With about 20 minutes and $150, You can have brakes that work as well as these too.
Before we install the new brakes, it's important to understand
how the stock brakes on the Himiway and many other ebikes actually work,
so you know what an upgrade does. Most bikes have a brake on the left side for the front wheel,
and then you have a brake lever on the right side for the rear wheel.
And sometimes they have some other little things integrated like a bell,
but the most important thing that they have for electric bikes, that's
different from a standard bicycle is a brake cutoff switch or a motor cutoff switch. So
that means when you pull one or the other brake, there's actually a mechanical switch inside here.
Some of them are a physical switch that you can actually hear or feel a click.
Some of them are a magnetic type switch, so you can't hear anything happening,
but they are turning either on or off. And what that's doing is sending a
signal to the motor controller, which is mounted somewhere else on the bike,
telling it to turn the motor off, so you can't use the brakes and the motor at the same time.
It's a safety feature and it's even a law in some states that it has to be
installed. So most electric bikes are going to have that. All of the bikes I
sell have it. It’s kind of unusual to have a bike that doesn't. The problem that most
people will face when they want to upgrade their stock mechanical disc brakes to a hydraulic brake.
Is that most standard brakes don't have the brake switches installed.
If they do, sometimes it's complicated to change the levers out because you have to pull the grips
off. You have to pull the throttle off. On this bike you'd lose the bell that you have installed
on there. Basically, it can get a little bit complicated finding brakes that will work with
the electronic part of the bike, and also just the other mechanical parts of getting it installed.
But there is a much easier way, and that is to just replace the caliper. If we follow the steel
cable from the lever, we go all the way down to where the rotor is, our brake rotor. And this
is the caliper. Now for these stock brakes, you have a brake pad on each side of this
disc, one side moves and one side doesn't. When you squeeze it, this lever up here,
you can actually see a little bit of movement down here that's moving, what I call, The outer pad.
The outer pad moves in towards the caliper. The inner pad, however,
doesn't move at all. So you're actually warping the rotor ever so slightly for
both pads to sandwich the rotor and bring the bike to a stop. Now, this isn't a bad
way to brake. It actually works very well and it's a very cheap brake system to produce.
And that's why you see it on many affordable budget-priced bikes like the Himiway. However,
the biggest challenge that I see for braking and stopping
is not that the brakes couldn't do a good enough job, it's that
they're not adjusted properly. So with proper adjustment, these brakes can work very well.
The problem is, you have to adjust them all a lot, especially if you're going at higher speeds,
you're carrying a lot of weight or you're just going down a lot of steep hills. You're going to
wear the pads down faster and you're going to need to adjust both the inner and outer pads,
which wear unevenly and the combination of those things makes it, so the bike doesn't
stop as well as you'd like, this is a mechanically actuated, hydraulic caliper.
So normally with a hydraulic brake system, you'd be replacing the levers, the hoses
all the way down to the front wheel, to the back wheel. And for a hydraulic
caliper, we don't need to do that. We can actually leave the stock brake lines,
the stock brake levers, all of those can stay in place. Just replacing this one piece.
Now you might be wondering how is this any better? And this has fluid inside. So it's more like
power brakes in a modern car. It's kind of a hybrid between a mechanical and a hydraulic
brake. But if you look closely at the pads that are inside the brake, they actually both move
in evenly. So the pads wherein evenly from each side, they require far less adjustment and they
have a slightly better clamping pressure on the rotor than you would from a mechanical brake.
Now, when it comes time to adjust these, instead of trying to adjust each pad individually and
get them lined up again, it's really simple. There's literally a single knob on the back
that you can turn. And that brings both pads in closer. So not only do they work better,
but they're much, much easier to adjust and they need adjusting less frequently.
Now that you know how these differ from the stock brakes. Let's go ahead and put them
on. And the cool thing is you only need two tools realistically, to do this on most ebikes you
need a five-millimeter allen wrench or hex head wrench. You need a cable cutter or crimper. First,
I'm going to pull the caliper off and we're just going to remove the two bolts on the top.
And although I'm doing this on the Himiway bike, this process is basically the same
or almost all ebikes, that have mechanical brakes.
