Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Bottom Bracket Standards

After several years of new bottom bracket standards being introduced practically every other month, all promising to fix all of the old problems, it seems like things have settled down a little bit in this area of bike design lately.

Whether it is PressFit 30, BB30, BBright, T47, or one of the myriad of other proprietary setups Worthington Cycles will offer frames with the proven regular  old threaded BSA "english" bottom brackets for the foreseeable future.



Some may argue that the various 30mm BB standards offer some performance advantages including larger bearings and a stiff yet lightweight 30mm dia. aluminum BB axle -- we feel that using the 386EVO, or similar designs can accomplish the same results  -- and it uses a standard threaded bottom bracket shell. 

Both of my personal road bikes currently have FSA EVO386 threaded bottom brackets on them which are are doing great after several seasons of use. 
For mountain bikes I tend to run with the standard BSA threaded 24mm Shimano setup which works great as well.

About the only time a BB30 or PF30 bottom bracket is more useful is when a rare customer has problems with ankle clearance on a standard crankset - the BB30 crank systems do offer tons of extra ankle clearance due to the narrower BB profile.


I tend to be an ankle and foot rub person, but fortunately I am still able to use standard cranks with an outboard bearing system on a standard threaded bottom bracket.


At some point the oversize T47 threaded shell design, which has very few drawbacks (other than the new tooling costs) may become the future standard that everyone can finally settle on. For now I am sitting back and keeping an eye on things to see how it all shakes out...If someone were to send me some cutting taps for T47 I would probably switch to that system, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon...