Yesterday I raced in the second XC race of the season, and the second race in the rain and mud.  While I suppose racing in the mud is “fun” it has been taking a toll on the bike.  The cables are less than a month old, but I’m fairly certain they are shot.  The chain has definitely looked and felt better, and the chainring is certainly showing its age.

However, the components that have been showing the most wear are the brakes.  Up until these two races the BB7s have performed flawlessly and required very little attention.  Prior to the first race I put new Avid sintered pads in the front, and checked that the rear (also sintered) pads were in good shape.  In the first race the front brake needed a couple of adjustments for worn pads, but nothing extreme considering the race was three hours long.  In this last one-and-a-half-hour race both brakes needed adjusting more than six times.  After that I stopped counting.  The results speak for themselves:

I’m not suggesting that other brakes wouldn’t have faired any better, but self-adjusting brakes (found on just about every hydraulic brake available) would have worked far better in these conditions.  Anyway, I’m looking forward to a dry summer.

Until then, here are some more of my photos from the comparatively-dry morning classes at the Prospect Hill XC Race:

Tags: AMTBC, BB7, brake pads, mud, Prospect Hill

This story was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 10:03 and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.