Velo Orange Grand Cru Zeste Brakes Review

I've been struggling to find cantilever brakes strong enough to satisfy my needs. The very rainy Severna Park 200k ride demonstrated that a few hours of rain, road oil and grit can turn adequate brakes into non-stoppers very quickly. After way more research than I thought possible on the subject of cantilever brakes, I got the Velo Orange Grand Cru Zeste brakes. I figured the longer arms plus the low profile should give me the most stopping power available from a cantilever brake.

While researching cantilever brakes, I relied mostly on this mechanical analysis from Circle A Cycles. I also read Sheldon Brown's article on cantilever geometry, but I found it oversimplified things and left out a lot of details. I did not completely verify the math in the Circle A Cycles article, but I will trust the resulting equations. Namely, the equation relating mechanical advantage (MA) to yoke height (footnote 8 on page 3, his equation uses degrees, mine uses radians).

For a given bike, PO is fixed at half the distance between the cantilever bosses, and DO is the vertical distance from the cantilever boss to the middle of the rim braking surface. The variables are PA, the distance between the cantilever post (P) and the cable anchor point (A), YO, the vertical distance from the cantilever boss to the yoke, and 'a', the cantilever angle, the angle from vertical of the line PA. This angle is measured differently than in Sheldon's analysis, where it is the included angle between the A, P, and the rim surface.

Circle A Cycles diagram. Cantilever Angle is APZ (not APR as in Sheldon's).

Sheldon's Diagram. Cantilever Angle is angle APS.

The equation is far from elegant, but it is easy to see that lengthening the arm of the cantilever brake will increase the mechanical advantage. And it doesn't take much, if DO=24, PO=44 (in mm), and a=.436 rads (25 degrees), then a 10% increase in the arm length (PA) leads to a 30% increase in MA. If your canti bosses are higher than normal and DO is smaller, so that the pads are in the lower end of the adjustment range, the MA can be increased 15-25% over pads at the upper end of the adjustment range.

For reference here is a list of a few cantilever brakes and their arm length (PA, pivot to cable anchor distance, measured 'as the crow flies'):

Brake Name	Arm Length (PA) in mm	'a' angle (approx)
Velo Orange Zeste	76	15
Paul touring	68	20
Shimano Non-series	67	20
IRD CAFAM I	67	30
Avid Shorty Ult	63	75 or 30
Tektro Oryx	60	30
Paul Neo Retro	47	74
Tektro 720	48	75

There are threads started every day on how to adjust cantilever brakes, and given that I've used four different sets on my rear brake (Tektro CR720, Shimano non-series low profile, generic low profile, and VO Zeste), here's what you need to know.

• lower yoke height=more power (but less modulation)
• medium and wide profile brakes are less sensitive to yoke height, up to a point
• low profile brakes are sensitive to yoke height throughout the range

This is relatively common knowledge, the part most people don't realize is there is tipping point for wide profile brakes (like Tektro CR720). Lowering the yoke height doesn't make them much more powerful, until you reach a certain point. Then the mechanical advantage skyrockets with each small lowering of the yoke. Perhaps all the people who are satisfied with the CR720's have sufficiently narrow tires or other frame distances that allow them to have a lower yoke height and thus higher than normal mechanical advantage. It's also possible that different levers have sufficiently different mechanical advantages (while still being 'short pull'), that the 720's can perform well. TRP makes two versions of the mini-V brakes with different length arms (and thus different mechanical advantages) for Shimano/Campy and SRAM brake levers, respectively.

Enough with the engineering, onto the review.

Comes with two brakesets, enough for one bike. All necessary hardware? Yes. Instructions? No, none at all. Tools necessary: 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5 mm allen keys, 10 and 13mm wrenches, phillips screwdriver.

When installing the calipers, the 5mm allen key bolt should be facing out, and the 13mm nut should be behind the caliper. The 13mm nut has to be very tight to keep the brake pad holder from moving. It would be easy enough to label the bags of hardware 'front' and 'rear.' But they weren't.

There are so many adjustments that can be made it can be time consuming to go back and forth between various adjustments until the pads hit the rim squarely, at the same time, and all adjusting bolts  (spring tension, pad angle, cable barrel adjuster, etc.) are near the middle of their respective adjustment ranges.

These take more tools to install than are present on any multi tool I have ever used. It is a little bewildering that a brake that may be used for long distance events would require either a 13mm wrench or an adjustable wrench.

