Drum Brakes

[velomaniac]

Has any body got any actual experience of drum brakes on a mountain bike and if so what did you think ?

I know many dismiss drums without having experience of them and I would appreciate not going down the 'I've heard from some one who knows some one who says drum brakes are c**p !' route.

I have seen a Norwegian retro mtb with 'Gigant' drum brakes and so inspired I thought I'd fit a Sturmey Archer set I possess to one of my bikes.

Thanks for any help or opinions you may wish to give.

Cheers

 

[bikeperv]

Hi, Never used them on a MTB but I use them regularly on our Freight bikes. Our company uses 8 Freight Cargo bikes made by Mike Burrows to transport heavy AV equipment around London. Heres a nice picture of our mobile sound system with Bass Cannon trailer that I tow on Critical Mass rides
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/critical ... annon.jpeg

Anyway, these bikes use Hub brakes as the frame and forks are mono blade so can't use V or Canti brakes. If they can stop a bike with a 150kg load + rider I'm sure they can stop a light MTB!

 

[toons]

I didn’t use them but we went riding with a chap (is that different to a friend of a friend route? if not sorry) called Frank Hutton (he used to run Northumbrian bikes in Morpeth, it’s now shut) he had some.

In the wet conditions (Kidland Forest) he really rated them over cantilever brakes; this was before magura brakes had been released, but he did complain about the weight.

He’d built a custom frame, painted it fluorescent yellow with black spray can dots, it had colour coded rims, looked the nuts at the time.

 

[No Longer Registered]

I've delt with many of the Sturmey Archer ones and later sach ones. They were fitted to Royal Mail bikes I worked on many moons ago evealuating how components lasted. The stock pad componds are a bit hard, but if you fit softer compund pads, change the cam ratio inside of them and/or longer lever arm they actually become pretty dam effective. They could stop a 11 stone rider, 40lb bike loaded up with 20kg of mail pretty quickly.
On the downside, they are heavy compared to the new breed of disc brakes.

 

[FairfaxPat]

BITD I had several Klunkers with drum brakes, with varying degrees of success. Sturmey Archer made a few different drum brakes, and I had one on the front of an early Procruiser in the mid 80's-it worked well for it's day, but leaves a lot to be desired compared to V-brakes or discs. I also used a Phil Wood band brake on the rear of a tandem and it worked quite well. Another drum brake we used was the Normandie drum setup for the front. The critical thing we found around my neighborhood (Marin County) was the heat buildup and consequent fading brake power on long, steep descents. The other downsides were the extra weight, and the complexity when it came time to change the brake shoes.

 

[Repack Rider]

I had lots of drum brakes in the '70s. The only rear drums available were made for tandems, such as the French Atom tandem drums. Phil Wood made a jewel-like tandem drum that was too beautiful and unprotected from dirt to use off-road.

There were a lot more choices in front drums for klunkers. Now and then you could find a Union, which for my money was the best, or an old Schwinn drum, but it's almost sacrilege to use one up on an off-roader.

A popular source was a peculiar style of Schwinn 20" bike, the "Krate" series, that was banned for safety reasons, but had a front drum. Of course, it had only 28 holes, so you drilled four extras on each side to lace your 36-spoke rim. We destroyed lots of these now highly collectible bikes just for the brakes, because the brakes were actually pretty good, and had aluminum shells that cooled better than the steel brakes.

Easiest to come by in the '70s were Worksman front drums, made for industrial tricycles. They were ugly and cheap and weren't really made for intense downhill though. You wouldn't use one for a retro build.

Sturmey-Archer made two versions of front drums, a 70 mm and a 90 mm. They were beautiful, probably the most attractive of their ilk.

Obviously the 90 mm had more braking surface, but it had a unique drawback. In order to have a low flange on the side away from the drum, the spokes were not threaded through but hooked from the outside through a keyhole shaped hole, each of which held two spoke heads. If you flexed your wheel, you could pop all the spokes out of one side!

On a big ride in 1980 a rider did exactly that, and because I had built a lot of those wheels, I sat down on the trail and built his again.

Drum brakes have the same advantage that discs have, which is that you can trash your rim without affecting the braking, and I have certainly done that. Under sustained load they fade though. They're a lot heavier than discs, and if you are after performance, go with discs.