People like myself who cycle casually for exercise or commuting have little need for the high-performance upgrades of professional and serious enthusiast riders. But I cannot stress enough that it always makes sense to invest in the most important active safety feature your bike has: brakes. It's too simple a precaution NOT to take, and could very well save you from injury or worse. Now, I can't justify putting the latest high performance hydraulic disc or cantilever braking system on my humble commuter bike– quality side-pulls are fine. What I will spend the extra money on, though, are the brake pads. These Kool Stop pads are pricey, yes. But they are superb and worth the cost. Cut to the point, YES– you will notice drastically improved braking performance after swapping a set of these pads in. But there's more; YES– they are incredibly durable and have outstanding wear capability; YES– they work excellent in wet or dry conditions; YES– they are easy to install, adjust, and even have built-in toe to keep braking squeak-free. Of course, you will need to make sure this type of pad works with your braking mechanism, but there are a wide variety of Kool Stop pads for all brake types. They take a short amount of time to properly break (no pun intended) in to full stopping potential. You will need to add slack to your brake line to give you some play in the control, as a tight brake pull with these pads can easily result in braking with only two settings: "zero" and "summersault over the handlebars". These are a worthwhile investment that offer tremendous performance, extraordinary durability (did I mention they come with an extra set of pads?), and are probably the best "splurge" upgrade you can – or rather, SHOULD – make to your bike.

These are really excellent pads. Stops really well. Toe in adjustment is easy to do. No squealing. I put them on some early1990s Campagnolo Athena brakes. The vertical slot for the brake pad mounting was just a bit too narrow, by only ~0.01 inches. So, rather than filing the beautiful Campy brakes to widen the slot, I reduced the diameter of the sleeve nut down - the hex head fastener shown is actually a sleeve nut that fits over a threaded post that extends out of the pad. This was easily done by mounting the sleeve nut onto a ~2" long threaded bolt (the thread is 10-32 UNF) and holding that in a drill. Then spinning the drill I ran a flat file along the outer diameter of the sleeve nut to shave off about 0.015 inches. Not as precise as a lathe but it works. Having a caliper to measure diameter helps but one could just do trial and error to check fit if you don't own a caliper. Note: this should only be done if the amount of matl coming off of the sleeve nut is very marginal. Taking too much matl off will weaken the nut. Also, this was all worth doing since the pad material itself is replaceable, so hopefully this is a one-time thing.

I bought a Trek 1.1 last August and have so far put about 1,000 miles on it. Everything on the Trek 1.1 delivers a decent enough ride for a beginner like me. I don't have experience with a much more expensive bike, but everything on this 1.1 (including the shifting, the 8-speed cassette and compact crankset, its aluminum frame, and even the Bontrager saddle) feels pretty solid. The one exception I noticed right away that was lackluster were the brakes. After just about 50 miles, the pads started making noticeable scraping noise against the rims when the brakes were applied. I understand it is the friction between the pads and the rims that produces the stopping force, but these noises together with the uncertainty of the gripping power of the brakes made every stop a little tenuous. Especially when I was going downhill and tried to tap the brakes ever so slightly, this scraping noise was already quite noticeable, but I didn't notice the same noise from the other cyclists riding down the same hills. I thought "May be they didn't use their brakes at all?", but that was quite impossible given the grade we were going down on.I tried cleaning the rim and the pads to make sure there was no debris trapped in the groves, but this didn't seem to help much. Furthermore, I noticed tiny black particles collecting on the front of my fork, apparently they came from the materials breaking off from the brake pads. It seemed that the black plastic was flaking off from the pad under friction, and they made the fork very dirty very quickly.Some riders recommended these Kool Stop brake pads and I thought I would give them a try. I ordered two sets (front and back) and put them on last night. Installation was easy. The black part of these pads faces the front; the salmon to the back. Amazon has a couple of videos with this listing showing you how to install pads, except they didn't demonstrate the toe-in. These pads have a mounting screw that pivots in a direction parallel to the width of the pads, so basically, you want the front of the pads (the "toes") to touch the rim before the back when you apply the brakes to avoid squealing (or brake chatter). You can either search on youtube for a toe-in video, or you can simply follow the standard installation instructions but before you fasten down the mounting screw, place a folded business card (the cardboard on the packaging works well for me) between the salmon colored part of the pad and the rim to provide a spacer, and then screw it down tight.End result? Today I took my Trek 1.1 for a 50-mile ride which had plenty of >10% downhills mixed in with some long stretches of 5 to 8% down grades. The brakes were absolutely quiet whether I just tapped them lightly or braked hard. These pads have superb stopping distance and the amount of control these new pads added to my ride was a refreshing experience. It's amazing how much more confident the ride felt to me with just a $40 upgrade -- just wish I had done it sooner.Update, Day 2: Second ride after these Kool Stop pads were installed. This time a continuous 3.2-mile downhill ride averaging about -8% grade. Absolutely great control and phenomenal stopping power.