Can "Magpeds" bridge the gap between flat and clipless pedals?

Clips versus Flats that's the question not always an easy one to answer because if you're like me you like certain things about both pedals well today we're going to review a product that looks like it might be in between this is the magped it looks like a flat pedal but this right over here is a magnet and so instead of cleats and clips you have a magnet and then I guess some kind of cleat that sticks to a magnet and this is supposed to be a pretty good replacement for clipless pedals but it gives you more of a feeling of flat pedals or that's at least what some people say about it today I'm going to find out if that's true but first let me tell you what I like about flat pedals and what I like about clipless pedals so let's start with flat pedals you have mostly seen me on flat battles you probably think I'm a die hard flat pedal fanatic but really it's just what works best for me at this particular moment because I do a lot of filming and jumping on and off the bike it's just easier to be able to step on and off a flat pedal and when you're hiking around to get shots or maybe even do a little bit of Trail building flat shoes are much better for that cleats tend to slip around on rocks they get packed up with dirt if you're doing any amount of things off the bike they're just not as good and so having flat pedals means flat sold shoes and that's pretty good now if you like doing dirt jumping or using your mountain bike like a dirt jumper flat pedals are pretty good too because you can take your feet off really really easily you don't have to twist you can just slide to the side and your foot is off so if you have to bail if you have to catch yourself if you want to do a one footer a no footer any type of trick trick flat pedals are going to be your best choice another thing I love about flat pedals is that you can just kind of step onto them and they start working you don't have to position your foot and press down and clip in if you clip in a lot it becomes second nature and it's very easy but you've probably been at the top of a rock roll or something not gotten fully clipped in and had to sort of ride something out with your foot kind of half on that's really scary happens rarely but never happens with flat pedals I also like how casual flat pedals are they're compatible with any shoe pretty much you can put on a set of Tevas and ride flat pedals it's always going to work foreign now before I tell you what I like about clipless pedals this is a broad audience so when I say clipless I mean the type of pedals that you actually clip into doesn't make sense but that's what they're called the main thing that I like about them is that they're precise your foot is always in the exact same position every single time you put them on the pedals so if you don't like the position that your foot is in you can loosen up the cleat adjust the position on the shoe and then you are completely locked in so you can optimize how you feel on your bike if you've ever had flat pedals and went through a really chunky section you know that sometimes your feet shift around and sometimes you're kind of doing like one of these trying to get your feet back into position and it can be pretty scary now another thing that I like about clipless pedals is you have a little bit of extra Reserve power because you can pull up on your trailing foot so let's say you're in sort of the wrong gear and you come up to a Punchy climb with flat pedals you gotta push on one pedal and hope that's going to be enough with clipless pedals you always have something a little extra you can pull up on the other foot and get a little bit of extra power now if you're pedaling properly in nice efficient Circle that's not really going to matter when you're just pedaling up a non-technical climb or when you're on a fire road I don't feel like clipless pedals give me any advantage there it's when things get dicey I find it useful the clipless pedals allow you to give a sudden burst of power to get up something and like I said if you're going through some serious chunk really fast especially on a hardtail they can just help keep your feet on the pedals period And if you've never had the experience of your feet coming off of your flat pedals well try going faster through something chunkier so when you're choosing between flat pedals and clipless pedals you have to make a trade-off you can't have your cake and eat it too but I'm hoping that today these will allow me to do just that like I said they're magnetic pedals and as you can see they're shaped like a platform pedal I could stand on this right now with my flat shoes and I don't see why there would be any problem now as you can see these pedals have pins they're two-sided one side sticks out a lot the other side sticks out a little bit and so you can install the pins how you want I went with the big gnarly side sticking out because shins are overrated and as you can see there are two neodymium magnets pre-installed now what I'm hoping is these are as easy to step onto as flat pedals because the magnet will kind of guide your foot into place they'll be as easy to step off of as flat pedals because you can kind of slide your foot aside and it should disconnect from the magnet it'll ensure your foot is located in the right position and because there's no like mechanical click talking or moving going on in the pedal if a little bit of Gunk gets on the shoe I