I’ve got a pair of road shoes, just trying to decide on what pedals to use with them, price is a factor here.

R540s seem the obvious choice but I am also thinking it might be interesting to try look or even one of the cheap LOOK compatible pedals knocking about (“Exustar”)…

I don’t make speedplay money…

Any useful suggestions?

There was a post earlier about r540’s with cleats for £19. Can’t think of any good reason to try anything else.

The exustar ones are fine, plenty of people i know use them daily on commuters and have way less issues that most others and being compatible with look cleats make it easy to get replacements.

Those r540 are sold out but you can get a pair of shimano with cleats forunder ~£25, then again you can get other brands of “look compatible” jobs for less and pukka keo for ~£30.

It’s a fiver each way so really I guess I’m looking for people with experiences of the different pedal systems to offer their input, is float an advantage of one over the other?

The shimano ones come with a cleat that has some float, I bought some because at the time they were cheaper than the exustar ones

but bear in mind that you don’t need as much on a road bike as you’re not flinging it around like you would a mountain bike.

I’ve use the look knock off’s too, apart form being heavy they’re fine.

Having said that shimano are far far better, look pedals wear out way too quickly. R550’s have a metal plate under the cleat which stops the pedals wearing out, don’t think the r540 has that so they won’t last as long and the R550’s are usually <£30 anyway.

Shimano, easier to clip in, harder wearing cleats, slightly lighter base models.

This from a KEO Blade user of 10 years. If I started again, I’d probably go with Shimano.

Yeah 9 degrees did sounds like a lot, buts then there’s 4.5 an 0 degree look cleats and shimano offer 6/2/0 degree options.

I guess I could start off with the cheapest and floatiest option (Exustar) and if I find it too much either opt for new cleats or switch to shimano…

I was expecting to be told Exustar simply fall apart, doesn’t matter too much if they are a bit heavy TBH, I can live with a few more grams.

Cheers all.

I bought some shimano 550s from CRC for about £28 recently (because of the metal baseplate as Tina S suggests – no idea if it really makes a difference though)

They’re fine for me, particularly in terms of float (was on speedplay frogs before, using mtb shoes, because of old-man knees)

I’d go Shimano. R550s are nicer than the R540s – they have the wider platform of Shimano’s higher end pedals and are a chunk lighter.