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Lost my brakes in the rain

  • Thread starter Thread starter BluePlateSpecial
  • Start date Start date
tkent02 said:
I never said they were wonderful, if they were wonderful I wouldn't have replaced them with better ones. I'm saying they were not death traps. You are saying this guys brakes failing completely is normal?

I'm saying Bullsh:t.
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You seem to be reading something into what I wrote that wasn't there. I'm saying they were crap in the wet kind of conditions that commonly existed IN THE COUNTRY I was living in. Many thousands of other riders discovered it too. I know I'm not bull****ting - I'm telling you my direct experience of these dreadful things.
It should tell you something that I'm happy enough with the later brakes to stick with them and even fit them to both bikes. In time, as the supply of good parts for the later brakes dries up, I will probably fit ex-Deauville Brembos to both of them, but for now I'm sticking with '80-on calipers and keeping them up to scratch. Now those don't have anything like the shortcomings of the '79 ones.
ps. There's another thread I started where I described how I started to strip the '79 calipers and discovered they were so corroded internally, through cunning design, allowing road muck and salt to sit inside the body of the caliper, that I concluded that they were dangerous for further use and tossed them in the corner.
Strike 2 against Suzuki 1970's design.
Howver, having said that - the rest of the bike was bloody good (except the charging system, as we all know) and it's because of that I've put up with its shortcomings all these years.
When I diss Suzuki over a failure or two it's because I feel let down - I expected better from them, escpecially from a part or system that could been deadly.
 
Here's what the new guy asked:

BluePlateSpecial said:
Got caught in a little rain on my way back from a bike show yesterday. It had only been raining for a couple of minutes and I hadn't ridden through any puddles, but as I turned into my subdivision I realized that my front brakes were gone. Tried to use my back brake to stop but with the wet pavement it locked up and I started to slide. Somehow I managed to recover and avoid hitting the median or laying it down and I managed to make my way home SLOWLY.

Awhile back I noticed a small drip of brake fluid coming from the lower part of one of the front calipers. I am assuming that the rain washed some of this down onto the rotors which caused my front brakes to fail.

It has been raining off and on here since so I haven't tested the bike now that it is dry but does that sound plausible?
Click to expand...



And here's what you said:

Grimly said:
Welcome to the 1980s and the sheer crap we had to put up with during wet weather.
Modern pad materials made a huge improvement, even on old caliper and disc designs, but it's only really brought car-type take-it-for-granted braking to bikes in the past 20-odd years. Earlier than that, you have to be a bit cautious in the wet, decent pad material or not.
Part of riding defensively in the '80s was keeping the water wiped off the disc by regularly giving the lever a light touch and hoping you didn't really need to brake hard at any time.
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Basically telling this newb not to bother fixing his brakes, that these are terrible brakes and that is normal.

It is NOT normal. The early GS brakes were not as good as later ones but they were not unsafe, they were much much better than the disc brakes other bikes had just a few years before..

If you want to get new riders killed I can't think of a better way of doing it than telling him his non functional brakes are normal.

If your calipers were corroded your maintenance was unsafe, not the brakes. Mine never corroded riding the bike over 100,000 miles, almost daily and usually in rain.

I did change the brake fluid once in a while, and lubed the calipers occasionally too. You should try it.
 
greg78gs750 said:
i call bs on the stock brakes being terrible too. as for arrogance on the board, uh, welcome to the interwebz?? sheesh, what is this, a barney episode?
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I just get tired of the attitudes constantly being distributed apparently according to mood. I like to hack on a newbie as much as the next guy,but life is too short to go around being a prick all the time.
 
I get tired of idiots putting out false information that will get people killed.
 
tkent02 said:
I get tired of idiots putting out false information that will get people killed.
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Your opinion is not supported universally,my statement should lead an individual to modify there inadequate stock braking system,leading to safer operation.
 
Everyone should upgrade them, but not everyone will. I have never advocated not upgrading them.
Those who don't upgrade still deserve functional brakes, not some bonehead telling them it's normal for them not to work. You are not the bonehead I'm referring to.
My beef was not with you, but with the other guy saying thats how the crappy old brakes are supposed to work, failing in the rain, with brake fluid dripping out. It is not.
 
tkent02 said:
Everyone should upgrade them, but not everyone will. I have never advocated not upgrading them.
Those who don't upgrade still deserve functional brakes, not some bonehead telling them it's normal for them not to work. You are not the bonehead I'm referring to.
My beef was not with you, but with the other guy saying thats how the crappy old brakes are supposed to work, failing in the rain, with brake fluid dripping out. It is not.
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Tom,

Tru dat.

For a curmudgeon, you're right a lot.
 
