Old 08-18-10, 10:11 PM
  #36  
Six jours
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Got mine in today and bolted them right up. Mostly positive impressions. The machining is nice, as is the finish. Very light. The backside of the chainrings is unfinished as a cost cutter. No big deal, AFAIC. The nuts and bolts are steel, which I appreciate. Aluminum is stupid for nuts and bolts and I was always bothered by TA's use of it. Unfortunately, the nuts and bolts on the VO were installed without grease, so I had to undo all of them, grease them, and reassemble, which was a minor annoyance. After that, I installed the cranks on my SKF bottom bracket and immediately discovered that the Allen head nuts on the inside of the crank (the ones that attach the rings to the spider) fouled the fixed cup, so I had to take the crank back off, remove the nuts, file them down, and reassemble everything. Not-quite-so-minor annoyance!

But that's all done with. The only other thing I don't care for is the crank attachment method. Instead of a 15mm bolt, they use a large Allen head bolt. I suppose this is fairly standard today, but I still don't care for it. I was going to solve the "problem" by simply substituting my own 15mm bolts, but then discovered that the funky dustcaps (which also install with a gigantic Allen wrench) won't fit over the 15mm bolts, and the TA dustcaps use a different thread so can't be substituted. So back on go the Allen bolts and the Allen head dustcaps. In the end, they work just fine, but still look a little funky. Sigh.

Despite the quibbles I'm quite satisfied. Now I just hope they don't break!
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