Bottom Bracket Selection Guide
The BBInfinite Wide Format BB Advantage
The newest generation of cranks have longer spindles to accommodate wider and wider tires for both road, gravel, cross, and mountain bikes of all kinds. Take the Easton EC90 road crank for example, with a spindle length that was once considered a MTB-only format, and then DUB, with long spindles out of the box as the only choice. This is all very good news to us as it gives BBInfinite the opportunity to place the bearings as far outboard as possible, something that should have been done from the start by the industry but sadly was not. Now that the crank set is no longer a limiting factor it is time for you, the consumer, to become acquainted with the new performance possibilities and advantages of this new era in crank and bottom bracket design freedom. Enjoy the ride.
So, a lot of you guys are familiar with spindle spacers right we've got a whole bunch of them on either side of this crank and that's because it's one of these newer style cranks that have a very long spindle format, but it has a very narrow bottom bracket which is based on the old well the old threaded bottom brackets. I have one right here this is what you would essentially be welding inside of a frame if you wanted to make a BSA threaded aluminum bike frame shell and you can see how that fits right there. Okay, so this is what they used and they based BB30 on this except they just machined out the shell and then they press bearings directly in there now this is this is a sort of a problem here because now you have this really long spindle and you need to put all these spacers in there it's kind of like headset spacers it's not necessarily wrong but it can be a little unsightly if you ask me but the biggest problem is it creates a cantilever effect on the bearings in other words the bearings are way in board but the moments of stress are way out here. Okay, so Shimano a long time ago corrected this when they came out with the Hollowtech2, because this is that same threaded shell that I showed you a second ago but with two cups in it. And you can see already where this math is going right look at this here's a spacer see that see where this math is going it's all based on that old Hollowtech system all right so instead of having a huge stack of spacers the way to do it is to start out with a bottom bracket that's already wide enough to position the bearings outside the frame once it is installed so this is what we're going to do right now because we want to reduce that cantilever effect we want to support the crank outboard as much as possible by journaling the bearings as far out as we can and that's what we're going to do right now so we've installed our wide format BB30 bottom bracket and if you come up here you can see that now the bearings are actually journaling the crank outside of the frame so we've gone from this situation where the bearings were inside of the frame to more like this situation like with the HollowTech crank where the bearings are outside they're journaling the bearings out here we have gotten rid of that cantilever effect and what this has done is increase the stiffness and the durability of this bottom bracket you
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