Inspired by the great "Things That Everyone Loves That You Hate" thread, I thought of a couple of parts that I really, really hated, but I couldn't put them on my list since everybody hated them. Qualifying parts should be of bike-shop quality and utterly worthless. The more financially painful the purchase, and the more you loathed them, the better.

To start things off, here's three that I utterly despised:

1) SR Sampson clipless pedals.



They had a really cool feature, which was that when you unclipped, a little bit of drag was applied to the spindle, so the pedal wouldn't turn and you could step straight down to clip in. When the pedal got dirty, the spindles wouldn't turn. Also, the back of the cleat wrapped around the rear of the pedal, so it was like an inch tall. Walking on them was like trying to walk on sideways ice skates. They totally, irredeemably, sucked. And buying them cost me a mint, considering that I was a 15-year-old Junior who washed dishes at the pizza parlor for $3.35 an hour.

2) Profile For Speed "triangle" Aerobars.




I have nothing to say, other than: however much you think these suck, they suck way more than that.

3) 1993 Trek 9000



Behold, the worst high-end bike ever made. The apotheosis of good bikes that suck. And, Gods below, did this bike suck.

Bonded Easton aluminum frame (good.) LX / XT parts mix (good.) Matrix rims on LX hubs (good.)

Adjustable air fork (sucked.) Shock pumps weren't a thing you could buy in 1993, so if you tried to actually adjust your fork, it was super-easy to blow it up. But there was no reason to bother, because there was no adjustment that would make it suck less. Plus, the air dampers leaked, so you were always riding on the elastomers anyway. Also, it was heavy as hell.

Untriangulated swingarm (totally sucked.) The only thing holding the back end of the swingarm together is the rear quick release skewer. You'd think this thing would break skewers like spaghetti. You'd be wrong. I never broke one, and neither did my buddy who used his as his car for like 12 years. The reason that they don't break skewers is that, under side loads, the swingarm blades move in opposite directions and the wheel leans with the impact. So, when you go to make a tight, bumpy turn at single-track speed, the front wheel leans one way, the rear wheel leans the other way, and the bike goes straight.

T4C Rear suspension (titanically sucked.) The rear end uses an elastomer shock with no rebound damping. In a suspension with a 4:1 leverage ratio. We named them "The Pogo Stick," and no bike was ever better named. If you hit a good-sized bump at speed and unweighted the saddle, when the rear wheel rolled over the top of the bump, the 4-times-muliplied rebound force would fire you over the long-ass stem and the whole bike would pivot on it's front hub and turn into a unicycle.

I bought mine on close-out at a shop that had just been sold. I think i paid $750 bucks for it, as a 20 year old community college student.
I hated it so much that when it was stolen out of my backyard in 2001, I was more pissed that they'd jumped the fence that that they'd stolen the bike.

Share your Sagas of Suckage. The more hated, the better.

--Shannon