Steely Dan

so i have a 1.5 month old Motobecane Le Champion Ti SL that has developed a double click on the down stroke of my left crank. the click is inexplicably intermittent and it is ONLY heard when i'm exerting a decent amount of force on the pedals (20+ mph); its' never heard at lower speeds.

i took it in to a LBS and the wrench there said it was a loose B/B cup, so he tightened it up and the noise went away for 4 days of beautifully silent commuting, and i was happy. then the clicking came back. i'm hesitant to take it back to the same shop because they didn't solve the problem the first time and i'm not inclined to spend more money to have the problem not fixed again.

so for all of you bike wizards out there, are there any likely suspects that i should look at first to diagnose where this mystery click is coming from? i know it's not chain or derailleur related, it's got to be somewhere in the crank or pedals, but the thing making it so hard to find is that the sound can only be heard when i'm riding the bike fairly hard, when i spin it in the stand, all is silent and well.

any ideas?



P.S. there's no need to point out that i got what i paid for by going the BD route, i'm already well aware of the opinions of anti-BD crowd.

desertdork

From your description, I'd suggest that the bb threads may be dry or dirty. I'd clean & grease the threads and then correctly torque the bb cups. This is a common reason for this type of ticking, though there are other possibilities (see Sheldon Brown).

brockd15 

I had something similar a while back and it ended up being my pedals. I changed my saddle, changed my seatpost, made all kinds of adjustments, changed my cranks, etc., but it was still there. Then I broke a pedal and had to change them...haven't heard it since.

Buckeye Jim

I've got the same bike, and have had the same problem. First time the lbs greased threads and tightned the bottom backet. It went away for a couple weeks. Next time tightened the bracked some more. another thousand miles it was clicking again I got to checking things and found the left pedal could be tightned about one eightth of a turn more. So far so good. Other than that I really like the bike, saved a ton of money.

Steely Dan

well, i finally got around to switching out the pedals with some old ritchey pedals i had laying around and sure enough, the clicking sound went away immediately, so it was my pedals the whole time, nothing at all to do with the brand new bike.

so now i have a year old pair of shimano PD-A530s that are clicking. is it worth trying to service a 70 dollar pair of pedals, or should i just start over?