A after a solid 2 months of testing I believe I can a give an honest review of the Armor hydraulic disc brakes. By all accounts, Armor disc brakes are manufactured by Pro Stop and are identical to the Dice Whiplash brakes, so it would be safe to assume that the Dice brakes perform in the same way.

After installing a rear Armor hydro on the back end of Dom's Stinky, the idea of getting some hydraulic discs started to play on my mind. At the time I had my Hayes mechanical discs working quite well but they just didn’t have the power I wanted from my brakes and I was starting to have some issues whereby they would work perfectly one and worse than Dia Compe 909s the next.

So I convinced the owner of my local bike shop to order some Armor Hydraulic brakes in after I had tracked down the supplier for him. Three days later we received a box stuffed with news paper and two complete, pre-bled hydraulic lever/line/caliper setups, six and seven inch rotors, two International standard adaptors for seven and six inch rotors respectively, rotor and caliper mounting bolts and some extra pads and cotter pins.

One thing I was glad to see was that the rotor mounting bolts were normal allen heads, not torx bolts. I’m sure torx bolts have some kind of advantage but I know I never have a torx head driver lying around in my camel back.

A point to note here, the levers on the Armor brakes are similar in design to Hope or Shimano open bath levers, meaning they must me mounted with the reservoir on top. So of you ride back brake right hand (FREAK! Ed.) you’ll have to swap cables and re-bleed. Total weight is round 1100 grams, which puts them on a par with Hayes hydraulic setups.

To fully test the brake I decided to give the brakes a quick re-bleed anyway but a look back in the box revealed no manual of any kind. With the Armor lever looking so similar to the Hope M4 mini lever I took the initiative and assumed that they would bleed in a similar fashion to Hope or Shimano brakes.

Using dot 5.1 fluid I performed a downward style bleed (after removing the pads of course) which took all of 5 minutes, then tightened everything back up and headed off.

Even before breaking the pads in the power and feel of these brakes was obvious, very bitey with lots of power. I did the mandatory 50 hard stops down my street and the brakes continued to impress me till I decided it was time to hit the trails.

One of the first things I noticed was the solid feel of the lever, quite similar to a well setup magura and very on – off with very little modulation. I found myself having to rethink my braking technique and forced myself to use 1 finger instead of 2 so I wouldn’t skid around every corner.

After a week of solid riding the brakea seemed to gain some modulation, this may have been a result of it wearing in or maybe I just learnt to use a finer touch, either way I knew I’d have issues going back to a cable anything again.

It wouldn’t be a Farkin.net review without some issues though; the cables/lines are very stiff and after being packaged in a box for many months they had developed a memory of being wound up so now they don’t sit flat between the cable guide and refuse to form any kind of neat loop going from my bars to the first guide or fork and generally look pretty ugly. I’m guessing heating the tubing would help sort this out. I have also put a small split in the hard plastic coating on the front brake cable, though this was probably due to me crashing or doing something dumb (like bar spins).

After 2 months of riding they have retained all their power and feel and I’m yet to have any serious issues. There could be some problems in the future trying to get new pads as they are unique to this caliper but the distributors seems to be supplying shops pretty well.

Oh yeah, I haven’t mentioned probably the biggest selling point of this brake system; you can buy a complete front and rear set for less than the price of one end of one of the big manufacturers hydraulic systems! Online shops have been selling full sets for $440 plus postage, which is just plain ridiculous! 

Being able to bring this kind of performance to this price point leads me to believe that that this is probably the best deal in mountain biking so far this decade.

When it came to specing out Tashas new AC frame it was clearly better value for money to run Armor hydro's than to buy any other disc brake system (cable discs included). If you ask me the Armor hydraulic discs are something that mountain biking needs more of.

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