Adjust Brakes on Mountain Bikes

Video Transcript

"You only have three contact points with your bike, so it's really important that all your contact points are comfortable, powerful, and efficient. The contact point I want to talk about right now is your hands, your handlebars, and especially, how your hands interact with your brakes. So for me, someone who has a smaller hand - I wear an adult small-sized glove, so I've got a small hand. A lot of people's brakes - like, I can't ride some of my friends' bikes because I can't reach the brake levers. What I do to make the brakes work the best for me, and anyone with any other sized hand can do the same, is adjust things to fit my hand the best. It usually takes two tools to adjust the position of the brake lever, it turns up and down, and inside and out. That's usually one tool, which is the 4 millimeter Allen wrench. And then there's another tool, a smaller Allen wrench that you use to adjust the reach, which is how far from the handlebars your brake lever initially engages. A fancy brake lever like this gives you some other options where it's sort of an adjustment that also affects how much lever throw you have, as well. I can turn this and make the lever engage farther or closer to the handlebar, in terms of the internal bike point. It's hard to really show that on video."