Hello again
Small update regarding these calipers.
It took me a while to get around to using them. Build issues, then the weather got nasty, then I sold the bike, then I put them on a new bike, etc...
I got a few miles in on them when I installed them on my old Poseidon X. I installed them with floppy housing and old Deckas rotors and they worked well, braking power wasn't amazing but it was definitely enough for my kind of riding and better than the stock Poseidon calipers or the Juin Techs I had on my road bike. I'm confident braking power would have significantly improved with time, I barely broke them in before tearing the bike down and selling it to my cousin. He fell in love with the X after his first gravel ride, so we put a GRX groupset on it and it's now his (and I made a new riding buddy
).
I've since built a new gravel bike with AXS XPLR and thought this was a perfect time to test the Klamper knockoffs for real. Rather than buying AXS shifters, I bought wireless Blips, TRP brake levers (
https://trpcycling.com/product/rrl-sr/), and paired them up with these calipers. I began with compressionless housing and immediately ran into issues. The cable exit and brake mounts on this frame are built in such a way that will give mechanical brake cables some really strange bends that these calipers really don't like. Rear brake cable exit in particular creates a crazy tight bend into the caliper, making compressionless housing almost impossible too install
(almost). I moved forward with floppy housing, installation was a breeze but unfortunately braking power was straight trash. I put some blame on the cheap Amazon rotors with improper bedding, so I ordered some nice TRP rotors, fancy polished slick cables and gave compressionless housing another shot.
I pre-bent the housing into just the perfect size and shape to ensure access to the caliper cable entry, but it was only possible by installing without a ferrule. After all this trial and error (and $), braking power has improved, but not so much that I'm comfortable with big descents or very technical trails. Next step is changing out the pads to the Paul recommended Kool Stop metal pads. At this point, though, I think I'm ready to call it quits and switch to something fully hydraulic, as this frame is obviously meant to have. No fault to the calipers honestly, they worked great on the old X and I have no doubt they would have gotten better. Maybe I shouldn't have sold it
I think I'll retire these calipers for now. Maybe sell them or pull them back out for a steel frame build in the future.
In the meantime, I'm looking for a decently priced TRP Hylex brakeset or maybe even the LTwoo hydraulic set with the shifting guts removed. What do y'all think? Tbh selling the AXS XPLR groupset isn't out of the question, maybe start from scratch with a GRX, LTwoo or SRAM 22 hydraulic groupset. We'll see, bike building is fun!