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Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

What kind of weird brakes do you have on your bike? I can easily buy Shimano Ultegra (which is pretty high-end) brake calipers on Amazon for roughly USD$65, and a big bottle of brake oil is less than $15. Cheaper-brand or lower-end calipers are of course, cheaper, easily less than $50 each. And brake calipers aren't something you normally need to replace anyway. Pads are easily available too, both name-brand and Chinese knock-offs that probably last 1/3 as long for 1/10 the cost. What supply-chain problem are you referring to? I don't see any.

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It may just be rumour, but the units Movida chose appear from what a number of people tell me, to be fragile: You should just be able to replace the brake fluid. You wind up losing things, because they don't come apart as well as they should and they don't go back together as well as they should.

OK, so "wear the risk" -great: I take my bike in to the shop, and either I get it back at 3:30pm or.. its 3 months for replacement parts to make it, assuming the supplier has parts. Or, I have to ditch them and go back to cables. Or, an alternate vendor which means new levers, and pipes, and disks, and pads and ....

Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. What brakes do you have exactly? There are only a handful of manufacturers (Shimano, SRAM, Tektro/TRP, Hope, maybe a couple others). And no, you shouldn't be losing anything. Bleeding is easy: you take connect a hose to the caliper, and a cup to the level/master cylinder, and pump some new fluid in there with a syringe. (In practice, it's somewhat fiddly and can be a little messy if you're not careful.) There's no parts to lose, except the screw that seals the master cylinder, and maybe the bleed port screw on the caliper if it doesn't use a nipple.

They're Tektro. That "in practice its somewhat fiddly" bit sounds like where I am.

I'll go canvas my options with some other stores. Who knows? Maybe I'm being sold a line of guff here?

(and its a Merida 200 not a Movida. I was having a bad hair day)

I have Tektro on one bike. They work fine, but maintenance on them is more of a pain than Shimano. I'm probably going to swap them out for Shimano later, because the Shimano brakes on my road bike are so much easier to work with.

Your brakes use mineral oil, and you can use any kind of mineral oil you want in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63VIuPiX3CA

> What kind of weird brakes do you have on your bike?

Apparently hydraulics, instead of cables. Cf. https://www.bicyclehabitat.com/how-to/disc-brakes-101-pg362....

I have hydraulic brakes on one of my bikes too. They feel great (so accurate and responsive!), but I'm glad I haven't had to get them fixed yet...

You should be able to stay away from most repairs if you check your brake pads regularly and make sure you change them before they fully wear out.

In addition, do know that the discs and even brake fluid will need to be replaced at some point to keep things working well, hope this can avoid a bad surprise!

I AM talking about hydraulics in my post, I even specifically mentioned brake oil, something hydraulic brakes require for a simple bleed operation.

Hydraulics are great, and I have fixed mine. The parts are NOT a problem to acquire at all. I will say, however, that bleeding them is a bit fiddly and a pain, compared to bleeding car brakes, in my experience. I've done bleeds on both Shimano and Tektro brakes; the Shimanos were definitely better, but still not as easy as car brakes. Which is why I happen to know Shimano caliper prices off the top of my head: I'm thinking seriously about swapping the Tektro calipers for Shimanos because they're easier to work with, both for bleeds and for pad changes (the Tektros require removing the caliper from the frame; Shimanos do not).

So again, I'm wondering what the OP is griping about. There is no supply-chain problem with hydraulic brakes that I can see.

Maybe OP is “stuck” with shitty hydraulics from a lesser-known vendor for which it’s difficult to get the parts? I’d say they look into the cost of getting the whole system replaced, my Shimano low-ish end hydraulics have worked fine for years and as you’ve mentioned, parts are easy to get.

Tektro HD-M275 front and rear. When I go online, its ali, ebay and grey market suppliers mostly, not a heap of returns from recognisable Australian bike shops.

Maybe its my bad timing, buying a 2nd had bike when it was end-of-life for one model of brake, and now it needs work, people have moved onto the next 'best thing' and I am behind "can't get the parts"

(I know one respondent disagrees and says they are both easy to fix, and easy to get. I am just reporting both what I was told and what I find when I look. "easy" is very contextually defined in both cases. It would be very easy for me to confuse myself, order the wrong bits, or manage to dismantle but never re-mantle things.)

