Front MC Guidelines

[Sci85]

Ok my goals for the Front brake are to have a modern, light pressure but progressive feel to the front brake. I'm not made of money so I rebuilt the stock caliper, fitted a drilled rotor from a newer Yamaha, got an 11mm bore MC (cheap evilbay variety), Mike's Kevlar brake pads (#29-3522) and a stainless line. The brake works ok but it requires a lot of lever pressure and travel for hard stops. After reading a lot of the brake threads around this, I thought the goto setup for my goals was the 11mm bore on the stock caliper. Is that not correct? And yeah, I've bled the piss out of it using all the tricks.

Any thoughts on the above to make this work better with less lever travel and less pressure required?

Thanks.

 

[650Skull]

Results depend in the year of bike or more importantly the differences between the early 34mm fork and caliper/MC set up and later 35mm forks and caliper/MC set up. As there is no information regarding what set up you have any answer has to be a question to define what set up is running on the bike and any change done to it would be an improvement.

 

[5twins]

I recently drank the "11mm MC" kool-aid too, and like you, I'm not very impressed. I have to pull the lever probably half way in before anything at all happens. Granted, there is more modulation available between slight braking and full hard braking, but all that wasted lever travel to get there bothers me. And forget 2 finger braking, lol. The lever hits the rest of my fingers still wrapped around the twist grip. I was perfectly happy with the original 14mm MC. It had rock hard lever pressure by about 1/4 lever pull, and even though the "modulation" range was less, it wasn't hard to do. Once braking commenced, pull harder to brake harder, not quite so hard to brake less. Needless to say, I'll never do another 11mm MC swap.

But, I'm thinking maybe one slightly smaller than the stock 14mm, but not as small as an 11mm, might be better. Like a 12mm or 13mm. That would maybe give a bit more modulation than the 14mm but not as much lever travel as the 11mm. If I do the swap on another 650, I think that's what I'll look for.

 

[Sci85]

This is on an '80 which is in my sig. Hmm, thanks 5twins. Mine is exactly like you described. I think I'll go back to stock 14mm and try that.

 

[spectra]

I just put together a 400 that the wife confiscated and used a 13mm Magura from Mikes and love the way it feels. Not sure what the factory one was as it was missing.