Brakes (Amended on 06/08/08)

Phatatude asked me about the wheels and brakes on this Bianchi. (He actually asked me about the wheels and brakes on a Miyata I had built, but I somehow posted this picture, instead of the pic of the Miyata. D'oh.)Those are 700c wheels, but setting the brakes up was no problem, since the frame was originally built for that size wheel.

This is my UO8. It was built for 27" wheels, and I am running 700c. On this bike, as with the majority of the bikes I swap wheel sizes on, the old-school centerpull brakes have enough vertical pad adjustment to line up with the rim.

The Mafac Racer, one of the classiest-looking brakesets ever.

This Mundo, which I built up this week, for a local fellow, presented a problem. No centerpull in my box had enough reach to line the pads up with the rim. So, I ended up using an old BMX sidepull, which had plenty of reach on extra-long arms.

(The brakes weren't the only problem the Mundo presented. I spent about two hours aligning the fork so that the wheel didn't pull to the left, rather violently, as you rode. French bikes, like my Peugeot, and German bikes like this Mundo always have hinky forks, it seems.)

Incidentally, there is a new bike, the Yuba Mundo, which is a long wheelbase cargo bike. No relation to the older bike, but it is all that comes up when you Google "Mundo". If anyone has any info on the older bike, feel free to post it in the comments.

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