Hope V-Twin hydraulic disc brake converter review

Paul Oldham may not have had to do much braking when he won the 2015 Three Peaks Challenge cyclocross race, but when he did he used cable operated STI brake levers with bar top secondary levers and the Hope V-Twin hydraulic disc brake convertor to convert the cables to operate his hydraulic brakes.

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The Hope V-Twin sits on a bracket below the stem and accepts the cables from a cable brake lever at the front of the unit, with a pair of hydraulic lines coming out of the bottom and actuating the front and rear brake calipers. Running hydraulic lines rather than cables from the stem to the brakes means that there’s much less opportunity for cable stretch, better modulation with less sponginess and an increase in overall power.

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Setup is relatively straightforward, although it does require dismounting your stem to fit the converter bracket. The grub screws which hold the cables in place are quite fiddly though, and since the system comes pre-bled, you may not be able to feed the hoses through the bike’s existing cable runs: we had to resort to zip ties along the top tube. The V-Twin comes with Hope’s excellent brake rotors too, in 160mm diameter, which can be swapped out for your existing brake’s rotors.

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Once bedded in, braking performance is definitely a notch up on cable-operated disc brakes, although not quite up to the standard of Shimano and SRAM’s newer all-hydraulic systems. And there’s the rub: with excellent hydraulic brakes now available for dropped bar bikes, it may be more sensible to make the swap from mechanical disc brakes completely rather than install the Hope V-Twin as a half-way house option.

For more details visit Hope.