I didn’t crash, fortunately: my only physical complaint is sore shins from having to walk three miles in MTB shoes.
So the abridged version of the story is that I was up on the ridge trail on my gravel bike, and after I did a huge drop, found that my right side crank had come loose. Walked it in to the shop and my guy Ashton found that that side of the axle was welded into the crank, and the weld had failed and sheared off. He also said he’d never seen a break like that before, probably because most people who come into that shop don’t ride their gravel bikes as much or as hard as I do. So while I’m still out a bike for a week while we wait for the replacement to arrive, I at least feel like I earned it.
Damn. At least you were able to walk it back, i.e. not terribly injured when it broke.
Yeah, if it had failed thirty seconds earlier, my day might have looked a lot different. I’m counting my lucky stars on that front, for sure.
Honestly, I’m not even mad. It’s a bit annoying and inconvenient, but if anything, it really does feel like an achievement.
No photos?
I had a single piece solid crank break on my 1981 Mongoose SuperGoose, while my friend was riding it no less. He had to get 9 staples in his leg. ☹️
Dude thought I was gonna be mad at him, but I knew exactly how old the bike was, I was just more worried about getting him back home safely so his family could take him to the hospital.
Unfortunately it wasn’t anything dramatic looking. At first blush, even after Ashton took the crankset apart and showed it to me, it didn’t really look like anything was amiss, other than there not being any way to fix the axle and the crank head back together again. A trained eye would have probably immediately spotted the evidence of a failed weld, but nothing really jumped out at me until he pointed it out. Even the manner in which it broke was pretty anticlimactic: I noticed something weird when my chain started rubbing on the front derailleur after I cleared that drop, and I couldn’t shift into the big ring, so I got off to look at it and then realized the crank/spider was loose.
Jesus, that’s gnarly. I hope he recovered.
yikes, glad you’re okay. i ate shit the last time i dropped off the ridge trail. it wasn’t pretty
Crankset model?
FSA Omega. Came stock on the bike when it was new in 2017.
Interesting. Not even Hollowtech.
Right, but the specific break I had also isn’t one I commonly associate with Hollowtech. I know that has its own issues.
I’ll never know - running square taper. ☠️
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Good call. Yeah, as far as I know, FSA doesn’t have that problem right now, but still, any way somebody might hear about it.
I’ve somehow managed to break several cranksets, but they were mostly cheap ass Costco/Walmart bikes I had had a kid.
For one of them I literally just sheared through the aluminum crank arm. It was made of cheap aluminum I guess, and the square bracket tore through until it was basically a round hole with bits of aluminum sticking out.
The other was one of those cheap ones where the crank arm and spindle are just a single bar of steel. This one mostly destroyed the bottom bracket, as my frame basically started leaking BB’s and grease. But somewhere in there the axle had snapped as well.
The last one was an ISIS bottom bracket that, like the square bracket above, managed to shear through an aluminum crank arm.
I don’t know how I managed all of that, I’m not even that strong or heavy of a rider
That’s pretty impressive. Lots of bad luck? Or just crappy quality control?
I’m a fairly average size, but I do a lot of pretty serious gravel biking, as well as riding in all conditions thanks to using the same bike for almost all of my transportation. And honestly, running down the list of changes I’ve made to this bike since I got it in 2020, most of the stock parts that came with it have failed and had to be replaced, to the point that I’m on first-name terms with everyone at my shop and they’ve started comping me labor when I go in for replacement parts.
Sounds much nicer than the time I broke a crank arm when turning left and dog-legging across a busy intersection and cut up my leg on the jagged aluminum.
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