I believe most people who visit this site knows that I currently work at a bikeshop. I’m pretty much doing all of the mechanic work there and of course I get to assemble/swap/service a lot of cranks. New and old. One thing that frustrates the hell out of me is 48-splined cranks. I can’t believe that they’re still around, and don’t give me that shit about “it’s well proven and works” because that is bullshit. Sure, they do get the bike moving forward once they’re assembled, but everything leading up to a fully working 48-splined crankset is a fucking pain in the ass. And that most manufacturers of 48-spline cranks does not include a crank mounting/removal tool (or even have one available to begin with) is also an outrage.

Seriously everything about 48-spline style cranks is shit. Either the crank slides on nice and easy (so far so good) and works good for a while, but eventually they will develop the inevitable wobble that can’t be fixed by tightening the spindle bolt further. Because face it - the splines are not tapered, tightening of the bolt will only add some extra friction from the bolt being tighter, it won’t address the problem and keep the cranks from moving on the splines (i believe that this famous wobble even has got a nickname after one of the more leading crank manufacturers out there).

Some manufacturers have addressed the problem by making the splines really tight. In this case the problems arise from the start. They’ll be a complete bitch to get on the spindle, even if you use insane amounts of anti-seize (copper grease compound stuff) you still have to pound away with a rubber mallet to get the spindle even halfway into the arm, after which you can start cranking down on the spindle bolt to pull the spindle through further. But let’s hope you’ve got a long, good quality allen key, otherwise you might round out the bolt and/or bend your allen key. To make matters even worse, some crank arms have not been properly masked before painting and have paint in the splines making it even harder to get the crank onto the spindle and aligning it up with the other crank nicely.

Let’s say you managed to get the cranks on there without putting nasty marks in the paint, or destroying your knuckles from slipping allen keys - well done and have fun riding! But I’m sorry, if you for any reason have to remove the cranks at some point you’re gonna realize that the assembly part was easy compared to getting the cranks off. Even if lots of anti-seize was used during assembly you still might have to spend an hour or so pounding away on the crank and spindle to get it off. Have I mentioned that most cranksets don’t come with a removal tool? Brilliant isn’t it?

Crank arms with pinch bolts is a lot easier to deal with when assembling/changing/servicing, but there is not one single design to date that looks good and is not stupidly bulky. This is because it seems pretty much impossible to make a nice and clean looking pinch bolt design. Besides, it doesn’t matter because pinch bolts is not the solution anyway. They also have flaws, apart from the aesthetics. Pinch bolts tend to come loose, crank arms tend to creak and retards tend to never touch the cranks which means that the splines gets worn/rounded out (in the case of steel 8-splined cranks, Primo-style arms just get rounded out because of the alloy material).

And yet no other manufacturers apart from G-Sport/Odyssey have gome up with a design that addresses all these problems. I know that the Wombolts suffered some problems as well, but I do truly believe that most instances where the crank arm cracked around where the wedges go actually was due to installation error. I’m on my second set of Wombolts (only changed because I needed the LHD version) and I’ve had zero problems.

So I guess my question to the BMX-world and manufacturers is: Why are there no other good crank designs out there? Everyone seems to want to “innovate” and come up with “one less part” solutions and spend huge amounts of time developing other things. Why does everyone stay away from cranks, or in the case they do make cranks, choose the mongoloid 48-spline thing? Why is there so much “innovation” for other parts of the bike, when in the case of cranks we’re supposed to make do with the same old shit that’s been around forever.