In August during a visit to Canada I bought an FSA Compact Carbon chainset, which includes the bottom bracket, from Racer Sportif in Toronto.
Once home I got it installed and did a couple of hilly 40 milers and a hill climb before hanging up the bike for the winter. Last weekend I got a new pair of Keo’s and when I rotated the non-drive side to the 12 o’clock position there was a nasty grinding feel and a “grapping” through the 6 o’clock. On installing the pedals I rode around the car park and found there was considerable resistance through the rotation.
Been the nervous type I took my bike to the mechanic that installed the chainset and b.b. to have a look at it. Once it was out it was clear to see that the bearings on the non-drive side had failed after less than 100 miles! Has anyone else suffered with bottom bracket bearing failure on their FSA’s as early?
It is currently on it’s way back to FSA for replacement, so I will keep you posted on progress and how FSA react.
No, I have never seen that. That is odd since it infers, to a degree, that there may be some inherent misalignment of the bearing in the bottom bracket. Not good- that suggests many scary things.
It could, at worst, mean the bottom bracket threads in your frame are not parallel. This comes to mind because jkmorrow on this forum owns the same brand of frame as you, and he had that problem too. Two other versions of the same brand frame also emerged with that problem. Even more, another brand of frame- made by the same manufacturer though, just branded and cosemetically different, also showed up here twice with severe bottom bracket thread problems- we had to chase the threads and a significant amount of matter was dislodged during the thread chasing process, suggesting they were far out of alignment.
-OR- Perhaps you happened upon one with a defect.
My concern over the fraem is paramount though. Of all the frames we have built in our store from this manufacturer- *all of them have developed bottom bracket problems. *Every one.
We no longer sell the bikes manufacturered by these guys, under any brand name- until we are certain there are no more issues. We’re talking about nearly ten bikes in a row now, all in under five weeks.
Tom are you aware that this was on my 200EMS? I think you may be thinking of the bike you fitted me to. Although that is worrying if it is, I still have my record carbon with DMT tt chainring on that one and it still changes a treat.
I was thinking of the bike we fitted you to. I have had no issues with Kestrel products at all, however, certain new Kestrel products are now made by the manufacturer I alluded to earlier.
This being the case (it being on your Kestel, not your other bike) I would look at the condition of your bottom bracket threads, be sure they are clean and straight, re-install a replacement bottom bracket (hopefully under warranty from FSA- they are very good about that) and that should, hopefully, fix the entire affair. Keep us posted.
Well, when I worked at FSA, we saw massive quantities of BB failure in the time span you mention. The earliest versions of the ISIS bb’s failed/wore out routinely in a very short period of time. Design revisions were made, and the current BBs are much improved, but there are still older BBs on the market, and if you happen to get one, it will fail quickly.
Even the newest ones aren’t great, but that’s ISIS for you. I “only” toasted 2 BB’s this 'cross season, an improvement on the 5 or so last season; so, the new ones are better; 3 months vs. 1.5 months lifespan for me…
(actually, I toasted 3, but the first one was a Truvative model that was pretty much DOA…)
FSA has historically been quite good about covering this type of thing under waranty…
Hmm, we looked at the frame b.b. threads when we took it out and all seemed well. I will be popping into my lbs Tuesday to check it has been sent off, and will keep you posted with progress.