Look Quartz Pedals - the Experiment is Over

13 Apr 2009 - Eugene For the last few months, I've been riding Look's Quartz Pedals on my Niner. This past week I removed them and put my Crank Bros Mallet's back on. So what's the story? First off, the Quartz pedals are really quite a beautiful design, are extremely light, and shed mud amazingly well. The feel clicking in and out of them is nice. But you are wondering, if that's all good, why swap them out? The simple reality is, I was inadvertently releasing from them too often. Basically, what I found to happen with these, often enough to make me switch back, was that I'd be in a dicey situation, or some real hard cornering state, and apparently have enough force sideways on my pedal that _my foot would release - in fact, it'd pretty much come flying out!_ This was not even close to acceptable. Twice it nearly caused me to crash. I've been riding clipless pedals (SPD, Time, Look, Crank Bros, etc.) since SPD's first came out, and this behavior is a first. It's simply not acceptable. Maybe for XC racing this type of situation simply wouldn't come up, or come up enough, to have this be an issue, but for trail riding, this was a deal killer. The other thing, and this is just my own issue really, is that I couldn't get clipped into them quite as fast as with my Mallets. I believe this to be 100% due to the Mallet's having the big platform that you can slam you foot into and have your shoe pretty much instantly in the right place and click right in. With the Quartz, or probably regular Crank Bros Eggbeaters, you need to be more precise, and a bit slower I think. I had in part tried these pedals to shed some weight (these are nearly half the weight of my Mallets (250g vs. 490g), shedding half a pound), and to work a bit better in mud. Overall, I tried to make the Quartz work, but after enough unexpected releases, that finally killed it. So for now I'm back on my trusty Mallets. If I feel the need to spend some money on another pair of pedals, I will likely go for the Crank Bros Acid's - that should give me a platform to smack into for fast entry, but drop a bit less than 1/4 pound. The weight isn't really that big a deal, not something I tend to dwell on, but hey, if I can get essentially the same features I need, and drop 100g, great. I should note, I ride Look Keo pedals on my road bike and wouldn't trade them for anything, they rock.