• Dear Forum,

    disc breaks are dead? I wish!

    These particular ones have a very significant problem. Everytime I use the front break to break stongly, the wheel gets misaligned so badly that the breaks rub and squeal like hell. I mean it's so bad that you can see the tyre is visibly closer to one fork blade and the bike no longer tracks straight. I then need to open the QR and pop the wheen back into both drop outs.

    Any ideas why this is? It's as if the skewers don't grip and the disc break just levers the wheel out of alignment. I tried different front wheels, different skewers, tightented the skewers with all the power I have and religned the calipers 1000 times (but it's clearly nothing to do with the caliper alignement, it's the entire wheel).

    I'm thinking the dropouts are somehow too slippery. The fork is an early Surly Karate Monkey, the hub is a new SP dyno with industrial bearings, so no movement from there for sure. The rotors are 180mm, calipers are Magura hydraulics. See pics. One also shows the drop outs with the skewers removed.

    Is this a known problem with Surly forks? The dropouts not knurled enough? Are the skewers too weak? Should I ditch the damn discs and get a nice set of V's?

    Help me please! Thanks!


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  • Which skewers have you tried? Try a proper closed cam one. Most Shimano will do. They're night and day compared to what I can see in the pic. Those are just recycling material.

  • Ah cheers, will try that! All the ones I used were external cam ones...

  • What about the anti-theft ones which you open with an allen key? Are those strong?

  • Nothing like so strong as Shimano external cam.

    If you try to crank the Allen key extra hard, the skewer snaps and fires out like a crossbow bolt. Ask me how I know

  • Ah interesting. Makes me wonder if Shutter Precision make an old fashioned solid axle for the hub, seems like the perfect retrograde fix.

  • Also it looks like the fork is stopping the QR from fully closing. If you close the QR lever in front or behind the fork leg you can close it by a few more mm in order to properly over-centre it.

  • Could also try a DT Swiss RWS skewer?

  • Are the axle fittings tight? Had a wheel this week with identical issue: cone assembly was loose on one side.

  • Thanks all for your ideas, a shimano skewer fixed the issue. Awesome stuff!

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Front disc break levers the wheel out of wack... what to do?

Posted by Avatar for RabiCycle @RabiCycle

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