don't think it's really going to affect this so we're going to install the magpeds install their cleats on my shoes and see if they really do give us the perfect balance of flat pedals and clipless pedals so first of all what I'm interested in seeing is I've got my flat sold shoes on how do these pedal without any cleats because you can't do that with egg beaters or SPD shoes foreign [Music] they don't feel the worst it's a little weird because there's not a lot of support in the middle but with the short pins it's probably passable I could do a ride like this and it's grippy it's fine so that's kind of cool let me put the cleats on so the cleats are steel then they have the spacer here just in case you need a little more distance they actually have different foam blocks that go under the magnet you can adjust the pins sometimes I like stuff that just goes in one way but it is cool if you like tinkering you can really dial these in to get the exact feel you want I'm just wondering how a magnet and a piece of Steel is going to give me the same sort of feeling as clipless pedals that's pretty damn impressive let's try this out [Music] I'm like really pulling up on the pedal let me see how it is to get off of this thing I kind of thought it was just gonna snap into place but that's not actually how it works you can kind of put your foot in a lot of different positions but it's not essential where your foot is when you first get on the bike because it's a platform pedal you can kind of stand anywhere on it that you want if you want to lock in once you get on the bike you can kind of shift your foot into place with these like let's say you were to drop into something sketchy and you didn't have your foot in quite the right spot it'd be okay because they just feel like platform pedals so with clipless pedals you have to lock in before you do anything with these you can kind of worry about it later and that might be a plus for some people [Music] okay so we have not gone that far A little bit of traversing I purposely got in the wrong gear a bunch of times so I could like pull up on the pedals I gotta make some adjustments I don't like where the shoes are kind of sitting I feel like I'm on the outside of the pedal I like to get on the pedal and because I go in sort of the center of my foot probably a BMX habit it's really hard to get these pedals into that position and so I wonder if the smaller magnets would actually help me foreign [Music] I gotta be missing something it could very well be that my particular shoe and my particular pedaling style are just a bad fit for these pedals and so I'm gonna move the cleat into a completely different spot and see if somebody who pedals with the ball of their foot would have an easier time all right let's give this one last try I'm gonna pretend that I'm somebody who pedals kind of further to the front [Music] so thoughts can you pull up on the pedal to add more power when climbing yes you can if you pull straight up on it you can add quite a bit of power before your foot pops off do you feel locked in when you're riding through chunk absolutely that's one of the best things about them because you're locked into a platform pedal you have all these pins pressing up into the sole of your shoe and it feels really good it feels really grounded I think these would work better with a size 10 shoe or larger the reason I say that is because usually once I get it locked in my foot's like off the inner pins by like three millimeters and so I feel like a bigger shoe would just cover that and no matter how I adjust it I can't seem to rectify that issue but they give you so many ways to Tinker with these I feel like I could get it dialed in and I think it's worth trying if it sounds like I'm being extra extra nice to these pedals it's because they feel really really good once you're locked in when you're locked in it's it's a feeling like I've never experienced because you're locked into a platform pedal but then if you just twist your foot a little bit you're off but then to me it is more difficult to actually get locked in then again I've only been riding with them for an hour or two I've ridden clipless pedals for way more than that I think magpeds are a really cool concept let me know if any of you guys have had experience with magpeds they've been around for a little bit this is the newest iteration I love testing weird and unusual products I hope you enjoyed watching this I hope you learned something today and if you didn't I hope you at least found it entertaining thanks for riding with me today I'll see you next time you know what part sucks the most is not only am I going to have to replace like 496 pins out here in the woods with this little hex wrench I'm gonna have to do it again when I get home to put Loctite in here because I didn't bring any Loctite with me and you know how pedal pins are when you don't use Loctite they're not locked tight

Channel: Berm Peak Express

Views: 1,001,945

Keywords: do it yourself, diy, tools, home, backyard, mountain biking, cycling, outdoors

Id: 7YZIV-0_YKI

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/weirdhowlatnight]

Just had a look at them after watching Seth’s review. A bit pricey for me. Maybe in a year or two.

[u/M-e-g-g-y]

Fact about the term 'clipless' since the guy in the video seemed to be confused by their name. They are called clipless pedals because the pedals don't have the old style toe clips that older bikes used to have.