Remove External Bearing Cranks on Mountain Bikes

Video Transcript

"I'm going to talk you through removing your two-piece external bottom bracket cranks. The cranks that I have on this bike are from a company called Race Face, out of Canada. The other popular cranks are from Shimano of Japan. They use slightly different systems to pre-load the bearings and hold the crank arm on. So I'm going to show you the Race Face way and then talk about what I'd be doing differently if it was Shimano. So to remove the Race Face crank, it's pretty simple. It takes one 8 millimeter Allen key. The 8 millimeter Allen key just goes in here, move it to the left and it pulls the crank arm on. There's a self-extracting bolt here, which means there's a larger bolt that's threaded in this way that holds everything on. With the Shimano stuff, the bolt here is just for bearing pre-load, and then on the left side of the bike here, there's pinch bolts, one here and one here, that holds everything on. I'm a bigger fan of the Shimano system than this system. I think it stays in adjustment better and is more tolerant of different types of use, but this Race Face system is pretty simple."