is there anything that can be used to stop the cranks from scratching when doing grinds and crank grabs?
yes
Happysquidman, when I first started grinding and pedal grabbing I asked the same question. However, I soon learned that trying to protect you’re cranks is a waste of time. It’s inevitable that they will scratch, chip, and dent. Don’t worry about it.
On thing that works well for protecting the paint on your frame is Satin polyurethane. I put 3 or 4 coats on my frame after I re-painted it and sratching has been kept to a minimum.
Goodluck.
Theres no real point in protecting the cranks, and if you really wanted to you could repaint them or chrome them, but there is no point. You could weld a small plate to the bottom of your dominant crank but it would probably get in the way and cause nothing but trouble. So “NO” there really isn’t anything that you can protect your crank with. Total uni, sigh.
Yea…I powdercoated a pair of KH cranks that get used A LOT for crank grabbing, and that held up well for a few weeks, but now they’re trashed.
It isn’t really worth protecting them too much, as the friction and slamming of the grabs just annihilates everything.
I think chrome may hold up pretty well for a while, but it will, like everything else, eventually get ruined.
Focus on what you’re doing with your cranks and not what they look like, so to speak.
“duct tape”
Catboy and Total-Uni, will you please stop wrecking every thread?
You two sound like my 8 and 9 year old cousins. To bad we can’t institute a 50 foot seperation rule.
Don’t demean me to a lower level because I correct the obvioulsy wrong… It’s no offense to to total uni he just needs to lear to think before he speaks(or types)
re
will the scratches make the cranks not work or make them not as strong?
Nah, the scratches don’t effect the cranks performance.
That is unless you crack the crank and you just think it is a scratch, but that hasn’t happened to me before, so I dunno about it.
Re: re
The scratches are just miniscule shavings of paint and metal, and wont affect it whatsoever. But you will probably not get cracks just from grinding, unless they are pretty cruddy cranks. So as far as the scratches go. You are safe.
But if every time you do a grab or a grind, and you take off some of the metal, won’t the crank get slowly weaker because layers of metal are disappearing?
I guess eventually it would but you would literally have to grind about a mile before it wore down any…
i must be weird, but when i bought my cranks i intentionaly got black ones so they’d get all scratched!
its not yout cranks you have to worry about though, its the bearing holders and hub flanges.
actualy my cranks are a bit wrecked now, but they are profiles, so what the hell!
Yea, can’t grinding pop spokes and stuff if you don’t do it correctly?
So far I have only scratched up my bottom bearing housing and removed some paint and scratched the cranks and pedals. In a month or two I am probably going to have to replace the housing, just so it doesn’t break but I would say that 3 bucks is more than a fair price. But I suggest getting smaller housing screws, because I have fallen because the screws on the housings grabbed…
C’mon catboy, could you stop pulling facts out of thin air?! On solid steel cranks, grinding won’t damage them much at all. On painted hollow cranks like Onza and black profiles, you really can weaken the crank enough for it to break, but it takes a long time. Noone knows how far or long you’d have to grind before it’d trash your cranks. It depends on the material of the ledge or rail and your crank. I asked Dan Heaton if he’s ever ground through a set of cranks, and he hasn’t. I’m sure he’s effectively done around a mile of grinds.
I would be seriously surprised if you had to replace the housing on the yuni frame. I’ve been pedalgrabbing, crankgrabbing, and grinding for around a year, and my Onza housings are fine. If it really is that bad, simply revers which housing is on your grind side.
digitalattrition: I’ve never ground a spoke off grinding, but something to be careful of is on big pedal-gaps or grabs onto rocks, you can have a piece of the rock smash into a sopke onyour wheel. This has happened to me, and first it bent the poke, and then, finally, the head of the nipple sheared off. I think if you have a fat enough tire, it protects from the spoke heads from shearing off.
I think that your crank will be worn oout or broken by spline wear or metal fatigue long before grind damage becomes a factor.
I never siad it would damage any, I was just giving an example to state that you probably won’t grind down cranks, before you bend/break them. Chill.
I remember several threads about Onza cranks that got smashed during pedal grabs. If my memory serves, some people had problems with the axle bolt getting smashed, thus making it impossible to remove the crank. I believe the Bevan had this problem.
Dan
yeah. I have smashed my cranks enough that the dust cap has had material kinda merge with the bolt. It makes it so I can’t remove the dustcap or bolt, but the crank can still be removed. That’s just a weak point of the Onza design, although I guess that is proof that grinds can damage a crank, although it hasn’t weakened mine any. Trip has bent his Onza’s and damaged the bolt enoguh that he can’t tighten his left crank. I’ve never seen this happen with any other crank design except for a set of profile dirtjumpers where the bolt was so reccessed that the metal ovalized around it making it impossible to get the bolt out.