A long long time ago i made one, it was so flimsy, so weak, and so poorly made, it was hard to judge if the problem was spencer wasnt the greatest at riding at the the time, needed more power, the brake wasnt precise enough, or it just flat out didnt work.
Griptape would wear off in about 5 revs of the wheel.
what about the cutting board idea?
Actuly, i meant the calf pad would help fight the plate fliping, you would have the brake cable run up to a lever in your hand.
what if you put a lot of griptape on. like 5 layers?
Well, i dunno, I think both spencer and i agree that its quite annoying to do en entire ride leaning into the wheel, its tiring, and hard on your tire. It might work though.
still…
if you could rid up something that was activated by your calf, it’d kill 2 birds with one stone. It’d fight the forces of the brake, and it would, well, brake. (no pun intended)
it would wear through in 25 revs of the wheel. 
didn’t see that coming:)
I think teh cutting board would brake very unwell, because it would be very slippery.
Well the idea was to have the pad not be a lever, but something to hit your leg when you apply the brake, and stop the plates from fliping.
Sorry Miles but that is the worst idea so far…I think that metal pole into the spokes as mentioned earlier would work better 
I think the problem was that I sucked at riding back then and I only really tried the brake one time and then decided it didn’t work.
One of the times Evan came out to my house we did some pretty calm offroading bc and I had a slick tire on my 24" and I can honestly say that when we were going down steep hills tire was shoved so hard into my right leg that I could have completely taken my left foot off and I wouldn’t feel any difference.
Miles sad:( Spencer Mean 
Miles hurt Spencer:)
wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Hi Evan,
I thought your original BC with brake design was quite nifty (even if it didn’t work very well), so it’ll be quite fun to see what you come up with - please take lots of pictures!
It seems like a disk brake would work quite well because you could mount all the active parts straight onto the plates, and just have the rotor attached to the wheel.
Two other possibilities would be :
Some kind of spoon brake that would push directly on the tire surface, but arranged so that you can put a decent amount of force onto it. Various penny farthings (and I think some unicycles…) have a spoon shaped metal brake designed to rub on the tire and slow it. it obviously won’t stop you that quickly, but I’m not sure on a BC that’s so important.
A hub brake (as used on the front wheel of some town / road bikes) would be interesting. It’d keep all the mechanism out of the way of your legs (and safe from damage), and just give you a cable operated braking system. Your main problem here would probably be finding an appropriate hub though - most of them will be designed with 700c wheels and puny axles in mind. You might need to do some customising, or build your own, both of which sound like hard work.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with - please post pics and vids when it’s ready!
Well that is basically trying to brake using a piece of paper.
Yeah, I get my disc wheel tomaorw, im finnalizing my design now, and ordering metal. I should have a Proof-of-Concept protoype done by next week or so.
Right now the current design is to have the disc brake caliper mounted to the front of the right plate. I am going to setup the brake so it cant lock, even when the lever hits the grip, this may change, but for testing i want anti lock. Im using a 165mm avid rotor, and an avid BB5 caliper. I am getting 6ft of housing, and the lever and grip will be at one end just hanging slack. This will allow for those arm movments i talked about earlier. This, along with the calf arm, seems to be the best course of action right now.
If this dosnt work, i think i am going to do a fork design, with v brake, and calf pad.
I think if you used the disc brake but had it activated by applying pressure to a lever with you calf. Sort of like Jeff Groves’ idea, but have it activate the disc brake. I’ll try to make a diagram but my Paint skills arn’t that great.
Now see spencer thats where your wrong, Its braking with a peice of paper covered in glue and sand!
Yes, so it might partially shred up your tire then get torn apart…
Kind of like this. It would eliminate arm movement problems, I think it would work. Also if you add leg braces that might help.
PS: Sorry for the bad quality diagram
brakes.bmp (823 KB)
I think that would work. would it get in the way of hopping though?
My new bc is for offroad, no hopping involved there.
