Breaking Brakes

How does this even happen?

This morning I was peacefully riding to work, going through my usual ritual of thinking that literally every traffic light was turning red on me and realising I was late, when I was rudely interrupted by what could have been a major problem.

One of my brake pads actually fell out.

I only realised this as I grabbed a handful of brake to try and avoid a van. Where there should have been solid rubber-on-alloy contact and a nice amount of slowing there was instead a distressing amount of air.

This was pretty annoying to say the least. Luckily I had a reserve brake in the form of my much underused back one, and was able to miss the van and embarrassing injury.

What’s confusing me is how I ended up in this situation. You see (and apologies to those of you for whom V-brake pads are very familiar), the pads slip into the brakes in a direction that means that normal braking should push them more firmly in with the rotation of the wheel, not out. There should also be a split pin stopping them moving the other way (although I am notoriously bad at putting this in properly and often get bored before it’s fully home). Even without the split pin I would have had to be braking while moving backwards in order to move the pads out. I don’t think I was doing this.

It may well remain as one of the great mysteries of cycling. Although by the time you read this it will all be solved with new pads. All I have to do is survive my ride home tonight with my ability to stop impaired by 50%. Because of the way this blog works (it’s now Friday, but you’ll read this on Monday) you won’t know until Tuesday whether I actually made it. Mind you, you’ll only think the problem is a day old, rather than the reality of four days so you probably won’t be as worried as you might have been.

This is all getting just as confusing as the original brake pad question now.

A