Could You Stop? Our Brakes Were Useless At This Angle

A lot of us don’t think twice about riding down a ramp or section of trail with a little bit of grade to it. But what if you had to come to a complete stop on it? Could you do it? We wanted to find out how hard it was to stop at what angle, so we built this ramp and did an experiment.

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this ramp is at 26 12 degrees on a mountain bike it’s quite easy to just roll down it and stop anytime you want we’re going to keep making it steeper today and there’s going to come a point where you lose traction or go over the handlebars today we’re going to figure out exactly what that angle is it works like this three Riders myself included are going to take turns rolling down the ramp they’re going to come to a full stop at the white line and then they’re going to continue down both Wheels have to make contact with the ramp and that has to be a stop longer than a second I it’s just going to get that point where so steep it’s just not going to keep traction and it’s just going to want to slide you know my goal is to not go over the handlebars or fall on my face my goal is to probably slide down the ramp at some point when we start losing grip so you think we’re going to lose grip at a certain point grip tape Can Only Hold so much and rubber tires can only grip so much so at some point one of those is going to start giving out and you’re just going to go for a little slide I think we’re going to have tons of grip the back wheel is going to start going up in the air before anything else happens clearly 262° is no problem for any mountain biker any mountain biker let’s make it a little bit steeper [Music] cool 30° is almost 60% grade if you were going down a 30° mountain bike trail you would be [Music] cooking complete [Applause] stop so that was only like not even 4° more that felt kind of different didn’t it when I dropped in I was like oh I’m feeling some slippage now a little bit I’m sorry to get more worried about the slipage you guys are both right what do you think like 35° yeah I think when they say that 45° increment which should be good yeah all right 35° trigonometry 12.2 [Music] ft that’s some pretty impressive trigonometry I did all right 35ish de complete stop yeah that was a complete stop [Music] oh yeah no problem 35° that’s starting to feel way steeper though should we go straight to 40 or should we try like 38 or something I think we just go smaller increments smaller increments right and I was feeling some slippage on that one so like 38 is deg 38 is let’s aim for 38 and see where we [Music] got so it’s worth noting we’re all on different bikes that by Design I’m on a cross country bike Mangler is on a trail bike and Joe is on a downhill bike I bet you can guess which one is designed for the steepest angles body position matters too both Joe and Mangler are taller than me Mangler much more so and so he can actually get way behind his bike but he’s also up much higher and that might put his center of gravity over his front axle before us and so I don’t know we’re going to see there’s something a little bit sketchy about this I can’t put my finger on [Music] [Music] it that counted yeah complete stop you got it [Music] we have a rainstorm coming so I’m going to get aggressive on the cuts here so now you might be wondering what happens when we do reach that point where we can’t stop that’s why I have good riders with me both Mangler and Joe are better Riders than I am and they know to let go of their brakes if you let go of your brakes you’ll just roll down and it’ll be like a rock roll or a quarter pipe or something and so we’re not stupid 42 1/ 12° we are starting to get proper steep this is the last one that we can walk up I lost a little bit of traction there I think I’m going to go for a round two let me see if I let out a little bit of tire pressure I had this pumped up pretty good okay so I have better traction now but I got to get further back I couldn’t hold traction do you care to try [Music] no I knew it was going to be hard to get to 45° but I thought we would get closer to 45° honestly what do you got your tire pressure at I don’t know I would go down a little lower than that yeah it helped me a lot but it didn’t help me enough [Music] dropping in oh come on Joe yes yes yes oh come on Joe okay so Joe because of skill or maybe the bike length he’s the last one standing so we’re going to try and increase it a little bit and see how he does this is 46° I don’t think you’re going to be able to walk up [Music] this goodness Jo bottom bracket you’re good you’re [Music] good he stopped he came to stop I think we found the limit but his back tire came up I feel like I can like get it I just need to like get my BB over that edge without it like it just throws me off a little bit makes me a little nervous but if you feel comfortable trying again yeah of course yeah yeah let’s do it and indeed the grip tape had ripped as Joe tried to control his speed as Joe made more attempts and it continued drizzling the grip tape ripped a bit more in spots where it was overlapping other grip tape this was possibly a fatal flaw in our already unscientific experiment I could have I felt like I could have I did the grip tape job wherever did the shoty grip tape job as the rain moved in and we packed up I couldn’t help but feel that Joe didn’t get a fair chance and so I pulled all the grip tape off of the ramp put one layer down the center so that it’s not overlapping anything and I even folded it over the edge so the tire can’t pull it up as it makes contact with the ramp we’re going to try and get Redemption [Music] 45.8 we got to make this a little bit steeper 46.2 Joe really wanted to try this but he had a procedure done to his hands so he’s not going to be riding for a few weeks but I’m going to try a different bike with a slacker head tube angle I figured it’s more traction than anything else and maybe Joe’s Tire compound was the factor or maybe Joe is just that good that bump down onto the ramp does not help pretty much nose wheelied the whole way down I got to get further back and I might be able to make it happen I also noticed a little bit of LOM on the ramp I did not clean off my tire sufficiently [Applause] if you shift your weight too far forward you go over the handlebar and if you go too far back you unweight your front tire and then it doesn’t have the traction and so there’s really this balance you have to [Music] achieve let’s just make it just recklessly low [Applause] [Music] all right 45° so this is where rise is equal to run this is 100% grade this is just as steep as it is flat about the same thing happened all right I’m calling it Joe stopped at the steepest angle I think it was 42.6 or something like that maybe he could do 43 maybe he could do 44 we could test this with different tires we could test this with different bikes different Riders we could spend all month running hundreds and hundreds of tests but what do you think a simple better test would be what could we do in the future to actually learn something useful the field we shot this video in belongs to Mills River Brewing and they’re huge supporters of cycling in my area they have great food great beer please support them if you’re in South Asheville or Mills River thanks to Joe and to Mangler for coming out and risking your lives of my Contraption I hope you somehow learned something from this video and if you didn’t I hope you were at least entertained thanks for riding with me today and I’ll see you next time