Since I am spending some time off the uni for a while(as in not commuting to work and not riding too far) to let my knees recover, I have some time to mess around with my ungeared 36er setup. I previously ran 114mm qu-ax cranks that I liked a lot, but recently I have put on some 102mm Schlumpf aluminum cranks. They are really lightweight, but there is some Q in the cranks. I took it for a good 2-3 mile test ride and I really like them! I am definitely faster on them and they are surprisingly easy to controll over bumps and down curbs etc.
Anyway, my question to those riders with small cranks is this: Do you think that weight or Q is more important for speed and riding comfortably for a long ride? It would probably be more ideal to have some lightweight square taper cranks that have no Q (like the qu-ax), but there are simply no lightweight q-less cranks less than 114mm for square taper hubs (that aren’t custom made).
I see that there are some cheap steel 102mm cranks available on unicycle dot com (miyata, united) and they look like they have no Q. What would you think would be a better crank to run, lightweight schlumpf 102s with some Q or heavy steel 102s with no Q?
The next question is…why doesn’t Qu-Ax sell smaller square taper cranks? They have 100mm ISIS cranks, but not square taper ones.