Bicycle tech geeks of the 90’s may remember Bebop pedals, now back on the market under new ownership after a few year hiatus sorting out some legalese. Clipless pedal design has followed two basic paths - one with the binding mechanism in the pedal, another with the binding mechanism in the cleat. Bebop follows the latter school of thought, with a simple two sided pedal and a cleat that has an opposing pair of teeth that engage with the underside of the forged chromoly pedal body rings. For the roughly $125 BBP-01 model which we have for review, the pair of pedals come in at 199g and the cleats at 75g putting this system squarely in the ultra-light category of pedals.

The Bebop design isn’t just to be different, on paper at least the design offers some advantages beyond simply being lightweight as opposed to other clipless systems. First and foremost is the free float inherent in the design, a full 20 degrees. “Float” is the amount of free rotation the foot can make before reaching disengaging from the pedal. People prefer various amounts of float, with common wisdom saying that a large range of free float is best for touchy knees. For those not into the single degrees of float offered by most traditional systems, the wide range of free float can be a real treat.

The cleat design also keeps the shoe nearer to the axle than most systems, with a short stack height of 11mm. This is so close in fact that many recessed shoes need some tread trimmed back around the pedal axle. This should result in a slightly lower seat height as compared to other pedals, and consequently a lower center of gravity. Basically, stuff the real bike nerds like to talk about that has some, albeit very little, effect on performance. The cleat also affords a pretty large contact area on the pedal, which may help with people that experience hot spots on their feet from other system’s smaller cleat/shoe/pedal contact patch.

The model we have received for test feature a stainless steel axle and forged chromoly rings, but possibly more importantly features real roller bearings in the pedal. Sealed ball bearing on the inside, needle bearing on the outside and nary a bushing to be seen. This should bode well for long term pedal body durability, as bushings tend to wear out and get sloppy in pedals.

The fact that the binding mechanism is housed in the cleat rather than the pedal does bring up some questions though, mainly in terms of durability. The binding mechanism appears somewhat delicate to make it manageable inside the cleat. Your cleat takes a lot of abuse clipping in and out, and especially walking around generally grinding it into the ground. Having the binding mechanism in the cleat leads to an expensive cleat to be walking around on, hopefully the stainless steel plates keep the binding “tooth” well protected. Further adding to this potential issue is that the cleat is larger than normal and looks like it may stick out from the edges of the recessed area of my mountain clipless shoes.

Back in Bebop’s first run at the market I had the chance to use them for the better part of a season and am looking forward to another run, this time mainly on the road bike. Check back for reports in the coming weeks once I get some miles in and refresh my memory of this design.

This entry was posted by brad on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.