So the first step to installing your front brakes is installing the brake lever
You can install it on the right or the left side depending upon which side you prefer
It really doesn't matter and it's going to be about the same setup and honestly
You can set up your brakes with your lever on either side and still switch it to the opposite side
Without any problem even after they're all the way set up
So get your brake lever about where you want it and snug it up
You don't have to tighten it super tight in case you want to move it later
But you just want to get it on to the bars for now. So the next step in installing
Your front brakes is installing the brake arms themselves
If you hold the brakes the way that they would be on the bike you can see that one has to go on before
The other this is the right side when you're looking at it from the front. So we're going to put the right side on
first then we're going to put the left side on and
You want to pay special attention when you're doing this to the direction that your Springs?
Rotate towards so if we look closer at the left side
Spring we can see that it is coiled in a clockwise direction
And if you have the Odyssey brake arms, it is a lighter colored metal than what goes on the right side
So if we look close at the right side spring you can see that with the Odyssey brakes
It is a darker color finish on the metal and it is coiled in the counterclockwise
Direction so you want to make sure that you get the direction of your Springs, right?
Whenever you're installing your brakes or you'll be taking them all the way apart
in order to switch the springs out and this is
Universal the left side looking at it from the front is going to have spring this coiled in a clockwise direction
And the right side looking at it from the front is always going to have a spring that is coiled in the counterclockwise
Direction so once you get both of your brake arms on you can snug up both of the bolts that hold the brake arms on
And then from here we will adjust our spring tension
So once we get it to the point where we need to start using an allen wrench
We can grab crescent wrench or whatever sized wrench goes on to
the cap for the brakes and we can
Twist the cap in the direction that tightens the spring. So with a
Clockwise coiled spring we're going to be tightening the cap in the clockwise direction along with it
And this is my friend Marcus's bike. So he wants some tighter brake pool. So I'm gonna make that happen
and
That should be good as far as that one goes. You can check it
That seems good so moving to the opposite side spring and tightening the cap here
We want to do the same thing as we did on the other side and tighten the cap
To the direction that the spring is coiled
so on this side being the right side looking at the brakes from the front we are going to tighten the cap in a
counterclockwise direction to
Tighten the spring and push the pad away from the rim and then we will tighten the bolt
And
To check your brake spring tension. You can just act like you're pulling your brakes
And push them together like this
So once you get your brake lever and brake arms installed on the bike now, it's time for your brake cable
So the first thing you're going to want to do here is take the end of the cable and run it through the fork
It's gonna hit the tire and not want to go through you just got pushed a little bit harder and it will work
run the cable all the way through up until the point where
You can get it into the brake lever
Put the cable end into the lever and
Then line up the barrel adjuster so you can get the cable through it as well
and
Seat the cable into the brake lever
and now you're ready to move down to the bottom and adjust the length of the cable and
Get everything else put together once we get the brake lever and the brake arms installed onto the bike
The next step is to cut the cable housing to the length that you want it to be
So what we're going to do is make sure that the upper part of the cable where it goes into the brake lever
has enough slack to your personal preference and
then we're going to wrap it as tight as we can around the fork and
While we're doing this we want to pay attention
To the slack in the upper part of the cable because oftentimes you will accidentally pull some through and we did that
so we're going to put more slack into the top and
We're going to basically just get a measuring point of where we want to cut this cable at
Keeping in mind that we're gonna cut it pretty much right at this side of the brake arm
And another thing to keep in mind here too as well is that you can put the cable on either
Side of the fork and it's going to be about the same so you can set it up on either side
Really doesn't matter. We just need to figure out where we're going to cut this cable and I think right about here looks good
So we're going to get our cutters and we're going to cut our housing
But before we do that
We need to make sure that we take the inner out of this housing because if we cut through this with the inner in it
We're going to cut through everything and then have to cut the housing that much shorter in order to compensate for
how much inner we cut off that we shouldn't have but once we figure out where we want to cut the cable we get our
Cable cutters with the shoutout to Park Tool and then we cut our housing
Very easily because these cable cutters are amazing
Once the housing is cut you're free to put the inner back into it and into the brake lever and from here if you're installing
New brake cable oftentimes they come with a cap
If not, you can get one for extremely cheap at your local bike shop
What you're gonna do here is just put the cap over your inner cable and slide it on
To the housing and you're going to take your cutters these ones have a pinch point on them
if not
You can just use the cutting part and just be very gentle and you just put some pressure on this housing
