Are 150mm cranks in your future?

catching a pedal on a rout or Rock absolutely sucks ask me how I know is bigger always better despite Western culture norms and the world of levers attached to our bicycles shorter has become the latest rage and if there's anything modern mountain bike culture loves more than carbon fiber it's most definitely keeping up with the latest trends top Freer Riders are mentioning in the Red Bull rampage that they love short cranks mentioning 40 to 155 mm lengths your favorite Pros favorite pro is this fellow Remy Morton and he recently posted a bike check with 135 mm cranks now it's very on Trend right now to love 165 mm cranks I'm no exception to that but if you're a bike reviewer online it's also very on Trend to Rave about stubby little cranks today I'll be zigging instead of zagging and sharing my experiences with 150 mm crank arms I started riding 170 mm cranks back in the early 2000s since I've been running a single chain ring drivetrain since around 2003 I was always standing and grinding right away way I noticed that it was more comfortable to Pedal my intense M1 specialized SX Yeti ASX or even my old Santa Cruz Heckler all while standing with those slightly shorter cranks fast forward another dozen years and around 2017 I started dropping down to 165 mm cranks the difference of 5 mm shorter is pretty minor and I had zero downsides to the 165s I do spin a relatively quick Cadence but not outside what's considered normal I had a very real reason to ride shorter crank arms is I desperately needed more clearance for an injury earlier this summer my toe and foot are broken big toe foot and I can't really smack in the ground real hard so I'm going to ride cliping pedals clipless that helps a bunch I've been riding the last month or so and I feel pretty safe and then like the shoe they gave me is nowhere near as stiff as a clip-in shoe so in an effort to stay safe I reached out to my friends over at Praxis and they sent me this box in the mail along with a sweet t-shirt thanks Ross thanks Adam thanks Cory thanks guys Praxis is like right around the corner from ivis and Santa Cruz and all that the guy that runs Praxis Dave Earl used to be the head of engineering at Santa Cruz bikes many years ago before that at Bond trigger and he's designed a bunch of famous mountain bikes over the years chain ring 32 narrow wide offset chering praus bottom bracket and then a set of Praxis cranks but these cranks are super special these cranks are only 150 mm long that's shorter than like ebike cranks yeah I'm very curious what it's like to ride 150 mil cranks in reality my feet are going to be so safe with these stubby little things this bike has more suspension travel than the length of these cranks that's saying something all right we're going to ditch these smam GX cranks we'll throw these guys on oh much shorter and these current cranks are 165s and I've got a 30 to on there now cool this will be a very chill bike for going uphill with the small crank arms it might feel like it's a taller gear I don't think it would make a difference but yeah could 3 to uh let's bolt this all up and see how it goes I'm very curious what this feels like when I pedal my six-year-old daughter's 20-in Pella around uh it has similar length cranks and it's kind of silly but seems to work so we'll see we will also be installing a brand new chain cool huge thanks my friends at Shimano for hooking me up a little care package I got some brake pads chain few other things I need more stuff this pedal is all bent from riding the hd6 the other day focus focus those cranks combined with this bike in general I think are going to end up being a really fun combo for the bike park we have another month left until Bike Park season ends let's take this rig up to some completely unsafe places and just get after it why not and because this bike is so much fun I went for red grips with green oneup accents thanks to one up for the product thanks to WTB for the saddle the tires Santa cruz/ reserve for the test wheels and end for the cockpit I'm going to head outside and bed in the brake pads it's raining pretty good so I'm not going to bother filming this okay uh see you soon so as you're attempting to ride with these stubby short little crank arms you're going to be pedaling a lot harder than normal and you're going to blow right through your water supply you're going to end up electrolyte depleted and a little bit possibly dehydrated way faster than normal there's an easy way to combat that in all seriousness though on most bike rides over 2 hours or so I've been having really good success with putting a simple electrolyte supplement in my water bottle and often I'll supplement this with a full hydration pack and that keeps me going almost a whole day I've been lucky enough to partner with the fine folk over at element spelled lmnt and they make a really simple supplement it's just sodium potassium magnesium a little bit of stevia the stuff tastes pretty good for limited time now element's offering any of you here on my YouTube channel who make a purchase from the element website using my link down below you'll get a free sample pack with that purchase the link is drink element LM nt.com jeffjeff this is the orange Sal salt flavor I'm running it in this really fun little water bottle and I'm enjoying it big thanks to element for their support and thanks to all of you for trying it and letting me know in the comments how much you like it we're going to drink the orange salt cuz it's going to blend in with the Maple Leaves here stay salty everyone are we recording perhaps well we're up here at the top of garbanzo so let's drop in on freight train to no joke to to the other Trails oh there's some more pump okay my hands are starting to leave the chat let's see if they can come back oh God what better spot to break in a rebuild of this long travel Endura bike than Whistler Pike initially I was expecting zero pedaling but then I got a bit of a surprise is the lift not open anymore not close oh how's the how do we get back to the uh Village uh you'll have to just take the trail back around the RO there oh by the