Re: [CR]Crank length/Vintage Bicycle Quarterly

(Example: Racing:Jacques Boyer)

From: "David Feldman" <feldmans1@earthlink.net>
To: "Sterling" <sterling@tns.net>, <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
References: <001501c259cf$7f78f110$af8c56d8@sterlingpeters>
Subject: Re: [CR]Crank length/Vintage Bicycle Quarterly
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 15:21:42 -0500

I'm 5'9" and have spent almost all of my cycling time since 1968 on 170's; didn't realize I was riding 172.5's for a few years until I looked at the cranks when cleaning the bike--this is on my main single bike. It is interesting to note that large numbers of cyclists who started with mountain bikes have never ridden shorter than 175mm--this for riders as short as 5'4"--and don't appear to be suffering ill effects from it. It is also interesting that since the early 70's, the normal size of stock road bike cranks has become longer--172.5's start on 54cm bikes, 170's used to be fitted to bikes as large as 64cm a couple of decades ago. Also interesting that very small stock bikes don't have proportionally shorter cranks; you'd think that there would be more 165 and even 160mm arms available if manufacturers really cared about all that "bike fitting the rider" stuff.
David Feldman
Vancouver, WA


----- Original Message -----
From: Sterling
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 3:11 PM
Subject: [CR]Crank length/Vintage Bicycle Quarterly


Jan Heine made some interesting comments about crank length in Vintage Bicycle Quarterly ( A 400K Brevet ). He commented about the fact that with shorter crank arms you can lower the Bottom bracket height , get a better cornering more stable bike and have the additional advantage of being able to continue pedaling thru the corners without fear of kissing the pavement , not to mention you also save your knees from the stress of longer cranks. I remeber reading somewhere that in the 50's the Randoneurs typically used crank lengths of about 165mm and smaller gear ratios.
    I can also recall that this long crank thing has been tried before by the Professional racers again I think it was in the 50's or 60's and they moved back to more knee forgiving lenghts after a few years. What does anyone know about this?
    Sterling Peters
   San Diego