Squeal Like a Pig

Getting Rid of Brake Squeal and Chatter From My TRP EuroX Brakes

I wanted to share my two week odyssey to get rid of excessive squeal from my 2007 TRP EuroX brakes on my carbon rims. The 2007 TRP EuroX brakes do not have any kind of toe-in adjustment. [Note: the newer magnesium models do]. On my old bike, this was not a problem because I was running aluminum rims and the brakes did not squeal or chatter. This year, however, I have a new "A" bike set up with carbon rims (older model Zipp 340 wheels). With these wheels, the squealing on the rear brake is simply unbearable and the fork chatter was harrowing.

I tried a variety of fixes:

- Bending the arms of the brake shoes to create toe-in (clamp the shoe in a vise and grip the arm with a open-end wrench)

- Replacing stock cork carbon-specific pads with yellow SwissStop pads. SwissStops can be used with both carbon and aluminum rims, as long as you’re careful to remove any aluminum shavings from the pad before using them with carbon rims.

- Increasing the yoke angle (by raising the straddle cable carrier), but at the price of decreased mechanical advantage.

Finally, I replaced the brake shoes with after-market shoes from Velo-Orange with adjustable toe-in. With these you need to adjust the toe-in first and then install the shoe into the brake arm. This turned out to be the magic bullet. I was able to dramatically increase the toe-in with these shoes and completely eliminate both squeal and chatter, even under hard braking conditions.

With renewed confidence in my brakes, I’m able to carry more speed into turns and hit the brakes at the last possible minute, rather than scrubbing speed all the way up to the turn. My speed through technical sections has increased noticeably as a result.

- I also ran across this helpful video on adjusting cantilever brakes. A little simplistic, but one helpful tip was to wrap a rubber band around the back of the brake pad in order to adjust toe-in.
I know everyone says that "brakes are overrated, because they just slow you down," but in 'cross, better braking = more speed.