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Whoa whoa whoa don't go giving the marketing people any idea's like that. Soon a 45mm stem will be marketed as 10% more compact than a 50mm stem.

First off, thank you! And that’s a solid question. You can FEA full frames and estimate deflections, but you’re making a lot of assumptions, and they start to stack on each other, so things can stray from reality quickly. And speed to reality is crucial. Using FEA is useful but only for very basic analysis and often you can guess what's going to happen: I made the chain stay bigger, it got stiffer. FEA is useful for validating a scenario where I wanted it exactly X amount stiffer and then you verify in the test lab. I’ve always wondered if...

I feel like I'm saying the same things over and over here, so this is gonna be my last post on the subject. I had to do this on two separate sets of T4V4s — two bikes, four calipers total, purchased in pairs about six months apart from each other — in order to get them working. I agree I shouldn't have had to do it, but I also definitely had to, as out-of-the-box performance was dire and fiddling with the pistons individually loosened up the seals and fully resolved the issues I had. Similarly, SRAM doesn't mention the piston...

Yeah, I wasn’t talking about servicing old brakes. My point was that extensive service was required on a set of brand-new brakes to get useful performance out of them, and I only brought that up in response to an assertion that SRAM was the only brake manufacturer whose brakes did not work perfectly out of the box. All brakes, in my experience, require a certain degree of fiddling on initial setup, and the Mavens seem in the middle of that spectrum to me, based on my experience with them.

It's not in the manual, it's in their service procedure videos. The URL for that is in the manual, but IIRC the videos themselves are hosted on YouTube. I had to massage sticky pistons on two different pairs of V4 calipers in order to get them dialed. And given that they had T4 levers which had at the time just been released, I have a hard time believing they were on a dusty shelf. You say it just isn't necessary, but my initial install of both was to trust the written procedure in the manual which got me some wildly...

There is going to be very inefficient heat transfer between the pads and the heat sink compared to the shimano version with the them being integrated. You could increase the thermal transfer if you used some kind of thermal compound but I’m not sure how that would stand up to water/mud. It will do something but just not nearly as good as having the pad bonded to the heatsink.

I guess I was the only one to sit through Hope's setup and bleed procedure videos? They very clearly talk about loosening up the piston seals on new calipers by extending single pistons, one at a time, then resetting them and centering them in the caliper. "Play around with it and you'll find a sweet spot" in a thick Lanky accent and everything. I'm totally with you on wanting brakes to be less fiddly out of the box, but every single manufacturer has their own version of this kind of stuff, plus whatever local knowledge shop mechanics have about how...