Ironman: Close to braking point

I’ll try to keep this brief but I have to whinge a bit. My front brake is rubbish. I train long hours/distances on the mountain bike, and the F brake is obviously pretty bloody essential. There may be one or two people out there (assuming that anyone is reading at all) mistakenly thinking that the front brake is less important than the back brake, in which case I shout poppycock*! When you decelerate, the weight moves towards the front of the vehicle. More weight on the front wheel = more grip for the front tyre = use the front brake more. Valentino Rossi (or any other racing motorcyclist) will probably not use his R brake from start to finish of a race, because when you brake that hard the R wheel has so little grip that it would skid immediately. Which makes it all the more eye-popping when our charismatic security guard turns up on an off-road Kawasaki with no F brake at all! All well and good for doing a few laps of our front garden (which obviously I had to try) but I wouldn't fancy it on the highway. This is also a massive issue on a mountain bike, since you do not have the luxury of both tyres being planted on firm and consistent tarmac, but rather you frequently have one or more tyres squelching and slurring through unidentifiable poppycock (or more correctly pappe kak*, this being the Dutch term for “soft shit”). It is possible of course, to stand the bike up on its front end, and from there even to fall over the front onto the track, by excessively hard and sudden use of the F brake, but you’d have to be a complete clutz and a dullard to manage that. I’ve only ever seen one person do it, and I won’t name him here. (A clue you say? Oh, alright then, Aberdeen, religious fundamentalist, annoying accent…)

But, since I want to be able to brake as hard as I like, I do want my F brake to have sufficient power to stand the bike up on its front end, should I so choose. Indeed, with a little bit of practice one can learn to perform an “endo-stop” or even an endo-turn in relative safety, and once learnt it can actually be useful. I did it once in T2 of a triathlon and the marshal screamed in fear; great fun. And the Hope MonoMini gracing the front end of Rocky (the mountain bike) will simply not do the business. Now I know a tiny bit about maintaining bikes, having built about 6 from the frame outwards. I even make my own wheels, so basically you can’t do much more without a welder. I set up my R brake, exactly the same make and model as the F and it works fine. I set up Suzanne’s F brake (Hayes XC9, fantastic piece of kit with a carbon lever, prrrr) and it is superb. But I have worked on this for some time, and spent sums of cash I don’t want to add up:

• Bled and re-filled the oil reservoir four times (twice by me, twice by a pro’ just in case).
• Replaced the hoses with new Goodridge jobs. This kit is canine reproductive tackle, they use the same brand in F1 racing, allegedly.
• Cleaned the rotor in water, fairy liquid, vodka and any other solvent I could think of.
• Replaced the rotor with a brand new one.
• Adjusted the reach of the lever (which was a revelation, didn’t even know you could do that with an open reservoir system?).
• Cleaned the pads in all the above solvents, and then baked them at 180C to burn off any trace of remaining dirt.
• Replaced the pads with after-market upgrades from EBC.
• Replaced the entire chuffing calliper and lever.

And while this was all infinitely preferable to going to the office, none of it has made the slightest difference to my ability to convert kinetic energy into heat (i.e. to brake, but you knew that? Good). So please, answers on an e-card, what the blazes is going wrong with my brake? I am fast running out of ideas, and becoming tempted to blame bad karma.