Qualifier: With any brake pad, get a feel for it and learn how hard you gotta squeeze to stop. These don't have as much contact area with the rim, but we've used them with no problems. Don't install them at the top of the mountain.

Sanity Brake Pads: Stubby V-Brake Pads that don’t make you deflate your tires

The design fault of every single V-brake on the market is that the brake mounts close to the fork blade and seat stays. So close that when you release the brake to mount or remove a fat-tire wheel, the long, 72mm brake shoes bump into the frame or fork before opening up enough to let the fat tire out. This is insane. It is a design demerit that would have been solved long ago, if bike makers weren’t going to disc brakes.

There may BE a theoretical mechanical advantage to putting the brake shoes there. But at most it is theoretical, and it shouldn’t trump the real world practical reason for not doing it—which is that before removing or installing your fat-tired wheel, you have to deflate it. If you get a puncture, the deflate takes care of itself, but you might do as I’ve done at least ten times: you pump the tire up when it’s out of the bike, and then you have to deflate it again and rempump. Or if you have the kind of rack that grabs the fork dropouts, holy cow, you have to deflate your tire just to use your rack. Forget that noise.

A few years ago we got some front-only, 40mm long stubbies from Kool-Stop. They were slick, with polished silver shoe holders and general gleam. They had about 80 of them, and we sold out fast and we can’t get more of them. Period; impossible.

But Spencer, our buyer, found some 40mm, down-n-dirty stubbies made by Odyssey, a BMX company. They call them Ghost Pads. These are, presumably, for young BMXers who can’t be troubled to toe-in pads to stop squeeks, or to deal with the usual complement of concave and convex mating spacers and washers typical of high-end fancy V-brake shoes. Little Snot-nosed Billy can’t be trusted with those, so he needs something Billy-proof, or close to it.

These pads are GENIUS, FANTASTIC, and EASY. They have one bolt and no loose washers. The hang-card sez: NO ADJUSTMENTS. INSTALL AND STOP.

They are directional, like all brake shoes, but only because they have built-in toe-in. It may trouble you to discover that the pads are only an inch (25.4mm) long—more than half an inch shorter than the KOOL-STOP stubbies, which were already shockingly short (when you’re used to 54mm road pads or 72mm V-/cantilever pads).

You’ll be as delighted to discover as we are to tell you that you can’t tell. They brake fine-to-great. Normal. You’d never know. And of course, when you open your brakes to install or remove a fat wheel, holy moses, the pads clear the frame and the wheel practically jumps to where it needs to go.

These are features worth paying for, but in fact, we sell these for $10 a pair (one brakes worth).

Brakes - Cantilever

Sanity Brake Pads: Stubby V-Brake Pads that don’t make you deflate your tires