Splined Bottom Brackets

For decades the square taper bottom bracket axle was the defacto standard with nearly every high quality bicycle up through the late 1990’s having the same basic crank arm interface. These days the market supports a number of splined bottom bracket designs, none of which are compatible with one another. At the high end of the market, external bearing designs with oversized spindles fused to one crank arm or the other have all but taken over, again with incompatibilities across brands. How did we get here, and now what?

Click here to read the entire article from issue #17.