This is an addendum to my other reply to you. I only briefly googled for this model, but my guess is that it's an older model. It should be possible to find a newer product (either from Tektro or better yet Shimano, which uses the same kind of mineral oil as brake fluid so you can probably reuse your lever if you want, if it's the caliper that needs replacement) which is compatible with this system's mounts. You'd be better off doing that than trying to get an exact replacement: newer designs are usually better anyway, plus they're frequently cheaper since they're current production.

Sorry, I didn't realize that you had understood that and were talking specifically about hydraulic maintenance. I have bikes with cable-actuated brakes and also one bike with a hydraulic system, and I've done maintenance myself on the former but not the latter. I personally think of the cable version as comprehensible and maintainable and the hydraulic version as black magic; hopefully that will change intentionally. I was imagining that other people would probably feel the same way about hydraulic brakes ("great, but hard to understand and totally infeasible to maintain at home"); my apologies for misunderstanding your point!

No worries! Have you worked on car brakes before? Bike brakes aren't any more "black magic" than those, though again I will say they're more fiddly in my experience, because getting all the air bubbles out can be a pain sometimes. I've bled countless car brakes and it was always fairly easy with a helper to pump the pedal, but my experience with my 2 bikes has been more troublesome. I'm not sure what the problem is, considering cars have rather complex systems with multiple master cylinder reservoirs (2, for redundancy), 180 or 360-degree bends in the brakes lines, and now ABS systems, but getting all the air bubbles out of my bike systems turned out to be a bit of a black art, and it differs by caliper position (front vs rear) and hardware mfgr. The $20 brake bleed kits on Amazon are pretty good though, including all the stuff you'll need.

The nice thing about hydraulics is that, once they're set up, they're good until you need to change the pads usually, and even then the fluid is probably fine unless it's old. Rim brakes, on the other hand, need constant adjustment and fiddling just to keep them from rubbing, as the pads wear. I don't miss them one bit.

The fiddliness of bleeding a hydraulic brake line is exactly why I stick with cable actuated disk brakes on my bike hah. And even if the front wheel gets knocked out of the brake a bit it's trivial to go home, put it on the stand, and move the wheel around.

Hydraulic brakes are definitely fun but my bike is a compromise between low effort and utility. I'm running a 2x right now and running a barend shifter up front because my height and bike geometry means I often knock the front derailleur cable out of place. I should probably just switch to a 1x at this point.

You live in Australia? You have not had any problems securing bicycle parts here in Australia these last 2 years?

Cycle shops I ask in, say parts are a nightmare or were, the last time I asked. Maybe its about market size, maybe they just don't want the hassle.

Where you are, and your budget, affects availability of things. Are you in my market?

I'm in Japan. I've only checked Amazon, but I didn't see any problems getting parts there. I'd recommend looking at online sellers instead of local shops. Local shops aren't motivated to look for anything beyond what their preferred supplier has in stock.

Back in the US during Covid, I needed a new derailleur hangar because I bent mine, and wanted it quickly so I could go riding again. My local shops all said it was hard to find and expensive, and I'd have to wait a month just for them to install it (and they wouldn't sell it to me directly) for a small fortune because they said it needed to be specially bent (it didn't). So I found an online shop that had it and bought 2, got it in a few days, and installed it myself. Sorry, but after that experience, the people saying "support your LBS!" can shove it.

The other thing you should be aware of is that the exact part you're looking for may not be easily available. So if you want to replace a whole caliper, for instance, you'll probably have a much easier time finding a compatible caliper (probably a newer design) than finding another of the old one. Mfgrs are constantly updating their product lines, so it's frequently cheaper to just get something newer rather than an exact replacement, though of course there's limits here (you can't easily change from a 10-speed drivetrain to an 11-speed one, for instance, but you can easily mix-and-match different 11-speed cassettes). For hydraulic brakes, on road and hybrid bikes these days, they mostly all use the same flat-mount standard, with a few different rotor sizes.

Also I don't really understand what the difference between the tiagra and Ultegra brake levers are except in comparison to like bottom rung stuff. But to each other I can't seem to tell a difference.

Ultegra is better, of course :-)

But you're making an invalid comparison: the real comparison is between Ultegra and 105. The two are functionally the same, but Ultegras are a bit lighter and use better materials (probably carbon fiber handles, for instance). The year I got mine, the 105s were physically larger too, so the internals weren't as advanced; not sure about today.

Tiagra is a 10-speed shifter, while Ultegra is an 11-speed, so they're certainly not compatible at all. You can assume that Tiagra will be even more cheaply-made than the 105.

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