I have recently bought some FSA Team Carbon cranks from CRC and tried fitting them last night.

In theory this is straight forward – slide driveside crank through BB, slide non-driveside crank onto spline, tighten bolt.

However…

The fit of the non-driveside crank is incredibly tight on the spline. I could only get it about 2mm engaged before having to use the bolt. And in order to get anywhere near full engagement the bolt torque would have to be way above what is recommended. I have even tried greasing the splines (which FSA state must be clean by the way) with no improvement.

Has anyone else had similar issues?

My previous splined cranks had pinch bolts, but these don't, so they do need to be a snug fit – but surely not that snug!

anyone?

Got some FSA MegaExo's from on-one 3 months ago – no issues here – but obviously not quite the same as yours but the same fitting.

Edit: Yeh as below mine were "snug" and one bearing started to come out, knocked it back in but the crank arm was fine to put on 🙂

Mine can be very snug. I have actually had the drive side pull the bearing out of the BB. Very tight tolerances. Are you lubing the splines? You may have to use some percussive maintenance to get them on far enough for the threads to pull properly, or a very light rub down with some fine wet and dry on the splines to give enough clearance.

I've got some carbon FSA cranks also, and they also need to be done up well beyond "two grunts and a groan" worth of torque.

Thanks for that – I got them on – but putting that much torque on something that costly (although half price at CRC at the mo) made me feel a bit nervous!

Ripping the threads out of the spindle on first fitting would be a tad embarrassing!

I'll remove them when it stops lashing it down and re-fit – hopefully they'll have loosened a bit now they are on so I can use somewhere close to the right torque.

Have you checked the torque value in the manual? I remember it being surprisingly high?

I've got some FSA carbon road cranks and whilst I haven't had the issue above I have had some issues recently with the non drive side crank coming loose on the splines and making a god-awful creaking noise