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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

It's wild? Disc brake maintenance absolutely sucks.

I like them, they're critical to mountain biking, but to say they're trivial to service? Not sure I can agree with you at all?

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The easiest thing to maintain is cable actuated disc brakes. Changing the pads is trivial and no bleed kit is necessary. The performance is much better than v-brakes as well. Of course, if you want performance hydraulic disc brakes are necessary fo mountain biking.

Do you work on larger vehicles like cars, trucks or motorcycles? Compared to the brakes on my car the disc brakes on my bicycle are trivially easy.

Why would you compare disc brakes to cars? Why not compare them to the rim brakes they are replacing. An order of magnitude more complicated to maintain

I've gone far into the depths of hell trying to properly set up a pair of cantilever brakes to be performative. Disk brakes any day.

> I've gone far into the depths of hell trying to properly set up a pair of cantilever brakes to be performative.

This! I thought I'd never have to see cantilever brakes again until turns out they were used on kids bikes so had to deal with that. Luckily my child has now grown to a slightly larger bike with hydraulic disk brakes so life is back to being easy on that front.

Bleeding brakes still sucks and requires specific tools. Cars are worse but bikes aren't particularly easy. You need more than a screwdrive and an allen wrench.

If we really want to bring self-maintenance back we're going to have to have more gumption than this, and perhaps a special tool every now and then.

The issue we're fighting isn't the battle against hard maintenance vs easy maintenance, it's against manufacturers deliberately making products that are expendable and not intended to be maintained. Hydraulic brakes are perfectly maintainable, you can even rebuild the whole system at home with a $6 pair of seal picks and a $12 seal kit, don't even need to be OEM seals.

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