so that it will stay on the cable and
Now that that's tight
It should stay on and we have protection for the end of the cable
And then you drop your cable cutters
And now at this point we want to take as if tie and put it around our fork and around our cable housing
So that we can keep them as close as possible to the fork and out of the way of the tire
once the zip ties tight you can take cable cutters and cut the end slack off of it and
From here we can take the front brake hardware that usually comes with your front brakes
Depending upon which kind you get
These are Odyssey brakes Odyssey brakes always come with this hardware
The first thing you're going to put on is this barrel adjuster piece
Then after that, we're gonna put on our NAR p--
Once you have the front brake Hardware onto your cable
You can twist your cable around and get the barrel adjuster piece into the brake arm
This is going to take some force because of how much tension is on the cable
Then you can get your NART into the other brake arm and from here
We want to figure out where we should tighten the NAR Pat on the cable
and what we want to do is leave some space between the brake pads and
The rim so that you have some room for adjustment
realistically just get the pads about where you think they should be away from the rim and then tighten up your NAR p-- and
From here. It should hold itself together and your brakes should be working. All we'll have to do is cut off the excess and
readjust our springs if
Anything isn't working the way it should as far as how close your pads are
To the rim on either side
You have to adjust your Springs to get even distance on your brake pads because unlike a gyro
We don't have the ability to adjust the cables on
either end of the brake arm one thing to really pay attention to when you're doing this is that the housing itself is seated in
the barrel adjuster
because if it comes out like this and you tighten down your NAR p--
You're going to have a lot of slack whenever you put that housing into the barrel adjuster the way that it's supposed to be
So just make sure
Everything's snug you want to make sure up on the brake lever as well that the housing is seated and that the brake lever is
All the way returned so that there is no extra play in this cable or any excess that you don't account for
Before you tighten this NAR p-- because when you tighten this nut up, you're effectively
Hurting the cable by pinching it and giving it a place where it could break in the future
So we want to make sure that it's in the right place
so once we get our brake pads about where we want them to be away from the rim, we're gonna tighten our narc down and
From here we should be able to pull the lever a couple times and see where the brakes are at and
As you can see here
This arm is not
returning as quick as this arm is
so what that means is that this spring isn't tight enough and another sign of that is that this brake pad is
closer to the rim than this brake pad is so we need to adjust our springs and like I said
I have an entire video about adjusting your spring tension
It's exactly the same in the front and in the back
It's just the effects that the spring tension has are different in the front than they are in the back
We can just loosen this brake spring up or this cap with the Allen
It's going to completely return but we're gonna tighten it up
And we're gonna give it a little bit more tension this time
And we're going to tighten it and
Check our brakes and as you can see, they're returning a little more evenly now
But they're not completely perfect and with this left side because the spring is coiled
Clockwise and we are tightening the bolt clockwise along with the cap and everything is going clockwise
We can just tighten the cap down and it won't affect our bolt
So now as you can see the brakes are pulling a lot more evenly you can go just a little bit further
and now the tension is
extremely even and
Really? All we have to do from here is adjust our cable slack and get it exactly where we want it once the spring tension
Is the way we want it our brakes feel the way we want them to and the brake pad
Spacing is even according to spring tension
There's two places for adjustment on your front brakes where you can take out some of the pole that you have
First place is on this barrel adjuster here
And the second place is on the brake levers barrel adjuster this one. We just pull the cable out a little bit
loosen our barrel adjuster
then tighten the nut against the piece that's in the brake arm and
Then tighten the entire thing down so that it doesn't tighten itself and from here
We can feel the effect that it has on the brakes it
Looks like we need just a little bit more
So we'll probably have to move up to the brake lever and take out some of the excess there as well
So up on the lever. It's the exact same as taking out the excess on any other brake setup
we just loosen our barrel adjuster and
Then tighten the nut down
to the brake lever and
Then tighten the barrel adjuster and the nut at the same time into the brake lever
snugging everything up and now you can see there is much less play on our brakes and they engage
Almost instantly. So once everything is all set up and done with your front brakes
All that is left is to cut the excess off of your cable
This is another thing that is up to personal preference. And this is Marcus's bike
He wanted it to be about an inch from the brake arm. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna cut it off and then
Most break cables come with a cable end like this one
if not, like I said before really cheap at your local bike shop slide it on there and
Use some cable cutters to pinch it on to the cable
So that it doesn't fray
you're gonna pinch it tight as we can and
That is it for setting up and installing your front brakes onto your BMX bike