I certainly appreciate the long arms that provide more power than almost any other cantilever brakes, but the user interface (to borrow a software term) is not quite refined enough to be truly useable for non-mechanics. These brakes could really use a couple hundred more hours of engineering. I would have considered halting the project once a 13mm wrench was required. It is unfortunate that Velo Orange is such a small company they can't afford to make these more user friendly without making them prohibitively expensive. As a comparison, Compass Bicycles offers boutique centerpull brakes that are as powerful as possible with no performance compromises (they also directly copied a well established design, so they spent a lot of time on manufacturing, not as much on design). But they require specialized bosses that are so sensitive to alignment and spacing, they should only be installed by a framebuilder. They also cost $325 for one bike.

Update: In corresponding with smutpedaller about these brakes, they pointed out that they are available here under a different name, although the listed arm length is significantly different (66mm vs. 76mm) than the Velo Orange ones. After a careful analysis of the product photos with some calipers and using the length of the brake shoes as a constant (54.2mm actual, 26.5mm in the photos), it seems the product description is correct, they are indeed shorter than the Velo Orange Zeste brakes. Perhaps the only thing VO did was spec the arm length and the brake pads.

The brake pads sit far enough away from the frame that the entire arm swings out of the way for removal of fat tired wheels. It's a nice feature, and Grant can tell you all about it.

I swapped out the stock pads for Kool Stop Salmons. Once installed the brakes work great. Fantastic power with good modulation. The Compass 650Bx42mm tires have so much grip you are still unlikely to lock up the wheels. I could stop the bike with one or two fingers on the front brake. On a drop bar lever, that is pretty impressive. Pads run pretty close to the rim for cantilevers, about the same as V-brakes.

After using Kool Stop pads for about 8 months, they developed a horrible squeal in both brakes. I switched to the Velo Orange stock pads, which are supposed to be resistant to squealing. They were quieter, but also not nearly as powerful. I put up with it for two more months until they started squealing as well. The pad holders don't allow you to toe the pads in very much, so I wasn't able to eliminate the squealing that way. I finally gave up and switched to a linear pull V-brake with a Travel Agent in the rear. I couldn't do this in the front because of too little clearance between the front rack and the fender, so I am switching to the Tektro Oryx calipers. They won't be as powerful, but hopefully they will be silent.

So, after 1 year, I had to abandon both Velo Orange brakes due to squealing issues. It's possible it is partly an issue with the rim, but I don't have a spare wheel I can try I haven't been able to eliminate this cause.

Cable Pinch Bolt (Sturmey-Archer on left, Velo Orange on right)

There were only two reviews of these brakes I could find online. One mentioned that the pinch bolt was prone to cutting the straddle cable since the end of the bolt can be sharp. I checked out the bolt and it seemed fine. I have been using the Sturmey-Archer pinch bolt of a similar design for years on my drum brakes without problem. The S-A pinch bolt uses larger diameter threads, but is functionally identical. If you aren't used to these types of anchors, they actually deform the cable instead of the clamping it. You do not need to tighten as much as normal anchor points where the cable is clamped between a washer and the arm. If I had to guess, I would use 5Nm.

If you go the V-O webpage on these brakes, here. You will notice that the brake cable exits the pinch bolt on both sides at a strange angle. Whoever installed it didn't hold the anchor with a 10mm wrench while tightening the M4 bolt. Please do not follow their example.

By the numbers:
Power: 5/5; Ease of installation 3/5; Field Serviceable: 1/5

Travel Math

Now that I've been riding a bike through the countrysides of Poitou-Charentes for nearly five months, new roads and towns are getting harder to come by. I've covered some of the smoother, more scenic routes dozens of times. In order to expand the limits of my cycling universe, exploring more routes and towns farther from Poitiers, I've decided to combine the two most convenient forms of travel here, bikes and trains.

Instead of biking in loops, always ending up back home, I've decided to try riding one way and taking the train back. The weather has been improving and I'm in much better shape than when I got here, making longer rides much more enjoyable. In addition, I can eat lunch and spend an hour or two exploring a city before hopping on the train back to Poitiers with my bike.

First destination: Niort.
Niort is around 80km from Poitiers, and is almost the same size. Biking there takes about 3-3.5 hours. Since Rebecca's students don't have class this week (because of Carnaval? Or Ash Wednesday? We're not really sure) she decided to take the train to Niort so we could have lunch together and explore on foot.