I don't think anyone is advocating neglect of basic brake maintenance on the basis that they are doomed to be bad in the wet. Everyone reading this forum, especially coming from a car background, should understand that to a far greater extent than any other road vehicle, maintenance is your neck. What does bad mean anyway - it's relative. Some unconsciously expect degradation or will have slowed more than the brakes degrade. Maybe they don't trust tyres in the wet and back off completely.
The question is was there a time and place when the reduction of brake performance in the wet on new bikes could scare the living **** out of you and the answer to that is definitely yes and no amount of maintenance could rectify it. You learned to slow down but it could still take you by surprise. It's that first half second after you squeeze that makes the biggest and longest lasting impression. As for dragging them every few miles to keep them dry don't make me laugh. Might as well be submerged down there when it's raining stair rods.
If you look at early brake designs they seem rudimentary now but at least back then everyone understood that they were what they were and you lived with it. The problem is when a brake is one thing in the dry but is different by a large margin in the wet.
If I recall correctly discs were a cost decision. Many argued that drums were superior inherently and they persisted on the track for a time. It appears that discs went through an evolutionary process to erode the difference between wet and dry but some riders at certain times found the variation scary.
This New Scientist article in from 1984 and Suzuki don't come too well out of it.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=f7D...torcycle brake performance in the wet&f=false
 
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Grimly said:
Exactly.
Suzuki (and the other makers) knew they were selling death on wheels to hapless riders who used them in the rain. The 1980 bike was a turning point ....
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I rode a 1974 GT550 roughly 25K miles, and probably a thousand were in the rain and another thousand on wet roads. That included rain so heavy that I had to leave the road because I could only see a few feet in front of me. Other than needing a fraction of a second to dry off the front disc, braking began quickly and was linear to applied pressure in all conditions. Unless the water sprayed on your brakes contains lubricants, the OE braking system works well enough for the intended purpose.
 
tkent02 said:
Everyone should upgrade them, but not everyone will. I have never advocated not upgrading them.
Those who don't upgrade still deserve functional brakes, not some bonehead telling them it's normal for them not to work. You are not the bonehead I'm referring to.
My beef was not with you, but with the other guy saying thats how the crappy old brakes are supposed to work, failing in the rain, with brake fluid dripping out. It is not.
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Jesus, you really are some sort of prize.
Once again, you're putting words in my mouth - stop it; it makes you look as if you lack comprehension skills.
If I'd actually MEANT to say to him - put up with it, we all had to, and it's some sort of initiation ceremony, tough luck - I would have actually written that. But no, I didn't. I just pointed out that late 70's brakes were crap, they're still crap and they will always be crap. I really don't care about your opinions and the opinions of some who hardly ever got their bikes away from the polishing rag; you will not change my mind on this - I've been through some real crap weather with the 70's brakes and it's something I never want to do again.
And as for your snidey remarks about my standards of maintenace, you wouldn't be saying that to my face.
 
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The OP was losing brake fluid. Tom said that the brakes needed attention. Others chimed to say Suzi brakes were sh1te. Yet more others said different.Wet weather overshadowed loss of fluid. Most missed that. Point remains - if your brakes are leaking fluid, they need attention.
 
That's pretty much what I've been saying all along.

This flake says that's how they roll.

He's full of it.
 
Brendan W said:
This New Scientist article in from 1984 and Suzuki don't come too well out of it.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=f7D...torcycle brake performance in the wet&f=false
Click to expand...
It was an utter disgrace that the Motorcycle Industry Association was able to delay the implementation of safety measures like that. Another factor that doesn't seem to register with people here, is the poor availability of better pads at the time and even when they were available they were often three times the price of normal pads - and chewed discs up. So, many people stuck with normal pads for better or worse and tried to reach a compromise.
Yet another thing that some don't register is the drenching conditions when in the middle of endless clouds of motorway spray - spray kicked up by wheels of big rigs - miles and miles of them.
It was crap - it was utter crap. Thank gawd I survived it.
 
Grimly said:
Yet another thing that some don't register is the drenching conditions when in the middle of endless clouds of motorway spray - spray kicked up by wheels of big rigs - miles and miles of them.
It was crap - it was utter crap. Thank gawd I survived it.
Click to expand...

You think it only rains in Ireland?
Most of us survived, it wasn't any big deal.

People who couldn't ride sometimes didn't fare so well.

Just as a poor craftsman blames his tools, a poor rider blames his motorcycle.
 
There's a nasty rumour going around that somewhere on this thread 30000 posts told 300 posts to get off his computer and do some maintenance.:confused:
 
Brendan W said:
I would imagine it's easy enough to 'survive' something that hasn't been experienced.
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Yes; I imagine Captain Querulous there fondly imagines he rode in the same rain/spray I did. I can assure him, his axlehole would be so puckered the seat would resemble the Rockies, assuming he ever got out of Granny Mode.
Whatever, the silly old fool is on my ignore list for a while.
I'd still like to see him say things like he did to my face - typical keyboard warrior.
 
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