Disc Brakes Suck—But I'm Never Going Back to Rim Brakes

A few weeks ago, I wrote about pointless marketing hype. It’s a topic that many riders have a lot of feelings about, and for good reason. If you’ve been riding bikes long enough, you’ve surely lived through a few cycles of brands telling you one thing and then, a few years later, telling you the opposite. But whenever bike industry BS comes up, there’s always one thing people call out time and time again: disc brakes. Road discs were absolutely a solution for a problem that didn’t really exist. The industry changeover was and is still painful for many riders. Learning to work on a completely new system, with new and often more expensive parts, was and continues to be a source of frustration for plenty of riders. Not to mention the ultimate crime that discs committed by adding roughly a pound of extra weight to bikes over comparable rim brake models. Plus, they can be noisy as heck. And don’t even get me started on the hassle of swapping wheelsets with disc brakes. [View in Browser]( [Bicycling]( [SHOP]( [EXCLUSIVE]( [SUBSCRIBE]( [Disc Brakes Suck—But I'm Never Going Back to Rim Brakes]( [Disc Brakes Suck—But I'm Never Going Back to Rim Brakes]( [Disc Brakes Suck—But I'm Never Going Back to Rim Brakes]( A few weeks ago, I wrote about pointless marketing hype. It’s a topic that many riders have a lot of feelings about, and for good reason. If you’ve been riding bikes long enough, you’ve surely lived through a few cycles of brands telling you one thing and then, a few years later, telling you the opposite. But whenever bike industry BS comes up, there’s always one thing people call out time and time again: disc brakes. Road discs were absolutely a solution for a problem that didn’t really exist. The industry changeover was and is still painful for many riders. Learning to work on a completely new system, with new and often more expensive parts, was and continues to be a source of frustration for plenty of riders. Not to mention the ultimate crime that discs committed by adding roughly a pound of extra weight to bikes over comparable rim brake models. Plus, they can be noisy as heck. And don’t even get me started on the hassle of swapping wheelsets with disc brakes. A few weeks ago, I wrote about pointless marketing hype. It’s a topic that many riders have a lot of feelings about, and for good reason. If you’ve been riding bikes long enough, you’ve surely lived through a few cycles of brands telling you one thing and then, a few years later, telling you the opposite. But whenever bike industry BS comes up, there’s always one thing people call out time and time again: disc brakes. Road discs were absolutely a solution for a problem that didn’t really exist. The industry changeover was and is still painful for many riders. Learning to work on a completely new system, with new and often more expensive parts, was and continues to be a source of frustration for plenty of riders. 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