lookin cable end all the way up and my gyro if you take a look at my other video about how to set up a
single cable inner
dual upper gyro cable it will show you the other
Thing that I've done in setting up
My cables to make them last as long as possible I will leave an info card up here on the screen
yeah, so what we're doing now is just feeding our cable through what we've got I've got a
V break
Noodle here I was having a little bit of trouble
Feeding my cable through the V break noodle and I found that if you are having
trouble feeding a cable through one of these all you have to do is separate it then run the cable through the metal housing by
self first
Then once it's through the metal housing you can run the cable through the plastic part by itself
And then just put it back together the way that you took it apart?
And you should be all set that way and now we can run the cable through
the rest of the cable the way that we need to
At this point I've got my new cable in ER run
through
My existing housing if you don't have a housing yet on either side don't worry this is literally
No different than any other
dual lower gyro cable housing or any other brake cable housing for that matter
It's just cut to the length that goes from your gyro tab barrel adjuster to the barrel adjuster in your London mod
or if you want to use a V brake noodle
Setup all you need is the V
Brake noodle and the end of that goes into the barrel adjuster of your gyro tab
Then you set up a cable housing that goes from the end of the V
Brake noodle to the barrel adjuster on your London mod it's literally just setting up a length of cable housing
to fit the needs from one spot to the other spot going from point A to point B
so once you have all of that set up now we can start talking about the
special pieces that we need for the back end of the cables
So, we're back to the rear end of the bike by the brakes and we've got the pieces that we need to make this setup
Work from our old cables it's literally just an arp like what you'd get with a brake cable setup with the screw
taken out of it and then it's a straddle cable bolt that comes with a hole
Pre-drilled into it this drilled hole might not be big enough so you may have to get a drill bit and make it
bigger
this is something that you definitely want to be aware of and
Literally all you're doing is drilling this hole out and testing it until you can get the cable to loop through it twice so
now that you've got the
Straddle cable bolt and a NART without a screw in it we're ready to get this setup going in the rear end of the bike
All we have to do is take our cable and put it through the bolt
Then we put it through the NART?
Being careful with it to make sure that we don't fray the cable
Then we loop the cable back around and
bring it back through the hole on the bolt that we started with
and
things are pretty simple from here on out
what we're doing at this point is just
Adjusting where this knife sits
so that our breaks are where we need them to be
So obviously that is way too long and we need to bring everything forward quite a bit actually
What you want to avoid is bending the cable like that before you actually are ready to because
we want the only bend in this cable to be the one that is exactly where it needs to be
And what you want to keep in mind with this process is that you want to keep your brake pad at the right
spacing from the rim
Through the whole process and one thing that we can do at this point I know I said to tighten all of your barrel adjusters
in if you loosen the barrel adjuster
Just a little bit and then you get this set up to the point where your brake pad is on your rim
Then whenever everything is tightened up and finished you can loosen this barrel. Adjuster back up
Or tighten it back to the London mod and it will give your pad the clearance from the rim and it'll give you more
Solid breaks than you would have if this barrel adjuster was loosened out when everything was finished so at this point?
I'm checking my brake pads facing, which is still way too far away from the rim
What we're gonna do is?
pull this back apart
and
we just gotta pull more through
All right so we're checking the brake pad spacing again which looks good it's almost touching the rim right now
once you get your brake pad spacing right and you're doing this you want to try and keep this bolt as
close to the brake arm as possible to give the least amount of movement in the NARC that you can and
really this whole process is about
Tinkering and just messing with it until you get it the way that you need it to be that's
Pretty much what brakes are in general so once you get
everything where you need it to be
You're ready to tighten this bolt down and to tighten the nut on one of these it's a size
10 wrench I'm going to use a crescent wrench on the top and my metric wrench on the bottom
You want to make sure that you're tightening it because if you loosen it the nut will fall off and you'll probably get frustrated
At this point as long as your brake pad spacing is where you want it and everything looks good you can
Tighten this down all the way
All right so we've got that tightened down
Everything is good let's check the brake pad spacing once more it's exactly where it was before which is what we would expect
Now let's tighten our barrel adjuster down and
test our brakes out
Everything
seems to be in order so
Once you get all of this done and everything set up
You're going to want to keep in mind that your cable is going to stretch
That's why you want to have the least amount of adjustment
Pre adjusted while you're setting this up so that you have room to adjust for that brake cable stretch
So you've got all of this done and
Your brake cable stretches too much or you already had too much adjustment
now rather than having to loosen an RPR up and have a frayed cable that you're messing with and possibly have to buy a new
cable you can just loosen up this bolt here move things around, where you need it to be
tighten it back down and you're good there's no frame there's no nothing because it's just pinching the cable or
smooshing it smashing it whatever you want to call it like this
rather than pinching it like an RPR and if you looked at the other
Side during the video i've moved that side around plenty of times and it's been completely
Fine so we're just about done with this cable setup and all that's left to do really
Is to take care of the excess cable which I usually leave there and just put a cable end on
Or bend it so that it's out of the way just because I prefer to keep the excess in case I ever
Need it you can cut it off you can do whatever you want with it?
and
I think that's really gonna wrap this one up all you need to do is make sure that your barrel adjusters are tight and that
your brake pad spacing is where you want it which it should be if
We made sure that the rim was centered and true in the brake pads were where they were supposed to be in the very beginning
Which is why that was the first two steps so with that?
Hopefully you guys can get some use out of this tip and hopefully it
can make your brake cables last
Years and years the way that it has for mine
I want to thank you guys for being here and watching if you enjoyed the video or you do this setup
Post a picture of it on Instagram or send me a picture of it on Instagram because I always love seeing
whenever people
actually use and get use out of these
tips
I want to thank you guys again for being here and watching you're new here and you enjoyed the video share it with a friend
Hit the subscribe button down below I come out with BMX tips and tricks videos just like this one every
Tuesday with BMX news videos on fridays and other types of riding videos and streams throughout the week
Thank you for watching for the third time and we'll see you tomorrow for another
video goodbye
You