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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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And that is the least surprising thing in this thread............
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [Andrewmc] [ In reply to ]
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Andrewmc wrote:
And that is the least surprising thing in this thread............

??

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Did my Martis course this morning on 150mm cranks. I really paid attention on what grade I could stay in the seat vs having to stand. Was able to stay in the saddle
at 16% grade. Had to stand for the 18.6% grade.

What continues to amaze me is how many year I felt one HAD to have longer cranks for leverage in the hills. Never ever would I have believed, without trying, that
I can climb great with shorter cranks, and the correct gearing. So I have to admit, anytime I see a post now that longer cranks are needed for hill leverage, I just smile
since I have the data to show that is not the case.

I am also amazed how many say I should just ride 175's since ST knows this is the only/best length to ride. Since I am seeing nothing negative with the shorter cranks,
and think it may be possible I am getting a better bike fit and help with my bad knee, I continue to just ask I wonder.

Going to do Martis again Sunday on 145's and again focus on how long I can stay in the seat.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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What gear ratio (chainring and cassette cog size) are you running when you go down to shorter and shorter cranks? As you decrease crank length, the overall gear size increases.

http://www.slowtwitch.com/...nd_Gearing_4095.html


So perhaps you should try a 34/36 or even a 34/42 gear ratio on your 150 or 145mm cranks to see if you can spin on the steep parts.

Alex Arman

Strava
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [doublea334] [ In reply to ]
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doublea334 wrote:
What gear ratio (chainring and cassette cog size) are you running when you go down to shorter and shorter cranks? As you decrease crank length, the overall gear size increases.

http://www.slowtwitch.com/...nd_Gearing_4095.html


So perhaps you should try a 34/36 or even a 34/42 gear ratio on your 150 or 145mm cranks to see if you can spin on the steep parts.

To date, I have stayed constant with what I have on my road bikes, 50/34 11/32. The reason being is I just wanted to change as few things as possible.

So far I have not felt I have seen when I decrease crank length the feeling of my gearing getting higher. Not sure what I am looking for.
I do know one time on Martis when I went to a 53/39, I sure could tell the difference having to stand much sooner on the grades, which I guess would be expected.
But so far, with the shorter cranks, and maybe correct seat height, I have been able to push staying in the seat for steeper grades than I was able to do on the 200's.

I know Frank has told me to go to a 34/34 or 34/36. Has not suggested a 34/42 yet. Since I can stand doing 18.6% grade, I am not sure at what point one would
want to change to lower gears because of a decrease in crank length. Any suggestions on what I should be looking for?

I always get high and low gearing messed up.. I guess if I just say to get up a hill one uses a granny gear, meaning low, which is a small ring in the front and a large in the back, I might get it right in my brain.

Thanks for a great question

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [doublea334] [ In reply to ]
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Quit feeding this attention starved troll!!! Just leave him to post inane crap between himself and Frank Day and maybe this thread will die and Dave will just fade away ;)

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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So this may all make sense why you liked such long cranks for climbing. Longer cranks make the same gear ratio smaller compared to shorter cranks.

So a 34/32 on 200mm cranks is a smaller overall gear per pedal stroke compared to a 34/32 on 160mm cranks.

Take a look at the Kopecky article I linked to in my previous reply. A drop in crank length required a 3 tooth, or so, drop in chainring size to keep the same gearing.


I think you should continue with your crank length to experiment, then you can use the gear ratio calculator to figure out what chainring size and casette to use for your desired crank length.

Alex Arman

Strava
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [trijunkie123] [ In reply to ]
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Alex Arman

Strava
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [doublea334] [ In reply to ]
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doublea334 wrote:
So this may all make sense why you liked such long cranks for climbing. Longer cranks make the same gear ratio smaller compared to shorter cranks.

So a 34/32 on 200mm cranks is a smaller overall gear per pedal stroke compared to a 34/32 on 160mm cranks.

Take a look at the Kopecky article I linked to in my previous reply. A drop in crank length required a 3 tooth, or so, drop in chainring size to keep the same gearing.


I think you should continue with your crank length to experiment, then you can use the gear ratio calculator to figure out what chainring size and casette to use for your desired crank length.

To be honest, I cannot tell you why I liked the 200's now. It was then length recommend by the formula that floats around. It seem logical if a short person used 175s, why would a tall person like me use the same?

But with my testing, I have had to throw all those assumptions out the door. I can climb just fine on shorter cranks. I can get better bike fit on shorter cranks. I think I have less
pressure on my knees with shorter cranks. Doing a focus on lower RPM seems to make my legs less fatigue.

Gearing will have to deal with at the end. But so far, if I can climb a 16% in the seat or 18% out of the seat, sure would not like to also have to change all the bike setups I have with the 50/34 11/32 stuff, but if I need to, so be it. I can easily test for any gearing change on the Velotron.