First step: Wake up early. Normally, I ride in the afternoon, but to make it to Niort in time for lunch, I'd have to leave by 9:30am. The trains stop running before I would be able to finish dinner, so I have to stick with lunch.

Wake up Jefe!

I got to Niort a bit before Rebecca's train was scheduled to come in, so I rode around a little to familiarize myself with some of the parts of town. Then I went to the train station...

...where I met Rebecca and got to change into real clothes (which Rebecca had kindly brought for me).

We found a nice place for lunch. Actually, we were looking in the window of a random place and then a customer came out to smoke his post-lunch clope, and he pretty much forced us to go in.

We sat down to recount our adventures of the morning. Rebecca *just barely* made it to the train on time thanks to the self-service ticket kiosks and their convenient option to "buy a ticket for a train that is departing immediately." Jefe found a really nice route from Poitiers to Niort with lots of smooth roads, nice scenery and not much traffic.

The part between Mothe St. Heray and Chavagné is especially nice, with views down into the neighboring valley.

Rebecca ordered une salade de thon, and Jefe had the plat du jour: roast chicken with spanish rice. We had just about finished up when...

--ok, now I have to recount an exchange I had with the waiter at lunch. It's embarrassing for me, but I feel that it bears an important lesson about French café culture--

...after the meal (in french)

Waiter: Vous êtes terminés? C'était bien? Vous voulez un dessert?
All done? How was it? Would you like some dessert?

Me: Non, merci, euh... {il donne un coup d'oeil a Rebecca} un dessert, peut-être?
No thanks, uh...{glancing at Rebecca} how about a dessert?

For some reason, I thought he had asked if I wanted the bill (l'addition). Perhaps it was my fatigued state, I'm not sure. Besides the obvious humor in rejecting and then asking for the same thing in a single sentence, Rebecca reminded me of two things one must understand about French waiters: (1) they will never offer the bill, and will wait until you ask for it (unless you're just getting coffee or drinks, or if you're in Paris & are perceived by the waitstaff as incompetent to do such things properly) and (2) they will always offer dessert. How I could have mis-heard and failed to take into account these two cardinal rules of the café, I will never know.

Giggling, we wandered through the streets of Niort, stopped by the Donjon, and island hopped in the middle of the Sèvre Niortaise River. We also saw this interesting alternative to standard bollards.

Serpent guarding the pedestrians from the evil cars

When it came time to leave, we got tickets for a local (TER) train to Poitiers. I packed my bike up for the train ride and covered it with a fitted bedsheet that Rebecca got that morning just for this purpose.

So much easier than taking it fully apart!

Everything worked out great. I got to try out some new roads, and we both got to explore a new place. This leads me to my new Theory of Travel Math:

more sweet math, for all you nerdfighters

On the Untranslatable (L'intraduisible)

In America, this gesture might translate roughly to "I don't know";

in France, it means "c'est normale!"

There exist some words in French for which there are no exact English translations. This is apart from idiomatic expressions like Quel dommage or Grâce au ciel. There are, of course, plenty of loan phrases, such as laissez faire, la pièce de la resistance, or noblesse oblige, which we use in English; but these often do not have the same connotation in the context of a French conversation.

No, the "untranslatable" is something different altogether.

The existence of untranslatable words points to conceptual areas that exist in French but not in English. Perhaps one of the most representative examples of the untranslatable are the french words normale and normalement. Many dictionaries will tell you that normale means "normal," and online translation engines will turn c'est normal into "it's normal" and normalement into "normally" or "usually." I find these translations misleading, but I've been struggling to find a way to convey the appropriate nuance.

Here is a typical conversation in which normalement would appear:

A: Est-ce que vous pouvez m'aider? Je n'ai pas bien compris la dernière annonce. Ils ont dit que le train departra ou pas?

Can I ask you a question? I didn't quite hear that last announcement. Did they say that the train is leaving or not?

B: Normalement on part dans vingt minutes, mais on ne sait jamais.

We should be leaving in twenty minutes, but you never can tell!

As you can see, in the above conversation, the term normalement has the sense of "theoretically" or "ideally". But this is also not a perfect translation, as it would not make sense to translate the phrase c'est normale into "it's theoretical." Below is a conversation that hinges on the nuance of c'est normale:

A: Je suis desolé, mais mon vélo est bloqué par votre voiture. Est-ce que vous pouvez avancer juste un petit peu?

