Every experienced rider knows that the proper way to brake on a motorcycle is to apply pressure to both the front lever and rear pedal at the same time. In practice, however, that doesn’t always happen.
For many new riders, the first reaction in an emergency situation is to grab a handful of front brake. Too much speed and too much front brake can easily result in one of two scenarios. If your front tire loses traction, you’ll quickly find yourself sliding on the ground with a bad case of road rash. If your front tire retains traction, you might find yourself flipping over the bars with the rest of the bike coming down on top of you. Not a good situation either way. That’s where linked braking systems come in.
Stopping Power:
Linked braking systems apply pressure to both brakes when only one is applied to provide a more controlled stop. This results in better traction retention during a quick stop, and a shorter stopping distance overall.
That’s great, but what if your bike didn’t come with linked braking? Until now, there were two options. Get a new bike, or deal with it.
Now there’s a third option. Lewis and Jay Thompson from Perth, Australia, launched a Kickstarter campaign for their invention, the BrakeBuTT. The BrakeBuTT is designed to retrofit almost any motorcycle with a linked braking system. It can be installed in minutes and doesn’t require any messing with your brake lines.
The BrakeBuTT consists of two parts. A control box attached to a pad fixed to the front brake lever which senses the amount of pressure applied to the front brake, and a unit about the size of a GoPro which receives the information from the control unit and can apply over 1000psi to the rear brake via a cable.
The handlebar-mounted box has two controls; a dial which lets you adjust on the fly how much pressure is applied to the rear brake, and a switch to turn the unit off should you want your brakes to operate normally.
The price is set at $380 if your bike is one that they’ve already designed a kit for. If not, you can put down a deposit of $120 and they will try to design one for your bike. If they just can’t do it, you get your money back.
Is the BrakeBuTT worth the cost? That’s up to you. While we do have some questions regarding durability, it does seem to be the easiest option if you want to add linked braking to a bike that doesn’t already have it.
Sources: Kickstarter, New Atlas , BrakeBuTT