Functional bikes. Not Porn not Anti

@mdcc_tester maybe able to enlighten us to the u-brake rear reasoning

I imagine canti arms on the rear wouldn’t clear a big pannier perhaps?

Is the fork original? If it was me I would switch a u brake fork for a canti/v brake one, so I at least had one good brake.

That would make sense but lots MTB frames of the era put the brake under the chainstays by the BB cluster

@Simba Yep fork def original. As @spotter says it's an era thing, I think mid to late 80's loads of MTBs had this setup.
Obviously if you're gonna have a U it's best to have it on the rear, by all accounts they work quite well.

My original point was though, if they work so well, why not have two? I wondered if its because they don't have as big a clearance as canti's and people tend to run a bigger tyre up front. However in my experience they're as shit as canti's, you have to buy expensive stiff ones to get them to work well, the odyssey ones are pretty good.

possibly but would it not make sense from a manufacturing perspective to have a same front and rear unless the U brakes were deemed superior and they "compromised" on the front to cater for larger tyres?

Think contextually, MTB was new at this point, the concept of making frames or other equipment specifically for it was new too, they were working out the kinks.

I picked up a 1990 edition of Richard's bicycle book in a charity shop the other day, and was surprised to see that he recommended U-brakes and Cantis for anything other than road racing. I'd not realised that V-brakes didn't really take off until the mid-nineties.

I remember when shimano released their first Vs. I seem to remember paying £70 for a set of LX ones.

Shimano launched them in 1996 with the M950 group

Which is an absolute design icon IMO, Id love it if they brought that finish back.

phwoar yeh thats awesome!

enlighten us to the u-brake rear reasoning

There's never a good reason to have a U-brake, it was a developmental dead end caused by somebody's failure to invent the V-brake soon enough.

an absolute design icon

And yet a failure on so many levels. By 1996, it was already obvious that disc brakes were the future, the parallelogram brakes were a complex solution in search of a problem, and first generation Octalink was wrong even for Octalink, and, as it turns out, just completely wrong for a BB.

Hey man, pretty things dont have to work well, look at {insert Italian car}, people will buy them just because.

Also #DBAD

pretty things dont have to work well, look at C-Record, people will buy them just because.

Fair point.

But are they pretty if they don't work well?
I would argue that the worst things are the ones that are style over function.

EDIT: Except for carbon canti brakes. Rules don't apply there!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BiRxNylB7ak/?taken-by=chapmancycles

That is rank

EDIT: Except for all canti brakes. Rules don't apply there!

You love them all, even though none of them work

...I never understood the rationale of having two types of brakes on one bike.

The first canti's tended to be quite wide so think a U brake on the rear was to avoid your heels applying the brakes for you.

Also have heard that people do it to get the best of both worlds as it were, or maybe to avoid having to make too many compromises, ie running a v up front provides a lot more stopping power but the pads sit closer to the rim so it's less tolerant of buckles, mud etc so run a canti on the back so that you don't have to compromise on clearance on both wheels. Or, a v on the front for the power, a canti on the rear for modulation.

I guess upgrading/replacing parts could be another reason, when a new brake standard comes out its maybe easier to change a fork than a frame so you get a mullet set up (this is pretty much why I run mullet with front disc and rear canti on my 1x1). Or you have no interest in upgrading but you damage a fork and its easier to find a v/canti fork than a ubrake one or a disc one over a rim brake one because things have moved on

I have those xtr brakes and levers! They’ve lasted 20 years and still look very good.

also for bmx the modulation of u brakes makes them far superior to anything else

and when you say modulation you mean flex and lack of braking power, right? ;)