Bicycle V-brakes are such garbage.
Any bike system where one of the components is called a "noodle" shouldn't exists simply because of said noodle.
I've been trying to look up who the actual inventor of the first set was but so far no luck. Anyway, brake designs previous to v-brakes were already working very well, so long as you knew how to properly set up and adjust them. Then at a certain point about like 10 or so years ago, seemingly out of nowhere the v-brake was on everything. I want to know why.
Why would something with such a crappy, bad, ridiculous, ugly design, with no sigificant leap in performance, and a huge PITA factor for regular, non-bike mechanic people to adjust, suddenly become an industry standard?
Oh let's put out a brake system that anyone who has ever worked on a spring tensioned system could look at from a mile away and see that you're never going to get the adjusted properly while having them actually look centered. Pick one or the other. The offset on where the noodle ends creates a situation where in order to be adjusted properly the spring tension has to be uneven on either side. Dumb. Since you can't begin asymetrically adjusting the spring tension until the actual cable is tightened, once you get them centered, one arm is always in a different position than the other. Always.Some of you tough guys might want to get on here and talk about how you can get them centered perfectly, but you're not going to convince me. Even if you think you're the v-brake master and -claim- to be able to get the centered and symmetrically aligned (which you'll never get me to believe), it still doesn't take away that it is a badly designed system that makes you work three times as hard to get results that were easily achievable with previous designs.
Anyway, I have been out of the bike industry since 1995, so obvs I don't know what the heck went on between then and now, but I do know that someone somewhere had to do a helluva job selling v-brake technology as the "new big thing". Maybe it started with some custom manufacturer making really nice ones, and the big manufacturers all copycatted it. Maybe vice-versa. If you know, please tell me. It smacks of someone trying be -different- by fixing something that wasn't broken.
Yes I know that disc brakes have replaced v-brakes on down to all but the lowest end bikes. That still doesn't excuse the years of embarassing industry wide adoption of a failure of a system. So Mote It Be.
