Having seen the great success Ty and Dom had with the Armor hydraulic disc brake package earlier in the year, I was excited when a package turned up at our door with Armors’ even lower priced cable disc brakes inside.

Unlimited Bicycles are bringing the brakes into the county and GripSport head-honch Jon Weaving had thrown a set of them our way to see if they were up to the standard of their hydraulic counterparts.

Before we get into the gory details of the test I’ll let you know one thing (maybe the most important thing) about these brakes; just like the Armor hydraulic discs, the Armor cable discs come at a very wallet friendly price. Try $165 for a 7" front 6" rear setup straight from GripSport.

The brakes are a floating caliper design, meaning the disc caliper is free to ‘float’ left and right in relation to the disc rotor. They use the same pads as Magura Louise hydraulic brakes and magnetic tension to hold the pads in. As with all cable disc brakes, one pad is active (moving) and one is fixed.

The brakes bolted straight on to my ’03 Marzocchi Dirt Jumper 3’s with the supplied international standard adapters and with the bolts for the floating caliper adjusted they were ready to be setup.

Setup however proved to be somewhat fiddly, with the extra-high spring tension in the disc caliper making setting the cable pull properly a two-man job.

Once they had been installed and set up the brakes took the requisite 30-40 hard stops before they began to bed in properly. Unlike other cable disc brakes I've used however, the brakes continued to improve in power and modulation for a long time after what I would consider a 'normal' period of bedding in and didn't reach their full potential by my reckoning, until around a month of solid use.

Once they had finished fully bedding in, the Armor cables had slightly more power a 6" Hayes HMX cable disc with EBC Red brake pads and considerably more modulation. I think by changing the stock Armor/Magura pads for EBC Red pads you could give the Armors even more bite, though perhaps at the expense of modulation.

The magnetic pad retention system worked perfectly and made installing and removing brake pads a snap. The brakes proved easy to adjust for brake pad spacing thanks to a 4mm allen key socket on the inboard side of the caliper.

It wouldn't be a farkin.net test if we didn't find a few issues with the product and the Armor Cables are no different. Firstly, the spring tension within the brake caliper was far too high for my liking, making pulling the levers a lot harder than it needed to be and giving me some serious arm pump for my first few rides.

As I see it there are two ways to remedy this problem, you can either get yourself some massive, herculean forearms and never worry about arm pump again, or you can dissassemble the caliper, take out the spring and gently heat it over a stove to fatigue the metal and lower the tension. Please note that doing this will void any and all warranty the brakes have and Farkin.net in no way endorses the practice, so don't do it, or even think about doing it. You have been warned.

The second problem I had with the brakes came from the nuts that are used to mount the caliper and allow it to float. Standard nuts are used for this and left alone, they will come loose. Despite checking and tightening these nuts every few runs, I ended up losing one which was a pain in the arse and cut short a days riding. Replace the nuts with Nylock nuts or get some Locktite on the suckers and this problem will be no more.

All in all the Armor cable discs are a fantastically powerful cable disc brake with excellent modulation but a slightly 'stiff' feel at the lever. At $165 for a full set, they offer exceptional value for someone looking to upgrade to cable disc brakes on a budget.

To get ahold of a set of these babies, you're going to have to slip a PM to 'Grip' in the forums or send an email to mail@gripsport.com.au .

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