But a cantilever brake’s geometry isn’t fixed. It’s changing as it’s being actuated, and if it’s moving around. Now, I can’t say that even I understand this entirely, all I know is from reading too much about this online and futzing with my own setup. Mostly poorly, as my brakes are far from great.

Advertisement

Around this time, people were trying to make a better cantilever, and all kinds of strange designs come out of this period of changeover from the old system to what was becoming the new one. There are also fun stories, as included in this Bike Magazine profile of Ben Capron, who helped make this changeover happen:

It is 1988. Ben Capron is 17 years old. He is sleeping in his broken down Volvo station wagon. In a junkyard. Surrounded by angry pitbulls. The next morning Capron’s beloved car would be turned into a pile of metal scrap. This is a high point in Capron’s life and a turning point in mountain biking.

At an age when most kids are busy battling acne, Capron was obsessed with improving cantilever brakes, which looked like they might stop your bike, but were essentially just seatstay ornaments. To that end, the teenager had created a more powerful cantilever brake he called the Decelerator and which he’d been trying to deliver to the editors of Mountain Bike Action, right up until his Volvo’s engine threw a rod and landed him in the junkyard.

When Capron finally limped into MBA’s office with his new brake, the editors were impressed. Glowing reviews followed. By the time Capron graduated from high school, he was selling 500 hundred units a month under his company, Marinovative.

Advertisement

What Capron and others figured out was that instead of having the brakes be pulled at the center, they could be pulled from the side, and they would not only work stronger, but safer, and they’d be compatible with suspension bikes. By the mid’-90s, big name companies had moved in, with Shimano patenting what we all generally call the “v-brake.” It’s not so different from what Capron was pitching in 1988.

I wanted to see if I could find an old brochure of what Marinovate was selling back when, but this is reasonably obscure stuff, and the best I could easily find was news coverage of when Shimano first started using v-brakes in 1996. The announcer still calls them cantilevers in the video.

Advertisement
Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind

I will also add that there were all sorts of other now-obsolete other brakes in this genre, from the Dia-Compe VC900 to the WTB Speedmaster with various other Tektros and Avids in between. I only know this because I spent several nights hunting to see if I could find a nice set used to put on my bike to solve my issues of getting my brakes to clamp down and getting them to fit my modern, smaller wheels.

Advertisement

And the reason why I found myself spending several nights hunting for different parts was because the simplest, easiest solution eluded me.

Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind
Advertisement
Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind

Above you can see my bike with one arm of a standard v-brake test fitted. I had finally broken down, given up on adjusting and re-adjusting cantilevers, and spent $25 on a v-brake. And it didn’t fit. With the spacers on the brake pad mounted as they came out of the box (top pic) the pad didn’t even touch the rim. With the spacers flipped, I was still touching the tire. If I rode like that, I’d burn a hole in the tire.

Advertisement

This is because of yet another change in standards since my bike was new. The brakes on my bike are mounted higher up and closer together than on new bike. That is, the physical mounting points are closer together and higher up. Modern mounting points are farther apart and lower down. That’s why my new brakes were clamping in too high and too close on my old fork. Some people file out the mounting slot on these v-brakes to make them fit better, but there wasn’t even enough material on these brakes for that to be an option if I was feeling reckless.

The brakes went back to the shop, and I realized I might be shit out of luck in more ways than one.

Advertisement

In my many trips to the shop with these brake questions, what every mechanic pointed out was that I had brake levers meant for v-brakes. That sounded great! I was going to put v-brakes on my bike. But as I realized that v-brakes weren’t going to fit, I realized my new levers might have been the root of my braking problems all along.

As it turns out, the way that v-brakes are set up requires the brake cable to be pulled a longer distance all the way between the brake arms, versus the shorter distance of a cantilever brake just pulling up from the middle. V-brakes are “long pull,” cantilever brakes are “short pull,” as are most road bike brakes. What I had were long pull levers.

Advertisement

What does this mean, ultimately? Even I don’t totally understand it, even after all this reading and fiddling! I think it’s mostly that you need X amount of cable to really jam down on a cantilever brake, and you need more than X cable to do the same on a v-brake. But that shouldn’t be a huge issue as I understand it. The main issue as I get it would be bottoming out your brake levers. That is, pulling them back so far that they hit the handlebars before they move the brake pads enough to clamp down on the rim, but that’s not happening to me, and my brakes are still poor. There’s more in there about geometry and mechanical advantage and the more I try and understand it the more my brain hurts.

Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind
Advertisement

As for the brake levers themselves, I bought them because they were very comfortable, with a more modern, padded design, and they were cheap, just $15 on Craigslist in the neighborhood next to mine. They looked amazing on my new, wide, modern handlebars, with the new, modern handlebar tape that my girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves after watching precisely one YouTube video and becoming experts.

Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind
Advertisement

My brake levers were never going to pull the right amount of cable, were never going to have the right amount of pull for the right mechanical advantage I needed. I have v-brake levers on a bike that doesn’t want to accept v-brakes. Luckily, a few options prevail.

One of the first people to produce a v-brake design was Paul Components, and he still sells it out of Chico, California. It’s called the Motolite, for sale here and with a bit of history here. The nice thing about them is that, well, Paul runs an old VW Dune Buggy, also was a pioneer in making old bikes fit with more modern wheels, and these Motolites look like they have enough adjustability in them to work with my mishmash bike.

Advertisement

I can bite the bullet and spend over $100 for a single (!) Paul Motolite v-brake, which has enough adjustability that it looks like it’d fit for my 700c conversion. I’d be granted all the ability of more modern stopping power and I’d get to keep my brake levers.

That or I can stick with cantilevers, possibly updating to a more modern cantilever (such as the Shimano CX50), change the pads, and hope for the best.

Advertisement

I ended up ordering a new set of short-pull levers, otherwise identical in price and design to the ones on my bike right now. They’ll be here next month thanks to me buying the cheapest set on eBay, down in Puerto Rico. I’ll figure things out from there, as it turns out mini-v-brakes (another potential rabbit hole for fitment) use the same short pull levers as cantis. If I ever decide to spend a few hundred bucks on Motolites, at least I have the levers for them.

What has been fun is that there’s been no manual for this. My Schwinn Voyageur isn’t a particularly rare bike, especially in the genre of people making old frames work with new parts. I was sure someone on some forum would have made this all work but not quite. Forums are full of people asking for help but never any follow-ups. The one guy I know who has gone in on the same project as me has the same old brakes his bike came with and told me they’re kind of a pain.

Advertisement
Image for article titled I Bought A $220 Bike To Do A $1,600 Bike's Job And Everything About It Is Making Me Lose My Mind

The lesson from all of this is that no matter how much I tell myself I’ll have a simple project, I always, always find myself several hours into internet forums digging up information on when one format changed to another, and how I can get some low-cost, obtuse, obsolete piece of a puzzle if I just look hard enough. It’s why there’s a 1980s Soviet lens on my digital camera, why there are Baja racing Bilstein shocks on my stock-body Volkswagen Beetle, why everything in my life is some mix of convenient and willfully obtuse. I will never learn.