Updating Brakes Round One

I owned a lovely set of red Formula R1 brakes since 2010. They went onto my singlespeed Niner Air9 Carbon, moved to my black 44 Kid Dangerous in 2013, and then to my 44 Marauder in 2017; fourteen years of service and still working perfectly. It was time to treat the Marauder to a new set of brakes. I was just waiting for a worthy replacement to appear on the market. This happened recently with Hope’s release of the XCR brakes in anodized colors and the option of two, or four-piston calipers. Hope is essentially the only manufacturer that still offers disc brakes in a variety of colors. The XCR with E4 calipers were the brakes I was waiting for.

The lever is gorgeously CNC-machined, is rather minimalist, and therefore light-weight. The E4 caliper offers a cleaner hose routing than the old Formula R1. The caliper is CNC'd in one piece from high-grade forged aluminum billet. This pair of brakes should have more bite than my old R1s; the only negative - is DOT. The Curas on my Stooge and Snakedriver use mineral oil. All my road and gravel bikes use DOT fluid, so it is just one more bike requiring that brake fluid. Not a huge deal.

When placing my order for the XCR brakes, I also got a pair of post-mount RX4+ calipers for my Volagi Viaje. The bike was already equipped with previous generation RX4 calipers. In our old, very humid basement, I always had issues with galvanic corrosion of aluminum components, particularly when they were exposed to sweat during a ride. I always had to clean my front hubs with WD40 before putting the bike in the basement, if sweat had dripped on them during hot summer rides. That’s a bit harder to do to a brake caliper bolted to the fork. The RX4 caliper corroded in one spot, which bothered me a little. It didn’t bother me enough to replace it, but with the RX4+ Hope refined these road calipers in several ways. All of the changes benefitted my Volagi Viaje. The hose-inlet angle on the old caliper had a sharp 20º angle. This pushed the hose against the chainstay in the back and caused a sharp bend of the hose up front. Hope reduced this angle to 10º allowing the hoses to be straighter. I also reached the sideways adjustment limit when trying to center the rear caliper. With the RX4+, Hope increased the adjustment from 2.5 to 3.5 mm. Lastly, Hope increased the piston diameters from 2x14 mm and 2x11 mm to 2x16 mm and 2x14 mm. I am certain that this will be noticeable.

On May 7th, Chris King introduced their Gen 4 hub system with the main changes being universalized drivers and axles. The goal was to make parts cross-compatible, easily swappable, less expensive, and backward-compatible. I’ve had several pairs of R45D hubs. If you wanted to swap an HG drive shell for XDR on an old hub, you also had to buy a new axle. Now, all drive shells and axles are cross-compatible. One bummer is that Chris King is still not making a 135x10mm QR axle for R45D hubs. I understand that all modern road and gravel bikes use thru-axles these days but there are still plenty of QR-equipped bikes being ridden and custom builders still make them now and then. Industry 9 and Hope offer QR end caps for their latest generation hubs. It would be a simple thing to add such an axle.