i fucking KNEW IT! i fucking KNEW someone would run freestyle front brakes on a FIXIE before long! how did i know? because i fucking thought of it a year ago and never implemented!

dammitTOLE!

for those not in the know, 20 years ago, BMX freestyle tech took a massive leap forward with barspin technology that allowed you to still run brakes. it was a two-part tech — hollowBolt stems and a thing called a "rotor." the hollowBolt stem is just that — the bolt that holds the stem on is hollow in the middle, allowing your front brake cable to run down THROUGH your stem and fork, loop back up, and then attach to the front brakes, which were restructured to have the barrel adjuster on the low end and the pinch bolt on the high end. when BMXers made the jump to threadless stems a few years back, manufacturers started making hollowBolt threadless stem bolts, which you can run on a roadbike. that’s what’s going on in the bike above.

the other part of the tech, the "rotor," was a bearing system — two plates that spun around each other, with the rear brake cable going from the lever to the rotor, then a second cable from the rotor to the brake. when you pull the lever, the whole mechanism moves up and down, allowing the brake to be pulled. the rotor was eventually superceeded by the "gyro," which i won’t get into, but which was a zillion times better than the rotor and which is still used on freestyle bikes today.

the funny thing here is that most BMX freestylers don’t use brakes anymore (riding brakeless fixed, dangerous. riding brakeless freewheel, DEADLY), and fixie freestylers have never run brakes, so i wonder if (a) fixie freestylers will resent and blacklist this advance, or (b) come up with a whole new list of tricks!

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