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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Interesting you prefer hydraulic specifically, even the disc brake zealots mostly agree mechanical is more reliable and easier to maintain.

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This is absolutely the opposite of my experience and the experience of anybody I've ever met who has actually ridden a bicycle before.

My personal experience is that cable is easier to maintain and repair than hydraulics -- but it may very well be that I'm just used to repairing and maintaining cable brakes so that's naturally easier for me.

If you have the money to pay someone else to deal with the maintenance, then sure I guess. I do my own work and don't want to deal with bleeding brakes and all the extra tools that are required for that.

I'm at 16k miles on my current road bike and the only maintenance I've done on my hydraulic disc brakes is swap the pads, which takes five minutes and requires no special tools. I assume at some point I'll need to have the brakes bled, but a $50 service task every 20k miles is not actually a meaningful expense relative to everything else.

The problem with having a shop do the work isn't the expense, it's the time. At least in my area, bike shops typically have several days to a week of backlog, so if you take your bike in, you have to be prepared to not have your bike for a week or so.

That's a big deal for me.

All you really need is the brake fluid, a standard sized syringe, and a rag. I was concerned about this when putting together my first hydraulic brakes, but it turned out not to be any more complicated than cables. It's annoying but definitely worth it for the power of hydraulics.

For context, I know someone who claims this statement is only true if you use TRP mechanical disc brakes. The rest of the mechanical disc brakes is supposed to be garbage.

I'm with the op, once you get used to servicing hydraulic I find them easier in many regards and require less frequent adjusting.

Sure if you get a leak on trail you're screwed, but that has happened to one bike one time in my riding group over the last 10+ years. I will be happy to have a cable-free bike someday.

> once you get used to servicing hydraulic

In my experience with over 40,000km on Shimano hydraulics, the only servicing is swapping pads when the pad wear spring starts screeching against the rotor.

My early 2000 era Magura hyrdros were a bit shit and required a lot of maintenance and issues with sticking callipers, but shimanos made in the last 15 years are pretty much perfected and maintenance free.

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