Canfield Brothers Crampon Mountain Pedals - Review

On the Trail

The thing that most clearly sets apart Canfield Brothers pedals from those of competitors is their profile. Whereas most flat pedals today feature a slightly concave profile that's designed to cup and support your foot. Canfield has long gone the exact opposite direction, with a pedal profile that's slightly convex. The leading and trailing edges of the Crampon Mountain (like the Ultimates) are a mere 6 millimeters tall. The pedal grows thicker (not surprisingly) at the axle; here, you're looking at about 10 millimeters of height. No matter how you slice it, the Crampon Mountain is one seriously slim chunk of metal. Canfield claims that their patented shape (and, yes, it's actually patented) offers superior grip over a traditional concave shape.

Is that so?

It's hard, if not impossible, to attribute a pedal's grippiness to any single element of its design. There's a surprising number of factors at play here, including the number of traction pins, the height of traction pins, the shape of traction pins, the distribution of traction pins, platform shape, platform length, platform width... I'm sure I'm leaving all manner of things out of the equation, but you get the idea--the amount of stickiness you feel on a pedal is a function of a whole mess of shit. So, I can't say with 100 percent, lab coat-wearing, test tube-juggling confidence that the grip I felt was all a matter of the pedal's convex shape. I will say this, the grip is quite good, though I wouldn't classify the Crampon Mountain as super sticky. Both Specialized's Boomslang and Race Face's Atlas (two models that come to mind) offer a more tenacious grip. I can, however, say that I prefer the feel of a concave platform. I never slipped a pedal because of the Crampon Mountain's unique profile, but I simply feel more...I guess "settled" or "planted" would be the word I'm looking for here. It is, however, a fairly subtle distinction.


Returning, for a minute, to the subject of traction, it's worth noting that the pedals come out of the box wearing 10 pins per side. You can add an eleventh pin in the center of the pedals, which I experimented with. I prefer having that eleventh pin in the mix, but I am also biased towards getting as much grip from my flat pedals as humanly possible. If you are running shoe with a particularly soft rubber compound or you simply want to free up your feet more easily, you can stick with the stock 10-pin configuration. The pins are dual sided, which means that when you do eventually mangle one, extracting it from the pedal body will require neither vice grips nor cursing. Nice.

The thing that truly sets the Crampon Mountains apart from a lot of other thin pedals is that they truly don't smack into shit as often as most other pedals. You can argue, of course, that pedal strikes are all a matter of operator error; that the pedal doesn't smack into things by itself, instead you are the one smacking it into shit. While there's some truth in that statement, there are also a hell of a lot of bikes rolling down the pike these days with very low bottom brackets and, well, sometimes you want as much margin for operator error as possible. The Crampon Mountains give you that margin. It's noticeable. While I invested some virtual ink a few paragraphs ago into noting that I prefer the feel of a concave platform, there's no doubt that the convex shape lends a helping hand in creating the pedal's pancake-thin leading edge.

As for durability, I've been riding the Crampon Mountains for three months, so it's too early to weigh in on that attribute. Given the mix of bearings and bushings, Canfield Brother's claim of improved durability over their bushing-only pedals is more than plausible. True, Canfield added almost sixty grams to their basic design by adding those stacked bearings, but for the same amount of money, you get a pedal that doesn't require seasonal rebuilds--something worth its weight in gold to me.


Pinkbike's Take

---

MENTIONS: @CanfieldBrothers / @vernonfelton

---