Hey everyone welcome back to this week's Tuesday tip video where in this video we're gonna be talking about break spring tension
So obviously this video is not going to apply to everyone like if you don't have breaks
But if you do, I'm gonna be talking about what spring tension is why it matters
Why it sometimes doesn't matter?
and
How you can use it to improve your breaks so basically the main purpose to spring tension is to pull your breaks back?
After you pull them with your lever so your breaks go in spring tension is what brings them back out and it also
dictates how far the spacing is
For your brake pads as well if you have a straddle cable like with a straight cable set up like on this frame
or if you have single to double
Lower gyro cables you're gonna
Have a straddle cable spring tension is very important because that's how you make your brakes pull evenly and get the exact same
spacing on both sides of your rim
but if you have
Dual lower cables like I have you can see that
It's both cables independently back to the brakes and the spring tension
Doesn't have as much to do with the spacing of the brake pads because you can adjust it
Manually with these barrel adjusters, and it doesn't matter as much
to make your pads the same distance away from the rim basically spring tension really matters to make them pull back evenly and
For how hard it is to pull them with the brake lever
The tighter the springs the harder it is to pull but the faster
They come back the looser the Springs the easier
It is to pull but sometimes if they're too loose the brakes won't come all the way back and you'll end up
with a gap in your brake lever right here because
Your brakes aren't pulling it all the way shut
Again, so now that you know why it matters and doesn't matter when dual lower cables
Let's talk about why it does matter with a straight cable setup
Or a single to double lower cable setup using a straddle cable
So honestly up until just recently a year or two ago. I
did not realize that spring tension is how you
Change the spacing between your pads and your rim
I thought it was all up here
and I used these pins in the straddle cable setup in order to pull my
Cables tighter or looser in order to bring the pads the way that I thought they needed to go
But in reality the way, it works is
Say this brake pad is too far away from the rim, and the other side is too close
You need to be able to even them out a little bit, so what it means is that?
the
Spring tension on the opposite side the side over here is
Not as tight as the spring tension over here the spring is too tight over here
pulling it back further or more powerfully than
The other side so what you would do is you would either loosen this side up just a little bit or you?
tighten this side up and
That would in turn pull this side further away or let it go further away and bring this side a little bit closer
The way you determine if you want to loosen or tighten
Either side is based on
How you like your brakes to feel if you want them to pull harder, then you make this other side tighter
making both sides
Have a tighter pull in general and that makes it harder to pull if you like it a little bit easier
Then you loosen this side
More, or less evening out the spring tension and making them a little bit easier to pull and keeping them somewhat how they were
It doesn't matter a whole lot I've just found that if your Springs aren't tight enough your brake
Lever won't come all the way back and you have to tighten them anyways so I keep mine tight so now
We've talked about spring tension, and how it works. I'm gonna give you a little bit of a visual what I've done
Here is I've loosened this bolt so the spring is completely loose
And I've taken this cable out of the brake arm on that side so as you can see with no
Spring tension loosen completely up if you push in on the brake arm
There's nothing to bring it back. It. Just moves freely and
You basically have no brakes because there's nothing to bring it back away from the rim for you to pull it back again
So as you can see if I twist the brake spring cap away
From the rim it pulls the brake pad away from the rim, and then when I tighten this down here in a second
You'll see how when I push on it
It pulls the pad away from the rim and returns it to its original position every single time
So I'm going to tighten that down
And then we'll show you an example
Now that I've tightened the bolt you can see that when I push on the brake arm and push the brake pad towards the rim
and then let go
It automatically brings the brake arm back out and pulls the pad away from the rim
Just as it would is if we were pulling the brakes so pushing in is basically the same thing as pulling the brakes
and letting go is the same thing as letting go and you can see that the spring tension works as it should and
Pulls the brake pad away from the rim allowing us to pull the brakes again and again and again
I'm not sure if you guys can see it or not in the camera
But it's extremely hard and takes a lot of effort to push the pad in towards the rim right now
And that is because the spring tension is
Extremely high and the spring is extremely tight and what that means is if I set up both sides like this the brakes would be
Hard to pull if you like that setup, that's cool
If not you would want to loosen the spring up a little bit
And then get your pads evenly spaced away from the rim, and then test the feeling again
And you can play with your spring tension and get it to where you like it basically
I like it right in the middle to where it's still somewhat easy to pull
But the brakes come back right away whenever I let go of them
How easy the brake arms are to push towards the rim is a good indication of how your brakes are gonna feel if you push?
On it and it's extremely easy and they barely come back or they don't come back all the way obviously
you're gonna want to tighten it up because once it's all together the friction from the cables moving inside the
Housings is gonna. Make the brakes not pull back all the way and you're gonna have to do it again anyways so
realistically if it's hard to push in you're gonna want to loosen it a little bit, and if it's
extremely easy to push in and doesn't push back all the way you're gonna want to tighten it a little bit and
until you get experienced with brakes
And you know what you like
You kind of have to play with it and go back and forth sometimes working on breaks is tedious
But if you work on them, and you practice a little bit, and you dial them in whenever they're not feeling good
You're gonna get really good at it, right away
And it'll be extremely easy
And you'll know exactly
What you need to do to make your brakes feel exactly how you want them to feel so when it comes down to it brake
Spring tension is the main contributor for the way that brakes feel and pull because it dictates both how hard
They are to pull or easy
They are to pull as well as the spacing between the rim and the brake pads themselves if you have a brake pad
That's extremely close on one side and on the other side. It's extremely far away
The extremely close side of course is gonna hit first then you're gonna have to keep pulling until the extremely far away side hits
Which in my opinion makes for inconsistent brakes that don't feel or break as good as they could if they were aligned
evenly and with spring tension you can make sure that your pads are evenly spaced so that they hit at the exact same time and
This combined with your spring tension the way that you like it will make breaks
That you're not only happy with but work better than they would if they were set up to
Where one side was further away than the other or the springs?
tension made for breaks that pull
Differently than you liked in my opinion my brakes aren't good unless both pads are evenly spaced from the rim in
Hitting at the exact same time when I pull and without the adjustment of due lower gyro cables
The only way to make that happen is with spring tension, so I hope you guys learn something useful from this video
And we'll catch you in the next one. Thanks for watching guys. Goodbye