orange ram/blue ram-rear brake issues

[mikel...@juno.com]

i have both an orange and blue ram. the rear brake bridge on the orange is indeed too high but i worked around it using shimano br-r600 47-57 calipers. first, i use kool stop v brake pads which drop a bit lower than traditional road cartridge pads/holders. second, i filed the left side caliper pad slot about 1mm and the right side about .5mm, the reach problem was worse on the left side of the caliper

tektro 47-57 dual pivots did reach the rear brake track on the Ramborange without filing/v pads but shimano dual pivots worked a little better

the Ramblue does not have these reach issues as mentioned

mike goldman

warwick,r.i.

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[George Schick]

This made me curious so I went down to take a look at my own orange Ram.  It, too, has standard Shimano 600 series brakes F&R and although their pads reach the rims OK, they are all mounted the way down to the very bottoms of the brake arm slots.  I'm wondering if this issue has to do with frame size.  What size frame do you have?  Mine is a 54cm.

One reason I say this is because the rear rack mount braze-on's on my 54 are located in such a position that they do not allow for the rack's mounting arms any shallower an angle than about 15 degrees from horizontal without interferring with the rear brake arm.  If you take a look at the Mark's M1 (mini) rack photo on the Riv website you'll notice that the same rack's front arms are completely horizontal and yet still clear the brake arm.   And this is clearly a much larger frame, judging from the steepness of the seat stays.  I suspect that the frame builders just moved the brake bridge slightly higher on larger frames, the same way they moved the rack braze-on's (even though you'd think that would be a constant across all frame sizes).

[mikel...@juno.com]

george,

might you have old school shimano 600 single pivot brakes?  i have dual pivot shimano 47-57. i would also guess the single pivots might be a bit longer....been a while since i used them

[George Schick]

Nope.  These are Shimano BR-R600 dual pivot standards with 47/57 min/max reach, just like yours.

[mikel...@juno.com]

george,

both my Rams are 58cm.

mike

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[Steven Frederick]

I have an orange 54cm Rambly too, and it does suffer from the high
brake mount problem in back. I think it might've been just one batch
of orange frames that had this issue...

...the new big mouth/Silver brakes by Tektro have a bit more reach
then the original Shimanos, and work without modification on the back
of my Rambouillet.

Steve

[George Schick]

Well, the only real way to solve this mystery would be to remove the rear wheel (and fender, if installed) and, using an old axle, take the measurement from the center of the rear dropout to the brake mounting hole on seat stay bridge to see if there are significant differences.  If I dissemble all of that the Winter for cleaning and maintenance I'll try to remember to do it on mine.

[Steve Palincsar]

On Sun, 2012-12-23 at 16:11 -0800, George Schick wrote:
> This made me curious so I went down to take a look at my own orange
> Ram. It, too, has standard Shimano 600 series brakes F&R and although
> their pads reach the rims OK, they are all mounted the way down to the
> very bottoms of the brake arm slots.

That's how the bikes were designed.

[cyclotourist]

I recall the fix to this is to carefully file the brake nut's washer down at an angle, turning it into an eccentric. That in turn lets the brake caliper pivot down just a a bit (.5-1mm like you needed). The brake pads of "normal" reach brakes will then be fine.

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[eflayer]

I had a 60cm Orange one in the olden days. Can't remember which brakes were on it, but I do remember even when the pads were mounted at the bottom of the caliper, the pad would just be barely off the rim and onto the tire. Think my remedy was to sand off / round off the top lengthwise corner of the pad. That allowed it to clear the curve of the tire and get the whole pad surface onto the rim.