KMX Cobra brake problem.

I was having trouble with the brakes on my KMX Cobra. The right brake (my right as a sit on it) was coming on earlier and more strongly than the left side. So, off to the bike shop I went (slowly as the brakes were rubbing and not working well). Luckily Marc the bike shop dude is open to the idea of fixing weird bikes I buy on eBay. Some bike shops don't want to know you unless you're there buying one of their $2000 bikes.

We started fiddling. Trying to see if there was a way to adjust the brakes to get them acting more evenly. After half an hour of fiddling the brakes weren't rubbing any more but still pretty much the same for pulling the trike into broad slides.

What was happening was that I would slide sideways if I tried to brake. There isn't much traction at the best of times on the rear wheel so any braking on the rear whilst braking on the front would just cause a broad slide with the left side of the trike leading (so that's turning to the right while skidding). This would end with a roll to the left side when it got traction.

Anyway, there wasn't any adjustment that could be made to fix it. We figured that the left brake was activating later and less than the right. But why? We got it down to different levels of cable flex/drag. The cable housing to the left brake is roughly 800mm long whereas the right side is less than 200mm long. The left one has loops whereas the right one only has one loop.

Being unable to eliminate these perfectly normal problems with the left cable we decided to replicate them to the right brake. To do that we simply fitted the old left brake cable and housing. We had replaced the left cable and housing during attempts to eliminate the problem.

The excess length follows the left cable towards the centre of the bike then loops back to the right brake. The excess cable length doesn't get in the way or interfere with the steering.

This worked perfectly. The bike holds its line under full brake now. The rear wheel doesn't skid to the left when it loses traction. I don't have huge crashes under brake (it was fun until I dislocated a rib the day before a video shoot).