Kovkov

6 of my 7 working bikes have cottered cranks. Thanks to the bikesmithdesign cotter press 5 of them still have the original cotters despite removal and reinstallation. The one that needed new ones i serviced before i had the press and thus i used the hammer method.

I never serviced a non cottered crank. But since a few weeks ago where after some 4976 pages of discussion in the mechanics forum there was no consensus on how to correctly reinstall a square taper crank i guess i'm converting my only square taper bike to cottered at the next service time *lol*.

The only downside i encountered so far is that shoe laces can get entangled on the protruding cotter ends.

T-Mar

The bottom line is that the USA has a long history with single piece cranks and they're less expensive to manufacture and assemble. I could write a short essay on the history of American crankset preferences.

francophile 

I'm interested!

T-Mar

Hmm, you didn't even mention our real nemesis - cottered, aluminum crankarms.

noglider 

I remember those but my memory is hazy. I worked on one of these either zero times or one time. If it was once, it was luckily uneventful. For sure, it was a dumb idea.

Trakhak

A couple of you must also remember the 3-pin cotterless steel Campy Sport cranks.

By the way, thanks to verktyg for the info on the Zeus hardened steel cotter pins, although it's about 40 years too late for my bike shop days.

Velo Mule

The VAR cotter tool is a big help. I worked in a bike shop in the late '70's to the early '80's and this tool was a tremendous help. Fast and easy removal and insertion. We kept a collection of cotter pins, but once in a while we needed to file them.

We had a racing bike from probably the early '60's in the shop with cottered cranks. We were all surprised at how light the bike was compared to our modern bikes. There was a time an a place for them. The best ones were made to look and perform nicely.

Salamandrine 

A cotter press is the only way to go with cotter pins. When I was the 15 year old bike shop helper BITD, and got stuck with all the cottered cranks, because I was good at it, ha ha . Really it was because no one else wanted to do it and they could make me.

I hate the things.

Now that that's off my chest, to address the original point of this zombie thread.... Cottered cranks disappeared from high end racing bikes sometime in the mid 60s. Some people preferred them and continued to use cottered steel cranks after this, for a time, at least that's what I've been told. I still remember old timers rattling on about how the old steel cranks were better than these stupid aluminum ones that break. They were used on middle range bikes into the mid 70s, and slowly got pushed into the lower end before mostly disappearing. As pointed out, they are still used in parts of the world.

It should be noted that not all cottered steel cranks are the same. A good racing crank from the late 50s is at a whole different quality level compared to one that would have come on a cheap department store bike in the 70s.

noglider 

Not only that, there are good cotters and cheap ones.

ryansu

+1 on the Bikesmith design cotter press, most expensive bike tool I have aside from the work stand and it has yet to fail me, I probably appreciate it all the more because I destroyed a cottered crank just before I got this tool in frustration at the C-Clamp method.

francophile 

I got mine for (as I recall) around $65 on a no reserve eBay auction. I prefer VAR's model over the other designs out there because it doesn't require a ratchet, it's fully lever-action.

Which also means you need to have that thing perpendicular, if you don't, the amount of raw force the VAR press will output is tremendous, enough you can easily mushroom the head on cheaper/softer cotters.

tiger1964 

Forgot about those -- and why did the Schwinn dealer I worked at have one?

Looks like prop from the battle scene in Braveheart.

FBOATSB

This is a dangerous and potentially expensive thread to resurrect. Now I'm considering sourcing one in the early sixties flavor.

noglider 

Williams! Chatter Lea!

bikingshearer 

I was reintroduced to cottered cranks about three years ago. A very nice Magistroni steel crankset came on a high-end early 1970s bike I bought - yes, the cranks were an anachronism, but it's what had been on the frame for 45 or so years. These were top-drawer cranks with the TA-standard 50.4mm BCD, so the potential range of chainwheels was limitless. Yes, it was heavy (those cranks were built to last pretty much forever) but they looked and worked great.

Riding them was fun. Working on them - not so much, even with a cotter tool (one of the small ones that you have to use a wrench with, not the VAR - I was not going to pay $200 or more for one, which seems to be the starting price on eBay). Finding (or, in one case grinding) the right cotters was also a chore. I find cotterless far easier to work on, but then I have the right tools and 40+ years of experience with them.

I sold the cottered crankset and its bottom bracket earlier this year. Don't miss 'em, and I have no intention of ever owning another set..