I didn’t crash, fortunately: my only physical complaint is sore shins from having to walk three miles in MTB shoes.
So the abridged version of the story is that I was up on the ridge trail on my gravel bike, and after I did a huge drop, found that my right side crank had come loose. Walked it in to the shop and my guy Ashton found that that side of the axle was welded into the crank, and the weld had failed and sheared off. He also said he’d never seen a break like that before, probably because most people who come into that shop don’t ride their gravel bikes as much or as hard as I do. So while I’m still out a bike for a week while we wait for the replacement to arrive, I at least feel like I earned it.
I’ve somehow managed to break several cranksets, but they were mostly cheap ass Costco/Walmart bikes I had had a kid.
For one of them I literally just sheared through the aluminum crank arm. It was made of cheap aluminum I guess, and the square bracket tore through until it was basically a round hole with bits of aluminum sticking out.
The other was one of those cheap ones where the crank arm and spindle are just a single bar of steel. This one mostly destroyed the bottom bracket, as my frame basically started leaking BB’s and grease. But somewhere in there the axle had snapped as well.
The last one was an ISIS bottom bracket that, like the square bracket above, managed to shear through an aluminum crank arm.
I don’t know how I managed all of that, I’m not even that strong or heavy of a rider
That’s pretty impressive. Lots of bad luck? Or just crappy quality control?
I’m a fairly average size, but I do a lot of pretty serious gravel biking, as well as riding in all conditions thanks to using the same bike for almost all of my transportation. And honestly, running down the list of changes I’ve made to this bike since I got it in 2020, most of the stock parts that came with it have failed and had to be replaced, to the point that I’m on first-name terms with everyone at my shop and they’ve started comping me labor when I go in for replacement parts.