The holy trinity of high brake power, best modulation and huge heat capacity - with painless bleeding
Please welcome our latest member, the Intend Trinity brake system. It took around 5 years to get all thoughts about an ideal brake system together. Bleeding, hydraulic leverage, indestructable BMC piston seal design and many more things. 3 years of engineering, 1,5 years of testing, testing and testing.
The result is - in our eyes - the most advanced brake system ever made. All parts are made as cnc parts with highest precision and lowest tolerances, out of durable 7075 aluminum. We had several crashes with the pumps, no defects and failures. The main body of the BMC is made out of a special high strength aluminum which rather "bends" than cracks.
Worth to know:
- Although we have 4x 17mm piston, we achieve a constant pressure on the brake pads. Some companies are making bigger pistons in the front and smaller in the rear to equal the dynamic pressure from the rotation and friction of the rotor. Instead of the different piston sizes, you can also make the brake pads asymetric to the pistons, exactly like every company does it with 2 piston caliper brake pads. So we calculated the friction in the system in the average of the wear of the brake pad and adjusted the position of the brake pad in relation to the 17mm pistons. The result is a small shift of the pads to the back side, which leads to constant pressure and wear of the pads.
- Intend Trinity uses Avid Code style brake pads, so you have a wide choice of compatible brake pads.
- We have a rear hose length of 200cm and a front hose length of 85cm. The front one fits to 99% of all bikes out there without the necessity of shortening it. So take the brake, mount it and it will be perfect. If you need a longer front or rear hose, please contact us. While we recommend to only use our brake hose, they are basically equivalent to the Shimano BH-90 standard. However Shimano uses 2x 6x0,9mm o-rings and we have 2x 6x1,2mm o-rings. So if you're using a Shimano hose for our brake, please use Shimano o-rings for the banjo.
- We recommend using only the Putoline 2,5 mineral oil. However if in need and you don't have the Putoline, any regular brake mineral oil like the Shimano should work.
- Everything you need for riding and to get started is included. Brake pads, bleeding stuff, bolts.
- All necessary installation instructions can be found on the order sheet which is shipped with the brake system.
Bleeding Instructions
Ride Style
Trail / Enduro / Downhill
Mounting standard
Postmount 74mm
Max rotor thickness
2,3mm
Adjustments
Lever reach. No stroke adjustment, it is as short as possible, shorter is not possible
Min. rotor size:
Front 200mm
Back 180mm
Smaller can be problematic with touching of the spokes
Weight
Enduro version: 244g
Downhill version: 257g
with 85cm hose, incl brake pads and pad bolt, excl mounting bolts
Colour
Black anodized
Delivery content
Front and rear brake, brake pads, bleed puck, 2 syringes, 50ml oil, 1 spare fitting, spare seals and bolts
Optional content
Refrigerators, Brake mount fit kit
Technology
Leverage: we have 17mm pistons (4x), 9,5mm BMC piston and a mechanical leverage of 7,3. This leads to an overall leverage of 46,78:1. This is higher then 99% of other brake systems, but not the highest you will find in the bicycle industry. But this has a reason. Bigger than 4x17mm pistons are a bit problematic for the caliper in terms of outer dimensions. The standard brake pads are not bigger, and we didn’t want to go for a custom brake pad carrier design. Also the fitment to brake adapters and frames is a bit limited in case of bigger pistons. And we also didn’t want to achieve a higher pressure from the BMC lever, because one of the goals was to get a more similar brake feeling between the front and rear brake. So we made the leverage coming from the caliper as big as possible while still being able to fit the Avid Code pads, and the leverage coming from the BMC just as high enough to have a kind of similar feeling between front and rear brake.
Modulation: the modulation is mainly steered by friction in the system. Of course 4 ball bearings (2 at each pivot) will do this job perfectly. We didn’t choose the smallest bearings to have a long life here. 2 at the piston rod, 2 in the housing (not visible from outside). combined with the soft seals of our newly developed Painless Piston solution you can NOT feel any friction in the system, also if you press hard and modulate softly.
