Brake Cleaning

My Red Roadie is now almost 2500 Km old. For the last few weeks I had been hearing a most annoying sound whenever I pulled the brakes. I have rim brakes on both my bikes. To get rid of the sound I had cleaned the rim a few times with alcohol. Things would improve for a day but again go back to square one. The other day I took the pads off one by one and cleaned the shoes thoroughly. They were pretty dirty, as you can see. Truth be told. They had never been cleaned since my purchase. Shiny metal deposits were visible as evident from the photograph. 

Rim brakes for road bikes are really simple. Just one nut and two washers on either side hold it to the post. First I tried cleaning with a fine grade emery paper kept for my tube repair. It failed to do a thorough job. I tried various methods. Rubbing them on the carborundum block meant for sharpening my knives was one. The final removal of the last bit of the shiny thing was achieved by using my heavy duty iron file. 

I do not know if I over did it but possibly a lot of rubber got rubbed off and it might not have been even uniformly sanded off. I am hoping that the rim will eventually rub the pads off to a uniform flat. The braking efficiency has improved a lot, no doubt.

There was still some noise coming from the rear brakes. It is not really a squeal. More like someone was dragging a large bamboo along a road. A rough vibrating kind of noise. I adjusted the pad to make the front touch a little before the back. This is called toeing. Things seem to have improved quite a bit. I will have to be alert. I also adjusted the torque in the rear brake's central bolt that holds the unit to the frame. It was so loose that one could turn it by hand.

Today I also ordered for two sets of Kool Stop brakes. The brakes I have as OE on my Red Roadie are integrated and brand less. That is, you cannot just replace the pads. You have to change the whole unit. So I invested in a good pair of brakes costing me close to Rs 3000 for the two sets. Ordered them off Happy Earth. I have Kool Stops on my LHT also, upgraded before the Darjeeling trip. 

I will change the existing ones on the Red Roadie when they stop working, which I suspect will be pretty soon. 

After the upgrade I will just need to change the pads and not the entire unit including the holder.