14-12-2021, 09:43 AM
I am at the lower end of skills here, but from my personal experience to where I am at now on my RP, which is quite happy, here goes.
Mine were not great at first so I worked from both ends replacing friction surfaces, cleaning up inner drums, replacing cables and putting in new gaskets between inner and outer hubs to prevent grease coming through, so was much more than just the set up. But on that point, it's also about balance left to right and front to back.
if you have straight coupled brakes then the fronts should auto balance through the centre but rears are separately adjusted through a clamp at the front end of the cable so are quite tricky to balance manually.
Worth checking for condition of cables and smoothness of the run through the central pivot point for fronts to make sure cables aren't catching. Mine were old and had a couple of kinks which meant that the pull was uneven and was pulling the kink straight first.
I set mine up with just 5mm of free travel on the pedal before you can feel it pulling on the cable.
Ultimately if a friend is pushing on the pedal hard you shouldn't be able to rotate any of the wheels by hand. but it is as much about what happens when you are half pushing on pedal where you can see how the balance is set.
Andy
Mine were not great at first so I worked from both ends replacing friction surfaces, cleaning up inner drums, replacing cables and putting in new gaskets between inner and outer hubs to prevent grease coming through, so was much more than just the set up. But on that point, it's also about balance left to right and front to back.
if you have straight coupled brakes then the fronts should auto balance through the centre but rears are separately adjusted through a clamp at the front end of the cable so are quite tricky to balance manually.
Worth checking for condition of cables and smoothness of the run through the central pivot point for fronts to make sure cables aren't catching. Mine were old and had a couple of kinks which meant that the pull was uneven and was pulling the kink straight first.
I set mine up with just 5mm of free travel on the pedal before you can feel it pulling on the cable.
Ultimately if a friend is pushing on the pedal hard you shouldn't be able to rotate any of the wheels by hand. but it is as much about what happens when you are half pushing on pedal where you can see how the balance is set.
Andy
Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think!