2lo8

Wrong. Polished aluminum is so 70's. Get with the times. It's all about matte black now.

Cyclist01012

Cant we please go back to loose bearings? Id rather have something I can repack and adjust then something Ihave to throw away..

BilbroSwaggins

to the OP. Threaded BBs are awesome for maintenance, 25mm gatorskins are one of the best general riding tires on the market becuase of their decent rolling resistance and amazing puncture resistance,I have external cables on my road bike and internal for my cross bike (really wish it was the other way around, again for maintenance), tubeless 33mm tires are amazing if you do anything off road, and finally I'll take the disc brakes on my cross bike over any other rim brake because of their modulation and power in **** weather conditions. There's a reason why some of these "trends" exist

datlas 

big john

I might be wrong, but I think people who rant against new stuff probably aren't going to be buying new stuff regardless.
I am a car mechanic and I used to work on drum brakes and install points in distrbutors. Now I work on supercharged Corvettes and electric cars with 30 computers on board.
Actually, my newest bike is from 2010, might be time to update.

noodle soup

You are right about some people, but probably not most people.

My local bike shop has sold a few road bikes with disc brakes, but sells far more higher end bikes with caliper brakes.

StanSeven

That's pretty much what I hear from the shops I visit as well. One sells mostly high end bikes in huge volumes and they said the market for road bikes (not endurance or gravel) with discs is really small.

deacon mark

I the OP and I am not against new if it is better. I love indexed brifters and would never go back to friction shifting. I also like internal cables but they need to find a way to make it easier. In other words some access to the process even though I can change mine fine it just takes longer. I would go electronic shifting but right now more than I want to pay.

Make a non-thread BB that will be more reliable.

2lo8

Internal cables only add a few minutes to the process at most if you don't mess it up. It takes all of 15 seconds to slide the cable liner on and off.

TimothyH

Why can't you just let people live their own lives?

seau grateau

Electronic shifting is dumb too.

K.Katso

It's time for this forum to be split into two sub-forums: "Classic Road Cycling" and "Modern Road Cycling"

dwing

Don't some press-fits have a metal sleeve glued into the frame (same as you've described threaded in your 1st sentence above)? And, the cups are pressed into that sleeve butting up against a reference lip?

big john

What I meant was the people who seem to be against anything new. You know, retrogrouches.


Disc brakes are obviously the most divisive thing to come along in some time, although the 50+ forum has some arguments about clipless pedals.


There are actually a few road bikes with discs in my club and the people seem to like them. Have not tried them on a road bike yet, but I'm disc curious.

WalksOn2Wheels

Sweet Lord, yes. I've been saying this for a while. Too many people in here seem offended by people who own anything made in the last decade. Classic Road Cycling sounds perfect for those who like integrated shifting but hate crabon and feel the need to go on endlessly about how Big Bike is showing up to their house and demanding they hand over their steel bikes in order to force them into purchasing carbon frame disc brake Di2 bikes.

I understand a lot of it. Classic steel bikes are awesome, threaded BB's are awesome, caliper brakes are awesome (no disc on road bikes for me), but that doesn't mean pressfit BB's on carbon bikes are the devil.

2lo8

Yes, and by doing so they've negated the engineering advantages of not having to glue in a piece of metal. I never said all press fit frames were intelligently designed for good reasons. I said there are reasons to not make carbon frames threaded, threading bottom bracket shells is not the end-all-be-all of bottom brackets. And again, there's no real reason to complain because you can still glue in a BB30/PF30 to BSA adapter, and you end up with a similar result to what those people claim they want. A BSA sleeve glued into a carbon frame. 9 times out of 10, they really just want to complain about how new things are worse.

That being said, cartridge bottom bracket bearings are press fit somewhere. It's not the press fit that's inherently bad. Threading is the result of needing adjustability on 3 piece bottom brackets. Ashtabula cranks use press fit bearing cups because the threads are on the crank. Most of the frames with an aluminum sleeve are BB30, which was designed from the ground up for cartridge bearings. An engineer would look at you funny if you said you wanted to press cartridge bearings into a cup to thread into a sleeve that you glued into a fitting. Press fit is perfectly logical, albeit often poorly executed.

Robert C

The first and obvious answer, because people will buy it.

However, that answer begs the question, "why will people buy it?" The answer is simple, no bicycle is perfect.

People will cast about in that search for perfection, or at least a closer approximation.

dr_lha

Therein lies the rub.

2lo8

Which means the problem with press fit isn't an inherent problem of press fit. It's a problem of poorly made frames. And makers of cheap poorly made frames chose a poorly made press fit over a poorly made threaded BB. And even if they did use a poorly made threaded BB shell, it there's no guarantee it would be faced and chased properly, which is especially important with external cup BBs.

Jarrett2

fify

WalksOn2Wheels

For the record, the last two times My Domane had an awful creak under load, it turned out to be a "loose" rear skewer.

dr_lha

Theres a false equivalence in this argument. Press fit needs much higher tolerances of engineering to work well than threaded. For this reason Press fit BBs tend to have issues on bikes of the same quality where threaded don't. My personal experience is that After rebuilding and refacing my BB30 shell 3 times, with various combos of loctite, I finally got my BB30 to not creak. The factory install was a disaster. I've never had any issues with any bike with a threaded bottom bracket.

Jarrett2

Even on my really cheap frames...

2lo8

"Much higher" is vague and subjective, and lends itself to false comparisons. Yes, it's "much higher" to do it right than doing it wrong, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near unobtanium. It really should not cost much more to make a functional non-threaded BB over a threaded BB. Threaded is just a bit more forgiving, and it's very tempting for corporate penny pinchers to make an inferior BB shell at a fraction of the cost of a threaded BB. The range in cost and performance from best to worst is wider for non-threaded than threaded.

Cheap threaded frames can in fact have problems with external cup BBs, which is why many frames need to be faced, and that is the system you'd expect to find on a carbon frame. For modern cranks, facing should be close to perfect on either system. There's no problem with older 3-piece type cranks, but those aren't being used on frames where press fits are being considered.

dr_lha

"Should not" isn't really the issue, my real world experience and that of my friends who ride with press fit BBs is. A couple of friends with CAAD10s who needed their BB30s rebuilt after less than a year, my BB30 bike that needed a BB30 rebuilt after 300 miles (FYI it's a $1350 MSRP Diamondback), a friend of mine with a CF Roubaix who was almost at the point of selling it before I recommended the Praxisworks solution to rid his persistent creak. When he took his bike into the shop to ask for the Praxisworks BB, the response from the wrench was "yeah, we've had to do this on loads of these bikes".

Look on Google and this website for thread after thread on pressfit creaks.

I'm not saying that threaded BBs are problem free, but they're a lot more reliable IMHO.