Overview of Brake System for Mountain Bikes

"One of the great things about disc brakes is how easy it is to change your wheel. If you get a flat, have to transport your bike, anything like that, it makes it really simple because there's no levers or anything to undo to release the brake. It just slides right there onto that disc. So I'm going to try to walk you through taking your wheels on and off with disc brakes. This particular fork is sort of a quick release fork. I move this lever to loosen up the axle, what's called a through axle. Now I can just pull this out and the wheel just drops right out. You see the disc brake just slide cleanly on and off. I'm going to demonstrate with this other disc brake caliper that I have here, when you're putting your disc back on you need to make sure, you know it's a real simple thing to remember after doing it one or two times. The rotor, which you don't want to touch and get your greasy fingers on, needs to slide between the calipers. If you get it behind the pad, or wedged in somehow, it makes it really hard to get the wheel back on and you're going to damage all sorts of things. It's important to remember to slide it in through there. And you can see, when I pull on the lever, you can see how, by pulling the levers the calipers clamp the brake rotor to slow you down. I'll put the wheel back on real quickly. So you want to make sure when you are putting the wheel back on there's a certain way it goes. The disc side is always the left side of the bike, the opposite side that the chain and everything is on. So we just line the rotor up, pull it through, push out through axle, turn it till it's just about snug, then flip our switch to close it. And the rear end is similar, except you have to deal with having your chain in the way."