highway yeah okay so there's that I'm now stuck at Whistler Creek Side I'm going have to ride on the highway the uh couple miles back to the other side of Whistler all right Road riding children's cranks here we go oh man see if I can make it in time to do one more run jeez this sucks I R the shorter RS at the bike park and things generally went pretty well but I think the big question here isn't how much how they go down the hill but how they go up the hill well to properly test that out we went to a little town you may have heard of it's known as Squamish okay transition Spire just as it is from the bike park yesterday didn't change anything not even pressures it's a solid climb to get up here like 2,000 ft or something the small crank arms man look at these things they're so little so much clearance definitely you feel it on the up and what you mostly feel is that your gearing feels harder uh significantly harder I wish I had a 28 tooth on there instead of the 30 tooth that's on there now I had to work pretty hard on a bunch of the steeper little pitches this bike climbs well but it's long it's a lot to manage through the switchbacks but it's nice having clearance with pedals so I don't know what the best setup is yet but we'll keep trying different setups until we find something we like I do wish the seat post could go a little lower what a difference it makes going down another 15 mm for crank length it's important to note that a lot of those Free Ride voices you've been hearing are folks that either shuttle chairlift or hike up the mountains while I certainly at times wish I was able to more gluttonously enjoy the mountains I almost always end up self-propelling on a sense using these cranks to actually pedal the bicycle forward and upward what I found was that for me trying to Pedal with the 150 mm cranks was a bit of a joke I would sit and spin and spin and spin and shift so off often yet seemingly kind of go nowhere when friends try to ride my bike they would simply laugh and call me an idiot I committed to the small crank arms riding them for over 2 months I got about as adapted to them as I could ever get I rode them clipped in and I rode them with flat pedals I did certainly prefer them with the clips though so spinning along with my little 150 crank arms there's this ledge right here and check this out I just barely Nick it if I totally M time my pedal stroke but I don't get stopped I don't really have any kind of a big problem so as I'm pedaling up a climb and I get to an exposed rock challenge like this I shift to an easier gear to grunt up it but check out what's going on I'm in second gear I'm not even in first gear it feels like your power band is quite a bit narrower with the shorter crank arms and that in turn means your gearing is more significant with the 165s and 170s I'm used to you can push through the wrong gear much more easily with the shorter crank arms you got less tolerance for B St in the wrong gear now your foot speed is a lot slower cuz you're closer in so as you get further out your feet travel more distance for the same amount of time therefore they're faster so I think there's something to do with the momentum of how fast your feet are spinning or in this case how slowly they're spinning and the lack of momentum to carry through with those different gearing choices I could go with the 28 tooth but it's going to be the same issue let's go keep our feet safe hit some descending that was so [Music] necessary in the end I'm glad to be moving these cranks off any bike I'll ever be pedaling Remy Morton isn't running a drivetrain on his bike it's fully shuttle only some might just call that a scooter but I'll let you make your own decision there and the goal of science it was time to mount these stubby little things to my pump track bike if the Free Riders enjoy these for jumping maybe I'll like them for pumping this kind of bike used to be called called a swom bike or a four cross bike nowadays it's called a dirt jump or pump track bike and nowadays they're all single speed I'm captain old school here all right 150 mm crank arms are on the bike will my chain guide work if you've never installed a chain guide before it takes about six tries usually and it's not going to probably work all right well we'll have a Bosch Taco but I'm we're going to go ride cuz this is taking too long out of [Music] [Music] patience First Reactions pump tracking get it so they feel different than the longer cranks exactly how hard to say I feel like it's a little easier to balance but I don't get quite as much of a pump when I'm loading into the bike so it's not quite what I was expecting it's like a when you go to Pedal you got to spin real fast but it's also harder to spin it's almost kind of similar and that to generate your speed you just push harder it's like being more Central you got less pitching to worry about with the bike it's a different feel a world better nah definitely different but not as Extreme as it was trying to Pedal down the street it would be interesting to sample 160 and 155 mm cranks but these are very hard to find with how much I enjoy my 165 cranks I don't plan on putting in that much effort to change things up but if cranks of those lengths do fall into my lap certainly give them a try sorry not sorry but the trend of crazy short cranks doesn't seem to really work for me I'm I'm sure so many of you are composing comments telling me I'm wrong and that's fine I'm allowed to be wrong and you're also allowed to be wrong too it's okay but please do something right and scroll down to that subscribe button just below peace and wheelies fellow mountain bikers not a complete test without dirt jumps oh okay note to self don't um do that again oh God spin some laps I'm not in pump track shape to spin laps I could spin a lap yeah that every two minutes that

Channel: Jeff Kendall-Weed

Views: 51,289

Keywords: 150mm mountain bike cranks, short mountain bike cranks, short crank review, 150mm crankset, praxxis zane crankset review, jeff kendall weed vlog, transition spire, ripmo short cranks

Id: RdEnl9JKK38

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023