V-brake compatibility

sterljw said:

Hey guys. I recently upgraded my fork and now I need to to update my old canti's to v's. I have a XT shifter/brake lever combo that came with the bike circa the mid 90's. I was wondering if Shimano LX or XT v-brakes would work with my existing brake levers. Thanks!

Do the levers you have provide for swtiching the "leverage" so that you can pull the additional cable required?

sterljw said:

Hey guys. I recently upgraded my fork and now I need to to update my old canti's to v's. I have a XT shifter/brake lever combo that came with the bike circa the mid 90's. I was wondering if Shimano LX or XT v-brakes would work with my existing brake levers. Thanks!

Non v-brake levers will not work with v-brakes. Although that statement is accurate, that statement has been proven wrong by a little gadget I've seen that makes up the difference in cable pull (attaches down by the brake arm).

performancebike.comprofile.cfmOpen ↗

I once rode a friend's bike for a few miles (that had these on it) after working on his wheels for him and they worked just fine. He had at the time older kooka levers he wanted to keep even though he had wanted the (then) new vbrakes. Check them out if you really don't want new levers.

Have fun.

K.

I can switch to add a little more leverage. However, looking at the travel agent at performance appears to take up a lot of slack. I'm not sure if my old levers can pull that much. Is there anything else I can do or should I just bite the bullet and spring for new shifters and levers too?

sterljw said:

I can switch to add a little more leverage. However, looking at the travel agent at performance appears to take up a lot of slack. I'm not sure if my old levers can pull that much. Is there anything else I can do or should I just bite the bullet and spring for new shifters and levers too?

At the front it's fully possible to use canti levers and v-brakes directly, as long as you pay attention to keeping the slack to a minimum. At the rear it's a bit more tricky, because the extra length tends to add too much slack to the system. You're likely to either get rubbing or bottoming out. The dangers of excess brake force and unvoluntary lock up isn't a bigger problem here than if you'd switch to disc brakes.

OTOH the travel agent pulley is a neat solution and it works real well once you've tightened the cable down properly. Cambriabike has it for $3 less than performancebike. http://www.cambriabike.com/brakes/travel_agent.htm

i've noticed while looking on ebay that some of the older XT shifter/brake combos say they work with both cantilever and v's. These models appear to look exactly like mine. Is there a way to tell which model I have?

sterljw said:

...some of the older XT shifter/brake combos say they work with both cantilever and v's. These models appear to look exactly like mine. Is there a way to tell which model I have?

AFAIK every one that has the "servo-wave action" thingy (or whatever Shimano called it should be good for both canti's and v's. What you can do to check probability of compatibility is to measure the distance (on the lever) between the pivot point ("hinge"😉 and where the cable attaches. For a shimano strictly canti lever this should be around 28 mm. Anything bigger than that has a decent chance to work with v's.

Thanks for all the help. I'll let you know what I end up doing. I flipped my bike and broke my clavicle a few weeks back so I'm taking the off time to fix a few things on it. Three more weeks and I'm back to it!

ireman_1 said:

Non v-brake levers will not work with v-brakes. Although that statement is accurate, that statement has been proven wrong by a little gadget I've seen that makes up the difference in cable pull (attaches down by the brake arm).

performancebike.comprofile.cfmOpen ↗

I once rode a friend's bike for a few miles (that had these on it) after working on his wheels for him and they worked just fine. He had at the time older kooka levers he wanted to keep even though he had wanted the (then) new vbrakes. Check them out if you really don't want new levers.

Have fun.

K.

Well, a decent pair of V-Brake levers will cost $20-$30.

Thanks for all the input. I thought I'd let people know what I ended up doing in case anyone else ran into the same problem that I did. First, I wanted to upgrade from oldschool cantilevers to v-brakes since my new fork couldn't use canti's. Since I had dual brake lever/shifter pods I simply couldn't upgrade my brake levers or I would have had to replace my shifters as well. This is an older bike (a ~'97 or so Jamis Dragon) and I didn't want to upgrade everything because most of the components were XT. I just wanted a decent XC bike to last me until I got an entirely new bike that I could go hucking on. 😄 So after tons of looking I found a handy little gadget called a travel agent, or if you use avid's brand, it's called a rollamajig. For those who don't know, a travel agent is basically a little pulley that you wrap your brake cable around. This takes up the slack when you pull on a lever. You can use them with v-brake levers too to add a little more torque if you wanted to as well. These things are awesome. I got some Avid SD7 Ti's and combined with the travel agents I can stop on a dime. The only catch is that the travel agents require an additional couple of inches or so of your brake cable. My old brake cable wasn't long enough so I ended getting a set of Avid Flak Jackets as well. Upgrading the brakes ended up costing about $120; $20 for the a pair of travel agents (Ebay), $80 for the SD7's (could've gotten a better deal but I wanted the copper-colored Ti's; Ebay), and then $20 bucks for the kevlar housed cables (Ebay). I can say that it was a true pain in the a** to upgrade but I'll never regret it.