Again, thanks for the inputs. Will keep this in mind as we head down this path.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [trijunkie123] [ In reply to ]
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trijunkie123 wrote:
Quit feeding this attention starved troll!!! Just leave him to post inane crap between himself and Frank Day and maybe this thread will die and Dave will just fade away ;)

I guess anything in life is possible. :)

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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You are the Clark Griswold of the forum.......
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [Andrewmc] [ In reply to ]
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Andrewmc wrote:
You are the Clark Griswold of the forum.......

Thanks, but I think I am closer to Trump :)

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Lions don't lose sleep worrying about the sheep
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Got the adjustable/lockable powercranks in the mail today. I thing these at a minimum will be like 130mm to 200mm. Will let Frank tell me since am too lazy now to get out the tape measure and allen wrench. :) I love the new locking mechanism on these beta units, since so quick and easy to change from PC mode to locked mode.
Now just need to pull some cranks and put these on.



Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Boy did I think of this thread reading this article

http://www.breitbart.com/...s-tech-industry-ceo/

There is now more freedom of speech in Beijing than in the San Francisco Bay area — and this could kill the Silicon Valley tech industry.
While right-wing commentators have been saying this for years, it’s extremely unusual to hear it from the lips of a Silicon Valley tech guru as impeccably liberal as Sam Altman.
Altman, influential and respected CEO of Y Combinator — an accelerator program for Silicon Valley start-ups — has triggered outrage in the tech community for having dared to suggest that political correctness has gotten so bad that it threatens to destroy their business model.
He writes in his latest blogpost:
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005.
It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.
This will be very bad for startups in the Bay Area.

You can have freedom to think and innovate or you can have political correctness, but you can’t have both, he warns:
To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too. In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy (the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture.
You can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right, and nearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out sounding like terrible ideas. So if you want a culture that innovates, you can’t have a culture where you allow the concept of heresy—if you allow the concept at all, it tends to spread. When we move from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas.

In today’s climate, some of the most innovative ideas in tech — such as Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin or Elon Musk’s SpaceX — would have probably have been killed at birth:
I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of San Francisco — it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many ways to go wrong. If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard. I can picture Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

[“E pur si muove” — “And yet it moves!” — were purportedly the words of Galileo, after being tortured by the Church into recanting his heretical belief that the Earth moves around the Sun.]
Probably the bravest part of the Altman’s article is the moment where he attempts to introduce Silicon Valley snowflakes to an important concept dating back to at least 1644 when the poet John Milton famously explored it in his polemical pamphlet Areopagitica: the notion that in order to understand what good ideas are, we must first put ourselves into a position where we are able to discuss — and reject — bad ideas.
This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

As you’ll see from some of the Twitter responses below, this prompted a mass hurling of toys out of prams which can only be described as “The Triggering.”
But if the tech industry ignores his warning, it will be its loss. As Altman warns, the exodus from the rampantly PC Bay Area has already begun:
More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

The response to the piece by tech industry SJWs goes a very long way to proving Sam Altman’s point.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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H2O wrote: "I know Frank has told me to go to a 34/34 or 34/36. Has not suggested a 34/42 yet. Since I can stand doing 18.6% grade, I am not sure at what point one would
want to change to lower gears because of a decrease in crank length. Any suggestions on what I should be looking for?”

The problem with out of the saddle is it is inherently more inefficient than being in the saddle. Why? Because out of the saddle the muscles must also support the entire body weight whereas in the saddle the saddle is doing most of that work. Out of the saddle should be reserved for when you absolutely run out of gears cause it wastes a lot of energy that could be going to driving the bike.

Frank Day

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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h2ofun wrote:
H2O wrote: "I know Frank has told me to go to a 34/34 or 34/36. Has not suggested a 34/42 yet. Since I can stand doing 18.6% grade, I am not sure at what point one would
want to change to lower gears because of a decrease in crank length. Any suggestions on what I should be looking for?”

The problem with out of the saddle is it is inherently more inefficient than being in the saddle. Why? Because out of the saddle the muscles must also support the entire body weight whereas in the saddle the saddle is doing most of that work. Out of the saddle should be reserved for when you absolutely run out of gears cause it wastes a lot of energy that could be going to driving the bike.

Frank Day

Totally agree. I cannot think of a race where I had to get out of the saddle, and I do some with tough hills.
But, not sure if any had real 18 plus percent grades. Getting out once if a while does help stretch my legs.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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H2Ofun wrote: "Boy did I think of this thread reading this article…”

THIS THREAD!!!! How about the entire forum? Bunch of bullies hang out here.

Frank Day

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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h2Ofun wrote "I thing these at a minimum will be like 130mm to 200mm. Will let Frank tell me since am too lazy now to get out the tape measure and allen wrench. :)”

The adapters move the pedals 30 mm from the marked length. Those cranks would go from 145 to 182. 5. Now, with this adapter, you can go from 115 to 212.5. I doubt we need to go any shorter but in case we do I also have adapters that will modify the length 50 mm.

Frank Day

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Okay, I have the new adjustable cranks installed, and set for 140mm. Will do a test ride on them in the morning and see what happens. Luckily I found a seat that sits much higher so I was able to get to 875m. Getting way up there.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Dave, you are a massive troll, but the sama quotes baited me too hard.

