Brakes

[G3CWI]

I help out with a project for young people in an area of social deprivation. Cycling is quite popular (hooray!). I want to fix the brakes on a lad's bike. He tells me it's a skate bike, not a BMX. Means nothing to me.

He took the brakes off and has lost the parts.What should I be looking for to re install the brakes (rear only) See photo.

cheers

 

[lpretro1]

u brake

 

[HovR]

As above, most BMX's running brakes use U-brakes, although I have seen a few lower end ones with V-brakes.

Does the bike have a gyro? If so you'll need to appropriate cables which turn the singular cable coming out of the brake lever in to two cables for the gyro. Should be something like this.

From there some BMX's will have dual cables exiting the gyro, running down to the brake still as dual cables, where each cable will connect to an arm of the U brake. It will use a cable like this. If the bike uses this system there will be two sets of cable bosses for the rear brake.

Some BMX's however will turn the two cables exiting the gyro in to a singular cable, and then utilize a straddle wire at the rear brake, similar to cantilever brakes. This system will look like this, and use a cable like this.

Front U-brakes use a system like shown below, although I've successfully used this style on the rear before. The benefit of this is you can use it with almost any cable-boss layout (frames designed for double or single cables to the rear).

You'll need to figure out which system the bike uses, and then get the appropriate U brake and cables.

If the bike doesn't have a gyro you can just cable it up relatively normally (happy days!)

The few times I've had to deal with BMX brakes they've been a bit of a pain in the ass, so good luck!