Heat capacity: This is driven by the masses of the rotors, and the mass of the caliper and also the amount of heat, which can be dissipated in between. The Trinity caliper is heavy, very heavy, around 15-20g more then a standard brake caliper of similar products. And in addition to this you can mount our Refrigerator cooling fins, which are placed between the front piston and the brake pad. Why only on the front piston? Of course the heat in the brake pad starts to rise from the beginning where the rotors comes in the pad(back side) and has the highest temperature at the end of the brakepad when the rotor leaves the brake pad(front side), so the best position for cooling fins is in the front of the pad. You can choose the brake with our Refrigerators or without. Even without we have a better heat capacity then most other competitors due to the high mass of our caliper.
Painless-Bleed: the Trinity is the most easily bleedable brake in the world. There is only one connecting channel for brake fluid inside. There are no “dead” corners, there is no secondary chamber anywhere. The fluid you press in at the bottom, will flow through every single part of the hydraulics and comes out at the top of the brake master cylinder. You can also close the caliper with mounted syringe with our Bleed Lock. just close it with a TX10 wrench and you can pull off the syringe without any oil leakage. For bleeding you only need 2 standard 20ml syringes, our Bleed Puck with a specific width of 9,5mm, a TX10 wrench and a bit of Putoline oil. Everything here is included when you buy a brake from Intend. So nothing to worry about. The only thing you need to have yourself is a 2,5mm allen wrench, and if you don’t have this, it also works.
Painless-Piston: You will hardly notice that as an average customer. but at mostly all competitor brake systems, it can be that after a while, after heavy crashes, the main piston seal gets damaged. I will not talk about the reasons for that, but: with our Painless-Piston solution that is not possible any more. We have a reservoir connection in our piston, which gets deactivated once you press the lever slightly. The dead-stroke (so the distance from start to pull the lever until the brake pads start to move) is as low as possible with 0,2mm at the piston, x7,3 = 1,46mm dead stroke. This is the shortest dead stroke in the industry and leads to a perfect balanced stroke of the system in order to handle the high total leverage.
Painless-Fitting: the fitting of the upper side of the hose is a new invention. Nobody did it like this. The total outer diameter of our fitting is 4,9mm. As you can already guess, this means you do not need to cut the hose(5mm outer diameter), when you want to mount or unmount the hose in the frame. You can close the fitting with a M2 bolt to prevent dust coming in or oil coming out (M2 bolt included in delivery) and push the hose through the frame. For installation of the fitting in our pump, just push it in and secure it with the bolt in the BMC and everything is ready and sealed. Due to the Painless-Bleed we ship the rear brake with uncut 2m hose length, and 2 of the Painless-Fittings, where you need one for installing it and one as spare for the future.
White-Magic brake pads: As we have white laser etching, white o-rings for sag indication and brake pad bolts, we wanted to go with white brake pads. The color does not play a huge role, but the material of the pads does. We have chosen ones with high brake power and low wear. this are the most important features for brake pads. As this will provide some magic for you, and the color is white, we call them White Magic brake pads.
Hydraulic fluid: The Trinity is based on mineral oil. We use a special oil, which is known as an “open source secret”. It is called “Putoline 2,5”. It is a damping oil for forks originally, but has very good properties in terms of viscosity, viscosity depending on temperature and boiling point. So also if you put it in the fridge over night at -20°C, you can take the brake out and it will work like new. Awesome. Oil is included in delivery 😉
So lets see if there is anything you might want to ask, what is not yet answered.
Can I put in all rotors on the market or do I need to take Intend rotors?
you can run all rotors you want, from 1,7 up to 2,3mm width
Can I put in other brake pads or do I need to take Intend white magic pads?
you can run all Avid Code brake pads or other pads which are made for Avid Code
Can I shorten the hose length myself?
yes
Which oil should i use?
we always ship a bottle of Putoline 2,5W with our brake. That’s the oil we tested and developed the brake with and therefore recommend to use. U may use other mineral oils like the Shimano one. When in doubt please contact us.
Can I use DOT brake fluid in the brake?
no
Can I buy only levers to combine it with other calipers?
We only offer our complete brake system to make sure that everything works like it should. Just to make an example: If you take a caliper from a major brand, and it makes some problems in terms of bleeding or functioning, of COURSE everybody would think the problem comes up from our levers and then wewould have to care about the problems of the caliper from a third party.
Can I buy only calipers from you to combine it with different levers?
We only offer our complete brake system to make sure that everything works like it should
