Original Question: Why Maggies?
If you look back through the forum it is pretty clear that Maggies became the standard as the tires for MUni got wide enough to make caliper brakes useless. Once the tire hits the caliper, or wire you’re done.
Maggie’s are great brakes, but not without problems.
On my Nightrider frame I had maggies and found that I couldn’t get them far enough away from the rm to eliminate brake drag during mounting on a grade. The Nightrider is a pretty flexy frame, and when you are mounting uphill it’s really hard to mount without having the maggie stop the wheel. It did teach me to do a better rolling mount.
I then went to V’s, and they were really nice. Super easy to adjust the gap so that my rim didn’t rub. A benefit I wasn’t planning was that they didn’t stick out from the frame as much as maggies. They were pretty grabby when I first set them up, but after toeing in the pads a bit more than normal I had really nice, quiet, modulation. I prefer V’s to Maggies if I can swing it. I still have Maggies on my MUni due to the tire volume issue. I have started running a narrower tire, so maybe V’s will work on that, but for now I think the Maggies will stay.
I then went to a disc brake on the 36 (square taper crank mounted disc). The disc was the best of the lot. Frame flex is a non issue. The brake has such a small rotor that modulation is king. If you think about it a rim with a standard brake is pretty much a really large rotor, by making a smaller hub mounted rotor you don’t get nearly the leverage, so much better modulation. I really only use the brake for long sustained descents, so I had the caliper hooked up to a shift lever to use as a drag brake. If you can find a cable disc caliper that will work inside the tight clearances on a uni it is a nice way to go.