Why you should replace your plastic pedals...
 

... on a $700 bike. Trek Valencia - great bike, love it... new pedals already in the mail tubes... but then this happens! :notamused:

P.S. WTF? Plastic pedals should be illegal on an adult bike. These probably cost Trek 50 cents a pair, and all metal, albeit cheap, would've cost them $1.00 a pair - made in China. I understand and accept there are different price points, but a $700 bike should not have the same pedals as a $79 bike from Walmart. And NO bike should have pedals that snap upon mounting. Talk amongst yourselves.

plastic can be pretty strong, just not yours.

Last time I had a bike with plastic pedals, a $110 Walmart mountain bike, it took the better part of a decade for a pedal to snap. Of course I would have liked not to have been going between 15-20mph at the time, but what are you gonna do?

Are those the Wellgo pedals Trek puts on new bikes? I had some similar contraptions that came with my 7.5 FX. I took them off before I rode the bike any distance. Yuck! I settled on some carefully overhauled MKS pedals. Much, much better.

Is the metal portion on piece or two? If two I can see why it would snap so easily.

I didn't break the Wellgo pedals that came with my 7.3 FX, but they're relagated to winter duty with power grips. Not great quality.

Ah! Good question. The metal portion is 2 pieces. If it were 1 piece wrapped around it would've been stronger.

There's no branding on them, but they're prolly Wellgo's.

Do you guys think I should make a warranty claim, just to rub their noses in it? :cry:

I never even saw the pedals specified for my 7.3. I told my LBS to never put them on and ordered a pair of of Shimano 540's to be put on. Stock pedals were junk and I didn't even want to start with them.

I'd put in a warrantee claim. That way you will have a complete set, should you ever need a set of cheap pedals.

When you sell the bike?

Repair a kids bike?

etc, etc, etc.....

As a rule, as the price goes up, the pedals get worse! On really expensive bikes you don't get ANY pedals!

Actually, even on $700 bikes, most manufacturers expect you will fit them with the clipless pedal of your choice so the plastic pedals are just there so you can test ride it at the dealership.

Back in late '91 I bought a Trek 1420 and it came with mid-line Look clipless pedals. At the time Look was almost the only game in town so Trek was pretty sure most customers would want them. These days there are so many models and types of clipless pedals than no manufacturer is going to guess what brand you will want to use.

Here's the plastic Ofmega Sintesi pedals on my commuter bike, where they've been used for over 25 years without failure:

http://os2.dhs.org/~john/sintesi.jpg

I think modern plastic pedals such as the one that failed for the O.P. are not intended to last much longer than the test ride. The shop is supposed to encourage the customer to buy a sturdier pedal, often one of the clipless varieties. There's no way to predict which of the several mutually incompatible clipless systems a customer may already have shoes/cleats for, so a disposable plastic pedal allows this decision to be made at the retail level.

I volunteered at The Evergreen State College Bikeshop for a year, and at least once someone came in with plastic pedals where the CPOS bearings (maybe just metal bushings?) had bound and literally worn through the plastic pedal body, so the rider was stomping on the steel spindle to transmit power, with some plastic bits hanging on.
Come to think of it, the spindles of such pedals might even be pot metal, i.e. melted down Chinese cookpots and Buddha figurines... so the snapping thing might not have been the plastic at all!

Oddly enough, my 30+ yearold Schwinn Sierra mountain bike has what appear to be CPOS pedals, but the ballbearing are actually serviceable. Sigh.

Yeah, my two Specialized Rockhoppers have plastic pedals. Don't like the look at all. I'm slowing going through all my bikes and upgrading at least to this Forte pedal, which is a pretty nice pedal, imo: http://www.performancebike.com/shop/...tegory_ID=5240

I've given away 3 sets of plastic pedals in the last month.

A pair of all metal Wellgo with toe clips and straps is on sale right now at pricepoint for $11.98. Tough to beat. I have bought and used several of these Wellgos from Pricepoint, and will probably restock at this price.

Not surprising. See this semi-often. Higher end bikes don't come with better pedals. They're omitted entirely. Those plastic ones you see are fine if they don't break. But otherwise i'd say they're good for test rides.

Which is precisely why they come on cheaptacular bikes.

Lol warranty claim for a cheap plastic set of pedals that are going to break again? It's not that hard to convince someone to buy $10 set of all metal platform pedals with a credit for the broken one. 90% of the people out there are using plastic ones just fine... until they break.

I have cheap plastic pedals on my mountain commuter bike (I have been meaning to replace them for about a year) and they have given me over 2500 trouble free miles.

:roflmao2::roflmao2: Well, maybe I failed to mention I'm 6'2" and 280Lbs. :roflmao2::roflmao2:

Well uh... hmm.

I agree plastic pedals suck. It could be a Trek thing since my Trek 7.2fx also came with rubbish pedals (and rubbish spokes but that doesn't concern this thread).

Problem is, the metal ones they stick on new bikes aren't any better. I've had both on new bikes, and they were always very thin and creaky. Both of them ended up with some play after a few hundred kilometres. Maybe pedals are a hard thing to make reliable? In essence you are putting all your weight on the pedals very small ball bearings.

Cheap metal pedals are no better... had 'resin' platform pedals on my bike that came stock but after a couple of years they got cracked and a little mangled so I went with a $10 metal pair. They looked cool but the cage on the left pedal got crushed in with a few days of starting to ride again.... I didn't even get into a crash....

Plastic pedals never break from hanging in the garage.

My Glock is half plastic with a few thousand rounds through it. Look at this pic - the weight would be directly above the spindle. On mine, the weight is on the front and back metal portion, and bridged to the spindle with plastic. Not good. Well, I really just wanted this thread to help anyone with a new bike understand you need to get good pedals. Just days earlier, on a different thread, I discussed this and settled on a decent pair of BMX style pedals. They should survive my weight or a crash.

It's easy to make pedals reliable. It's done all the time. But, read some of the above posts as to why manufacturers put super cheap, shoddy pedals on new bikes. They don't expect you to keep them and they don't know which brand and type of good pedals you will wind up using.

And fewer and fewer people bother to/know how to overhaul pedals. So they by something like MKS pedals, don't overhaul and adjust them - and declare they bite. I overhaul mine each year. If you don't know how to, learn. It will make your rides that much more fun.

Yup. I have had cheaptacular bikes from the past several decades, and the OEM pedals went steadily from strong and sturdy to meh to disposable junk. But yes, you;d probably still get sturdier peds on a $100 Walmart bike (they would last maybe a few years but that'd also be the life of the bike - Walmart doesn't expect you to repair those gaspipe beasts any more than they expect you to upgrade to Looks:lol:)