Need help with first carbon bike

I was mostly taking the piss
I was mostly taking the piss but BTBS is so entrenched in his views I considered it worth a poke.

What a pity this has turned

What a pity this has turned into (yet another) debate about discs vs calipers. There’s no law that says you have to buy a bike with discs (or calipers). MTBs… never looked back, CX bikes… never looked back, road bikes – in two years time this will have all gone away, the only people disadvantaged will be the rim makers as fewer rims will need replacing. If you are running carbon wheels this is a no-brainer – carbon rim brakes are never, ever going to be good/confidence inspiring in the wet.

enix [853 posts] 9 hours ago
enix [853 posts] 9 hours ago 0 likes
As has been said – you don’t need discs. I’ve used rim brakes for decades and they work fine for me and I do descend faster than most.

That’s because you can’t slow down on rim brakes 😀

Rim brakes work fine on alloy rims even mountain descent s. Add rain or wet conditions. Disc brakes work better

Er, yes brake type does

Er, yes brake type does affect thinking time.

If you come to expect to be able to brake at x distance away then you brake at that point or even later as a sporting cyclist (even as a commuter).

If you imagine that you can brake later because you have discs/better brakes then you shorten the thinking time to an event that may unexpectedly happen before you intend to brake – a car pulling out of a junction in front, a bend that comes up quicker than you expected or was tighter or an object that is in the road that wouldn’t be expected to be there.

So you’ve allowed yourself less time/distance than previously (one of the positives promoted is to be able to brake/reduce speed in a shorter distnce right) ergo your thinking time IS reduced because of what you percieve to be the braking distance based on the ‘improved’ braking.

Humans can only make decisions in a finite amount of time, that’s why you still see panic braking in the pro ranks and locked wheels/crashes. The disc brake itself comparatively does brake somewhat better in some very narrow set of circumstances but the grip of the tyres is overcome quite easily by rim brakes and as I’ve said people brake later with discs and thus won’t be any safer with them.  

alansmurphy wrote:

alansmurphy wrote:

What BTBS said, except the bit about safety, discs stop quicker in the wet and modulate better… Oh and get a helmet!

Braking in the wet is limited by tyre grip and the ability to think/react about when to brake (& having the time to do so) and having a decent set up. Discs shorten the thinking time as riders think they can brake later, discs aren’t safer and there’s no evidence to support that at all, they also go off when braking hard whilst descending, something the OP mentions he does and isn’t great at so could well be on the brakes more than some. Modulation, well that’s only ever a problem for those that don’t wish to learn how to brake properly, it’s no way to learn/get better!

Why a helmet, no-one, not even the pros need helmets, they’ve been proven in racing circles to bring about more deaths, more crashes and more injuries despite other improvements on course and general H&S/protocol improvements.

The OP admits to not being a great descender, over the last 2 decades the wearing of helmets have proven to be a massive problem for people on bikes who then ride beyond their own skill level and the ability of their bikes and come a cropper time and time and time again the helmet not making a jot of difference to the stats but an awful lot of helmet saved my life/saved me from serious injury stories. It certainly isn’t going to improve their riding skills nor their safety at any level, quite the opposite.

Why do people advocate helmets when all they do is endanger sporting cyclists even more than without!

Discs aren’t going to improve

Discs aren’t going to improve your descending skills nor make you any faster or safer.

As for using weight as a reason for needing discs, I’m a shade over 100kg at the age of 48 and 107kg at my biggest, never had issues descending fast and I’ve never ridden on anything but rim brakes since I started road riding in the mid 80s (I was 82kg when I was 16), never not had enough braking power, funnily enough nor have pro racers.

You’re relatively new to cycling, clearly you want to go faster/improve but have a really long hard think about your motives for going disc. I love the colour, not sure about the brand personally and havenever used them.

If you do consider a rim braked bike you could go for a discounted Giant TCR Advanced 2 (Available in blue), strip the components off and have £1700 to spend on whatever kit you want plus the money from flogging off the 105 drivetrain and stock wheels so close to £2k, you could buy a lot of kit for that.

Also the Giant Advanced Pro 1 disc is ball park to the Canyon in price and available in blue.

good luck whatever you buy.

“Skittish in crosswinds” ? An

“Skittish in crosswinds” ? An aero frame adds less than 1% of side area to the total area of a bike and cyclist. Except for those frames that are nearly completely filled in (triathlon beasts) my experience of riding aero frames (palmerston north, NZ… some years the windiest city on the planet) is that there is negligible difference between an aero frame and standard frame when compared sith the same wheels on.

The Bianchi looks fab, but the canyon is great value for money