Finally ordered Middleburn Chainset / Finally fitted Hope bottom bracket

I'd been debating for AGES about what chainset to get for the new Surly bike.  Pretty much right from the start I'd had in mind the idea of getting a Middleburn crankset just on the basis of having used their chainrings on the old Marin bike for about 1-2 years and being very impressed at the quality of them.  Plus the chainrings (I got a set of them about 2yrs ago) were still relatively in good nick, so I wanted to just re-use those on the new Surly really if possible.

The stumbling block was partly the price - £200+ just for the crank arms + axle (on a bike where the frame was only just over £300! - but also just the fact that your common-or-garden Shimano XT 'level' of crankset is now actually extremely good quality in terms of bang for buck as it were.  So I was torn for quite a while over what to go for.  In the end I took the plunge though and went for the Middleburn option.

Middleburn RS8 XType Crankset

Ordering the thing in itself was a nightmare actually, hardly anywhere 'well known' seems to stock a decent range of Middleburn components any more (by 'well known' I mean Wiggle/CRC/Evans etc).  There was one place I came across based in Buxton Derbyshire who seemed to do really good prices on them, but some of the reviews of the place sounded horrific so I left that alone.

In the end I purchased the crankset from Freeborn Bikes.  I've never used them before (or even heard about them if I'm honest!), but I emailed them beforehand to ask about stock availability and the guy that answered seemed pretty good.  I was actually more impressed by his honesty in saying that they didn't actually stock them but could still get them out within a few days, and that most of their customers just preferred the more mainstream crankset brands (Shimano etc) because they were now probably just as good quality and as reliable etc.

Anyway, went on their site and ordered the silver 175mm MiddleBurn RS8 XType with a red spider.  Happily the item arrived very quickly, I think it took just 3-4 days to arrive which was great, I'd expected to have to wait at least a week so very happy with that and Clee's service there.

The crankset itself arrived in a heavily padded plastic envelope.  After unpacking it, there was a vacuum wrapped plastic packet inside with the crankset in and some instructions:

The engineering on them is beautiful, very much like Hope's, just really minimal in terms of materials and fussiness (or lack of!), but just oozing with quality:

In the photo above, actually you can see a few little scuff marks on the drive side crank (under the 'M' on the bevelled bit).  I didn't actually see this until the following day, but they don't look like anything more than superficial scratches so I couldn't be bothered complaining about that.  They do have a lifetime warranty on the materials so if it does turn out to be something more than just superficial then hopefully I should be able to send it back and get it replaced.

The preload adjuster is below:

Never seen a preload adjuster before on a crank, was quite intrigued by it... actually when I finally came to fit it, the adjuster was very obvious, it's really just a way to ensure that the crank is correctly located within the bottom bracket shell - you tighten the adjuster to take up any play / gap between the non-drive side crank and the BB shell.

Here's the thing slotted together pre install:

Will be fitting that tomorrow I think.

Fitted Hope Stainless Steel Bottom Bracket

Well, after having had this sat around for about a month doing nothing but looking pretty as hell, I finally got to install it now the crankset is here!!!

I did have a very minor issue fitting it into the BB shell - the reaming on the BB shell threads was slightly burred around the lug holes where the various tubes are welded to the BB shell.  It was actually fine though, just meant putting a bit more pressure on to get it 'past' those tube lugholes.

Otherwise it fitted like a dream, buttery smooth to tighten up as you'd expect with a brand new frame / bottom bracket.

The instructions for the BB indicated to put two spacers on the drive side and just one on the non-drive side (I think that's right, going from memory here)... so I did that and it seems fine.

One quibble - as with most Hope components - was that there was no indication in the fitting instructions as to how tight to tighten the BB cups.  In the end I went for about 30-40Nm, which is reasonably tight but not overtight (I think Shimano say 35-50Nm).  I'll check on it after a few months to see if it needs nipping up a bit.