I'm sorry, but your car is blocking my bike. Could you move forward just a little bit?

B: Bof, je veux bien mais il faut attendre cet camion.

Well, I'd like to, but we'll have to wait for that truck.

A: Ah oui, c'est normale.

That's how it goes.

In a corollary to the Wharf Hypothesis, I would like to argue that the words normalement and normale evoke a sensibility that doesn't exist in other cultures. Maybe we could call it "French resignation"; what's normal in France is not necessarily normal anywhere else.

When you start to think about it, I think you'll notice that we (meaning English-speakers) have adopted many French terms and phrases in order to express feelings of regret and resignation. In American politics, we use the phrase laissez-faire to describe the kind of government that shrugs its shoulders (see photo at top) and consents to let its people do whatever the hell they want. And if an English-speaker says c'est la vie, he or she is communicating the inevitability of an inconvenient situation. What c'est la vie actually means is c'est comme la vie française; the implication is that inconvenient situations are French in nature, which many French people would confirm.

What are some other examples of these kinds of untranslatables?

c'est normale

(nerdy math joke)

Update:
It occurs to me that I should reread Doug Hofstadter's Le ton beau de marot, which is all about the art of translation. I've also been thinking a lot about translation in movie titles and subtitles. There's a movie that came out a while ago in the US called Religulous; the word "religulous" is a mash-up of the words "religious" and "ridiculous," which evokes the movie makers' beliefs about faith. You can imagine that this would be difficult to translate into another language. However, the French translation is rather impressive: "Religolo," a mash-up of the words "religieux" (meaning religious) and "rigolo" (meaning funny or odd).

Accomplishments...holiday gift guide

The holidays are here. We can tell because they have hung Christmas lights in our street. They have also affixed really strange cylindrical stereo speakers to the sides of the buildings on our street, which play insipid pop music all day long.  The one under our window mysteriously broke immediately after installation, which we didn't have anything to do with, but didn't cry over either.  The other speakers quickly followed suit.  Perhaps they were installed incorrectly. Perhaps the technicians got bored, or the neighborhood revolted?  We don't know.

So anyway, we are not big on gifts, but we have heard that other people might be. With that in mind, this is our holiday gift guide. 

First up, Rebecca received her complimentary contributor's copy of the latest installment of the journal Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Her essay entitled "Dialogics of Discomfort: Race, Roles, and Performance" was chosen for publication six months ago. Jeff has been reading some of the other essays and found them very interesting. Particularly the essay on Lonnie Athens' theory of violentization; how individuals become conditioned to use violence to resolve social situations, and how this theory might be expanded to larger population groups. It you know a loved one who would benefit from discussions of race (esp. Native American, African-American, or Persian), quilts, the development of violent criminals and violent societies, and the power of the mind in overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder the 31st volume of Studies in Symbolic Interaction may be just the thing you're looking for.  Only $110! (sheesh)

For someone who is more aesthetically minded, might we suggest some handmade furniture? Our friend Trevor, who lives in California, has completed another superior piece (he also made our hinged coffee table--currently in storage--with a little help from Jeff).

I like the contrasting color of the wedges in the tenons. Overall, everything seems to fit together exceptionally well (the style is Chinese, which we think means there were no screws, nails or other artificial fasteners used), and the instances of intentionally non-right angles here and there are interesting. In the email accompanying this photo, he mentioned that, though hard to see, the depth and width both vary slightly from top to bottom. He didn't mention a price, but we think he should ask for at least enough to offset the cost of his rent for the time it took to make it...$3600.

The economic crisis has hit everyone (even the french cafe culture is in trouble) and so we also have something for the budget-conscious. The Theorem of the Day is designed to make groundbreaking theorems accessible through clear explanations and examples using real world situations. For 2009, there will also be a special edition calendar available titled Theorems by Women Mathematicians. This will feature two of our favorite mathematicians (and really nice people): Carla Savage and Sylvie Corteel and their Polynomial Coprimality Theorem.

So, if you are the type of person who plans on buying stuff, wrapping it up, transporting it somewhere, and then giving it to someone else, we hope that this guide has made your life easier. Make good decisions and keep checking in with us here at arideaday.  We'll remain in our cave throughout the holiday season occasionally venturing out for supplies and, of course, fresh blog material for your reading pleasure.