I'll quote matt levine from bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/...ights-and-tech-fears

"Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are bold iconoclastic innovators who move fast and break things and question established paradigms to change the world, unless someone makes fun of them. In which case they crumple instantly?"

"How can I change the world if someone might mock me on Twitter?"

The article I linked goes into more detail.

Also you may want to read the comments on hacker news, (where sama is an active member). They go both directions, both in support of and defending sama:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924093


To me the most poigniant quote from that thread was: "That's toxic? First, sounds very straw-man. Second, okay, someone said they think something's unethical. Maybe it is? Maybe they have a point they didn't articulate well? Maybe they're straight-up wrong! If you're arguing for free speech, then you're arguing in favor of people being vocally critical of ideas you hold dear. Hiding under the pillow fort of "California is so intolerant" makes it seem like what you're actually complaining about is people disagreeing with you."


I am slightly reluctant in linking HN, and unleashing h2ofun on it.


This thread is an abomination and h2ofun should be banned. I apologize for bumping it but I was too 'triggered'.
Last edited by: drockz: Dec 15, 17 21:56
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [drockz] [ In reply to ]
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drockz wrote:
Dave, you are a massive troll, but the sama quotes baited me too hard.

I'll quote matt levine from bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/...ights-and-tech-fears

"Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are bold iconoclastic innovators who move fast and break things and question established paradigms to change the world, unless someone makes fun of them. In which case they crumple instantly?"

"How can I change the world if someone might mock me on Twitter?"

The article I linked goes into more detail.

Also you may want to read the comments on hacker news, (where sama is an active member). They go both directions, both in support of and defending sama:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924093


To me the most poigniant quote from that thread was: "That's toxic? First, sounds very straw-man. Second, okay, someone said they think something's unethical. Maybe it is? Maybe they have a point they didn't articulate well? Maybe they're straight-up wrong! If you're arguing for free speech, then you're arguing in favor of people being vocally critical of ideas you hold dear. Hiding under the pillow fort of "California is so intolerant" makes it seem like what you're actually complaining about is people disagreeing with you."


I am slightly reluctant in linking HN, and unleashing h2ofun on it.


This thread is an abomination and h2ofun should be banned. I apologize for bumping it but I was too 'triggered'.

Thanks for your education

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Rode for the first time ever 140mm cranks in my RPM/HR testing. Never ever in a million years would I have said I was willing to try shorter cranks, let alone say I just rode some 140's. Nothing has jumped out negative. I keep wanting to have the data show me there is a break point but so far, have not been able to say wow, these are too short because my numbers did this. I will give Martis a try with them tomorrow. I keep asking myself, how short will I try testing when I can finally show some type of number that this is just too short.
Sure wish someone else had done some thorough testing on this so I could at least be looking at specific data.

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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Try custom made 30mm. 140mm is so 2016.
Last edited by: DFW_Tri: Dec 16, 17 9:13
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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [DFW_Tri] [ In reply to ]
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DFW_Tri wrote:
Try custom made 30mm. 140mm is so 2016.

I am learning to never say never

Dave Campbell | Facebook | @DaveECampbell | h2ofun@h2ofun.net

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Re: My testing to try and find best crank length with my Velotron [h2ofun] [ In reply to ]
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H2Ofun wrote: "Rode for the first time ever 140mm cranks in my RPM/HR testing. Never ever in a million years would I have said I was willing to try shorter cranks, let alone say I just rode some 140's. Nothing has jumped out negative. I keep wanting to have the data show me there is a break point but so far, have not been able to say wow, these are too short because my numbers did this. I will give Martis a try with them tomorrow. I keep asking myself, how short will I try testing when I can finally show some type of number that this is just too short.”

How short is too short? How long is too long?

Several years ago when I first started playing with this seriously I just kept shortening and shortening the cranks every few days (gave myself a little time to try to get used to each length) until I finally said, “it is clear these are too short.” I was down to 85 mm. I then started lengthening them and as I did I could just feel the power start to come back. It was a wonderful feeling until I got to about 145 at which point I said “this is getting too long.” Even though I haven’t done the work you have to document this it is clear to me that 135 is close to my best crank length. This kind of testing is sort of like putting a frog in a pot and turning on the heat. The frog will go way past “comfortable” before realizing something isn’t right. For most people I think this is pretty straight forward if they can do this kind of testing. What complicates it for you is your back and knee. Shorter cranks are also easier on the knees. I would normally recommend that one use the longest cranks that allow them to get into a good aero position without losing power. However, if one has bad knees or back they may need to go shorter.

Then, I have todays experience. I put on my bike a new prototype to try. When we make prototypes we typically use older cranks that are alying around that we have little use for anymore. This set won’t go any shorter than 167.5. I found that length almost unridable to me. I couldn’t ride in the aero position (this despite the seat being lower so the drop was less) and I was spending so much time upright my hands were going numb from the pressure. The mechanism I was testing worked great but the crank length sucked, at least for me.

One more thing. Please give yourself a better granny gear for your Martis test with these really short cranks. It really isn’t cheating but just giving the really short cranks a fair chance on that 16-18% grade..



Frank Day

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