dexmax

i know most shoes are compatible with several pedals(shimano, time, look, etc.).

My question is, are shoes for MTBs compatible with Road pedals and vice versa?

SPDR and Look cleats have 3 bolts which are definitely incompatible with ATB(2 holes) shoes, right?

Are there Road Pedals that use 2bolt cleats? I'm not very familiar with the other road pedals(ritchey, etc.)...

Thanks.

Kev

Yes there are some road pedals that are compatible with the two hole MTB shoes. I know there are SPD pedals for road bikes which will work not sure which other models. Alot of roadies use MTB pedals on their road bikes also.

dexmax

yes actually i use mtb shoes... I like these because they are walkable..

But i was forced to use MTB pedals because i cannot find any road pedals that are compatible with 2bolt shoes.

RainmanP

Many road shoes have mounting options for both 3-screw road cleats or 2-screw mtb cleats. Mtb shoes on the other hand generally only have mounting for 2-screw mtb cleats. It is just the nature of the shoes. Mtb shoes are designed for recessed cleat mounting so you can walk on them. It would be impractical to make a recessed area large enough to accomodate large road cleats plus the bit of extra space needed to rotate out of the pedal. Now I have seen 2-3 models of road shoes that apparently have raised areas that in effect recess the cleat for easier walking. Lake makes a couple of models. In Performance Bike's Early Summer 2003 Performance catalong Lake SX100 road shoes are on sale and offer this feature.
Regards,
Raymond

Avalanche325

Crank Bros Eggbeaters are designed for MTB, but they also make a road shoe cleat.

Rev.Chuck

Most road shoes have a two bolt pattern(MTB: ATAC, SPD, Ritchey, Egg beaters) in addition to the three bolt pattern(Look)and in some cases a four bolt pattern(Time, SpeedPlay).
So you can put a MTB cleat on most road shoes, but why would you, you end up with a shoe with no traction and a tiny cleat.
You cannot put a road cleat on a mountian shoe, wrong patterns, no room in the cleat box.
The advantages of road pedals are the large contact area, less chance of a hot spot, very good connection to the bike. Down side, hard to walk in and(except for SpeedPlays) entry is only on one side of the pedal.
With the mountian shoes you can walk around with out sliding, double sided entry, and they tend to be cheaper, shoes and pedals.

khuon

Sidi makes an adapter for their road shoes. I imagine other shoe manufacturers might do the same. That said, I was rather disappointed with clunky SPD adapter. It was dangerous to walk on (very slippery... more so than just having bare cleats) and made the interface too flexy as well as adding quite a bit of stack height. I also had to do a lot of trimming of the cleat box to fit my Speedplay Frog cleats. All these problems went away after I switched to Speedplay Zero pedals as the bolt pattern didn't require any adapters.