I have the two brakes off the caliper will come off of the bike. And then there is one other bolt.
This may look different in style, depending on what bike you have, but we just need to loosen
this enough so that this cable can be released. And now that the caliper is completely loose,
there's only one thing holding it on that is the cable crimp right at the end here.
So you need to pop that crimp off. If you have some pliers, you might be able to pull it off.
Sometimes they're loose enough. You can grab it with your fingers or you may be able to use the
caliper itself to pop that off. If that doesn't come off easily, you can always be careful.
Don't cut too much of this cable off just to trim the very end off with your cable cutters.
The new brakes come with brake adaptors, these may not be necessary,
but they're included with every set just in case you need something different than
what's already on your bike. But in most cases, either the brake adapter, the bolts,
or the washers that are already on the bike are ideally adjusted and set up.
So for this particular bike, the caliper was on here. There were no washers. There were
just simply two bolts holding it on. So we're basically going to do the same thing with the
new caliper we're using the stock brake adapter.
We're going to slide the caliper in place and re-install the two bolts.
Before you tighten these two bolts down. You'll notice that there is some side to
side play with the caliper and that's so you can get it adjusted centered
over the disc brake. Now there are a few different ways you can get this
lined up. There's a fancy little tool you can buy that puts a shim on each side.
That's great, but you don't really need it. The other thing you can do is squeeze down on the
pads. Now, if we had the cable hooked up, you could actually have somebody help you out and
squeeze the brake lever. If you don't have that, you can squeeze this right here, that squeezes
the pads nice and tight on the rotor, and then as you're holding it, Tighten those two bolts down.
Or the final option is if you've got the good enough eyesight to do it,
you can actually just look and see if you have a little gap between the rotor and the pads,
and just line everything up by sight and tighten those two down. But once it's tightened down
in place, you can just spin the wheel and make sure that it's not rubbing on the disc.
And if you loosen those just enough to adjust, get it centered, tighten them back down until it's
right now that the caliper is on. You can go ahead and reconnect the brake line. We're going to feed
it through the little islet here. If your cable is slightly frayed and you have a hard time
getting it through anywhere, you can always wrap a little piece of tape around it to make it easier.
Make sure that the end of the cable is called a cable ferrule and is seated down into the
brake caliper spot, whatever you call that. You'll see that there's a small groove back
here where the cable sits. Get that in position. Just put a little bit of tension on this right
here and tighten that backup. Now, if you need to make a big adjustment, you can use this bolt,
just loosen it enough for the cable to move and you can move it forwards or backwards.
And if you need to make a fine-tuning adjustment, such as when the pads wear down,
remember to use the little knurled knob right here to make the brakes tighter
or looser. Now the rear brake is almost done. The only thing left is to put the
cable crimp back on. Whenever I shipped these brakes out, we also include new cable crimps
for you and a tool like this from Park Tool is the best thing to crimp these down properly.
If you don't have one of these, which many of you may not, then you can always use some needle nose
pliers or something similar. You just want to make sure this is crimped down, tight on the cable,
and it's not going to come off. We're basically going to repeat the process for the front brake.
You may notice that you have a different style of adapter on
your front for this one because the bolts go straight in. When you pull the caliper off,
the adapter has to come off as well. Sometimes there's a little arrow that says up. So make
note of that, when you put it back on, some will have an adapter like this, that goes on the fork.
Some won't have an adapter at all. And the caliper mounts straight to the fork posts.
And then sometimes you have an adapter like this. Where it's bolted on to the
fork from the side. And then the caliper is mounted on this way. The best thing
to do often is to make note of how things were installed before you take them off.
Or just take a picture that way you can always refer back to it. If you need to.
Do a few nice hard stops like that to break in your new pads. We have just upgraded our brakes to
a hydraulic caliper. So the stopping power is going to be much better, much improved
adjustments are going to be far and few in between. And when we do need to adjust them,
they're going to be really easy to do. And if you enjoyed this video,
make sure to go check out this one on how to install an adjustable stem that
allows you to get your handlebars into a more upright and comfortable position.