[Closed] Useless cr@p bike part inovations!

Upper dead point? What?

I can only think of biopace, but that had its fans.

eh?? How is that better than a straight crank arm?

Barel uses Rotor Q-rings (think biopace) for DH. But you also have to set your chain device up to 10mm away from the ring to account for its changing diameter. Sounds a bit too much faff to bother with. With my current rubbish skill level and silly-steep DH trails round here I hardly pedal my dh bike anyway!

I have heard that those vibration-daming bar plugs for road bikes are also a bit emperor's new clothes. Any experiences of them?

The best thing about this crank is that it's only 400 grammes heavier than a normal crank - double whammy! doesn't do ought, and heavier, ideal! 😆

It's nice to see the old rubbish ideas being recycled
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i always liked biopace, but then again i have a ruined knee hich probably makes me the archetypal biopace user.

At what point does the designer think that those cranks will work? And why were they not laughed out the door 40 years ago?

I know, even to me it doesn't make any sense, and i'm as thick as pig shit. Bobby Julich used a similar system to biopace for years, didn't do him any harm!

Some blokes used to bend one pedal arm so the pedals wasnt 180 deg/opposite in cycle speedway, rekoned it helped get the 2nd stamp onto the pedal going into the first corner...

Crap innovations/re hashed ideas gotta be girvin forks, much like a 1920s Vincent mororcycles forks.

Mind you I quite like the look of USE SUB forks and thats just another re hash on a leading link suspension design again from motorcycles of the 1950's re hashed again in the 70's for a bit and still used in sidecar MX because of the anti diving properties under braking.

Doesn't Sastre use oval rings?

nickc - Member

Doesn't Sastre use oval rings?

Yup! Sponsored by Rotor.

my mate has one of those fancy mtb chainsets with rotor rings he says he cant tell any difference . but hes paid to use it so he doesnt care. lucky get lol

how about something that converts decades of finely honed bicycle transmission technology into something from the 1930's

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Sauser uses Rotor rings too.

I present to you, my shimano airlines...
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ahh, airlines. fantastic. saw the thread title and that was the first thing popped into my head.

chainstay mounted u-brakes.

There was, in the dim and distant past, a product bought to the market that looked for all the world like a robust plastic coat hanger with the 'hanger' part removed. You bolted said product to the BB shell, and it help grind the bike over logs and other other trail objects "allegedly" needless to say it was utterly utterly pointless. Came out about the same time as things like Crud Claws and DCDs and mech tensioners.

the girvin design is actualy a very good one.

Bearings not bushings, easy to DIY service

Stiffer and lighter, like the logic behind VPP/DW/Maestro compared to horst links, faux bar's and Single pivots. Link two stiff structures together by two short stiff links rather than try and build one larger stiff structure.

Control over axel path, either to make it anti dive like USE or make it more supple like the whyte forks.

Control over axel path, either to make it anti dive like USE or make it more supple like the whyte forks.

anti-dive used to be a big thing to fork designers. I always thought that the girvins would get more acceptance than they did, but I guess people liked/were too used to the behaviour of telescopic forks, and with the advent of longer travel folks felt (rightly or wrongly) that there was a need for compression under braking to speed up the turning response, and that variable compression damping gave them the control they needed.

Every few years someone comes along trying to "revolutionise" cranks/pedalling - BioPace, Rotor, that Taiwanese stuff ^^ and it's always crap...

You'd have thought they'd learnt that by now.

I cannot see how that crank achieves anything at all. But I'm not an engineer, so this [i]may[/i] be me being dense. 🙂

i cant believe it!

20 posts on a thread about useless bike parts and no ones mentioned a certain component retailer in any form.

STW is losing its touch.

good to see DMR made an appearance tho. their speed guide needs to be on this list too.

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It doesn't get much weirder than this ...

http://www.powercranks.com/videopages/videomtdiablofun.html

check the video

good to see DMR made an appearance tho. their speed guide needs to be on this list too.

How exactly is the speed guide useless? I've ran one since 1999 and never lost the chain! With a bit of care to get it set up right when first fitting it runs effectively and silently. Much prefer it over an MRP style device, which wouldn't fit my set up anyway due to a BMX crank/sprocket!

A certain Mr Wiggins has been using rotor rings in the the TdF. They are noticeable even on crappy resolution live feeds, setting up the front mech must be a nightmare!

Biopace was a crap implementation of oval rings (90 degrees out) which are being very widely used by pros (particularly roadies) these days. Not a crap idea at all.

bruno says 29ers are so 2006 ...

36ers are hawt !
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the rowbike!

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Although I like it 😀
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so does anyone use rotor chainrings who isn't paid to?

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front mech setup isnt too bad, you just set ipt up for the largest diameter and thats that, roadie mechs can be trimmed anyway, so you just overshift and click back a couple of clicks if it wont go.

The shifting gates are in the low power bit anyway so your actualy helping the chain along in a way.

girvin flexstems were diabolical, and farcically expensive. Felt like your bars had snapped. And the superior Softride stem cost more than a set of forks and still felt like broken bars..

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Julianwilson said
>I have heard that those vibration-daming bar plugs for road bikes are also a bit emperor's new clothes. Any experiences of them?

Not a roadie so not sure specifically what youre referring to, but bar end weights can be crucial to damping out vibrations in motorcycle handlebars (which I appreciate are a different kettle of fish, with all manner of different frequencies of vibration to deal with).

That powercrank vid - what the hell is "no cheatinG" out of the saddle climbing?!

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Although I suppose the hat's useful enough...

The guy who used to own the Strawbury Duck at Entwistle sunk a load of cash into the production of a plastic handle which attached to the bottom of the seat tube to make it easier for the bike to be carried over gates / fences. 😆

I had a flexstem for ages, plus several layers of drop bar tape on Brahma bars. Was ok for something like SDW, when you're just riding along and it is difficult to get your weight completely off the bars. As soon as you start riding on your feet and not your hands (downhill) it gets a bit pointless.

What is currently considered cool and will be laughed at five/ten years hence? Remote control droppy seatpost? Remote fork lockout? Super-slack head angles? Six inch travel for normal bike? Or will they all still be with us?

those cranks work, science says so:

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fibonacci seems to work for nature and that's been working on it a lot longer than we have

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Approximate and true golden spirals. The green spiral is made from quarter-circles tangent to the interior of each square, while the red spiral is a Golden Spiral, a special type of logarithmic spiral. Overlapping portions appear yellow. The length of the side of a larger square to the next smaller square is in the golden ratio.

MRMW - for a luddite like me, can you please explain (in the manner one would to a 5 year old) how a force from top dead centre through the BB axle centre can give rise to a resultant rotational force with funky cranks?

i want a 36er, they are indeed "hawt"

i have absolutely no idea. but there's a formula for you:

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science says so

What utter mumbo-jumbo

Until the Vatican approve them I don't see how "science" knows better, do you?! 😡

i suspect although it's difficult to tell from the pics that the rings are not centred on the axis of the axle.

The cranks on handles to wind-up wells are shaped like that - I guess they lose less to bending.

actually forget that, it clearly is centred