How to choose your road bike brake calipers?

How to choose your road bike brake calipers?

Brakes are safety components on your bike. Relatively simple to choose, there are a few tricks you need to know to get the best possible performance from them.

Standard calipers

  • Mounting: classic or direct-mount

Stirrup types

Even though levers and brake calipers are all inter-compatible, it is still recommended to use calipers of the same brand as the levers, since both are designed to work optimally together.

As far as the mechanism itself is concerned, until now all calipers have operated on the same principle: two levers articulated around a point of pivot point A. These have evolved and now feature two pivot points B for improved power distribution between the two pads and increased performance. This mechanism performs even better with the new direct-mount standard.

It is still possible to mix a single-pivot caliper at the rear with a double-pivot caliper at the front, as with Campagnolo.

The classic set-up has an axle in the middle of the brake Cwhile the direct-mount has two axles on either side of the wheel and two points of attachment to the frame or the fork for greater rigidity D.

 

Which caliper to choose?

Since levers and calipers are inter-compatible, you can choose whatever you like, but we still recommend that you choose calipers from the same brand as your levers. However, check whether your frame is designed for conventional or direct-mount mounting.

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