My pedals have been slowly deteriorating for the last little while, but they have taken a turn for the worse as of late. I actually tried to replace them recently but I could not get them off the cranks. This week, the right pedal has been disintegrating day by day, making loud crunchy sounds when I pedal and it's totally loose, it almost feels like the body is going to slide off the axle. Went to the bike shop, Singletrack, and asked them if they could get the pedals off. After a valiant try, it was a no-go, the pedal just spun around without coming out at all. I guess it's so seized up, it's just stripping the threads when you try to loosen it. That means the only solution is to get a new crankset. [I already have new pedals from when I tried to replace them last time] After checking out a few cranksets, I decided on the Shimano LX. But they wanted $160, which seemed a little steep to me. Looking online, I saw that I could get the set for $120, $40 cheaper! I also found the set for $135 at the Bike Shop. When you factor in shipping charges [$10], the Bike Shop's price is only $5 more than online and I wouldn't have to wait for them to ship. So I decided to get it there.

I went in today after work and asked the guy for the Shimano LX crankset, 175mm. He even repeated it back to me "175mm", before disappearing into the basement for about twenty minutes. He came back with a crankset, no box, no instructions, no fixing bolts, just two pieces zip-tied together. I thought this was a little suspicious, but whatever, they could give them to me in a brown paper bag for all I care as long as they work. Well, I get home and take a closer look at what I bought. The first thing I noticed was that he gave me the wrong size. Right there in plain view, stamped on the metal "170mm". Fuck! Worse, I notice wear on the rings, the paint is all scraped away and you can see rings where pedals used to be installed. The motherfucker sold me not only the wrong sized item, but a used item! Holy shit, was I pissed off! They were still open, so I raced down there to get a replacement or my money back. I tried to be nice because I knew the guy who sold me this is probably gone home and I would be dealing with totally different people. But I'm sure they knew I was pretty goddamned pissed off. After explaining my predicament, he turns around and grabs the correct, boxed part off the shelf not more than two feet behind him. Eek, that first bastard wasted twenty minutes of my time to go get a wrong, used part from the basement, when the correct, new part was sitting right behind him the whole time? WTF?

Anyway, I got the right part [finally!] and I'm going to install it this weekend. I just hope my bottom bracket set isn't seized like my pedals, that would suck. Oh, and my new crankset is splined instead of tapered, which is cool because I've always had problems with those damn tapered axles getting wrecked. If your tighten your cranks too tight on a tapered axle, your cranks wobble back and forth, coming loose all the time no matter how hard you crank them on. Then you need to replace the BB and the crankset, usually. Major pain. I've actually had good success with the "coke-can shim" tho. That's when you take a piece of the metal from a Coke can [or any aluminum can, Coke cans are a nice, pretty red tho] and use it as a shim to stop the wobble. Did it about two years ago and it's been solid ever since.