Servicing calliper brakes

Without mudguards, calliper brakes are right in the line of fire for anything your tyre picks up off the road. Dirt ends up on the pivots that hold your callipers together and stops them moving freely. This is one of those satisfying jobs that looks much harder than it is and makes your bike feel much better as soon as you’ve done it.

Like your gears, your brakes are operated by a combination of a cable and a spring. Cables are great for transmitting a signal through all the curves from your handlebars to your brakes and they’re light and strong, but they can only pull, not push. Once you’ve used the cable to pull your brake blocks onto the rim, you release the brake-lever and rely on a spring in the calliper to push the blocks back off the rim so that you can ride and the blocks are back in their original position. However, your hands are generally much stronger than the little coil of wire that does the springing-back job. The effect of this is that, once your calliper pivots start to get all clogged up and sticky, you will…

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