Velo Orange TA cranks, trials and tribulations

The things they sell that support their existence may not have necessarily been targeted at college students, but ended up being great for a college coop. Cheap long reach brakes, replacement headsets, bottom brackets, racks, honjo knockoffs (sold A LOT of these), etc. Granted, they have recently taken a turn for the pseudo-classy on their website, but I still see their bread and butter being the small, hard-to-find replacement parts available for low prices.

Maybe UCSC is an unusual case (doubtful), but we ended up selling everything we stocked from VO really quickly and there was a lot of demand for the long reach calipers, gran cru cantis (which are apparently going to kill our customers?) and french and threadless BB’s. Stuff people want to buy at the coop to get their beloved but maybe kinda crappy old craigslist bikes working.

Also, I’ve spent most of my time poring over the VO imports dealer catalog, not Velo-orange.com. VO imports is mostly just the stuff they import and/or special order themselves. A lot of the things they order from other catalogs, they don’t offer to their dealers, so we dealt mostly with the VO branded stuff, which is really quite affordable and made a lot of people pretty happy.

We thought we were just getting it so we could hook ourselves up, to be honest, but the prices were lower than we thought they would be and I never really found much that I would want to put on my bikes, so it ended up being a good thing for the shop…

What I’m getting at, though, is not really that they target college students. They target people who want nice things but don’t quite know the difference and will enjoy a lesser product just as much if it comes at a lower price. I would say that that description doesn’t really fit most of Tarck very well.

I ordered some Tressostar bar tape from them and my handlebars are harder than a Dutch teen fuck-fest. I also got one of those nifty wire bottle cages from them and thought I was cool until one of the local elite to whom I so dearly look up notified me that 'Fixies can’t have bottle cages, bra."

So, to V-O, fuck you for ruining my fucking life. I doom you to 14,004 years of being force-fed shovel-fulls of flaming pitch-covered feces by demons with the faces of beautiful women and the genitals of Turk-men while frozen up to your waists in blocks of frozen camel urine while rats with inexplicably human hands prod and squeeze your arms and neck with red-hot pincers and little blackbirds with human heads shit upon your flame scorched pates.

Or not. I’m fickle.

Wow.

That was me, the screw on the adjustable straddle cable end suddenly decided to stop doing its job after 6000 miles.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is getting involved.

That’s not true, the brake pads and straddle cable ends on the Origin-8 brakes are completely different. They use a real cup-point set screw instead of a shitty brass-plated phillips screw with an odd 6.87mm hex head with snaggy threads and an unfinished end.

Though these Planet-X cantilevers are probably identical, and 1/2 to 2/3 the price.

The Origin-8 design is still somewhat defective, as it uses a single M4 headless screw that takes a 2mm allen wrench, making it impossible to torque properly. The straddle carriers for both use the same headless screw but doubles them up as one would slip for sure. It does not inspire confidence to know that you have less than a 2x margin of safety on your brake cables.

A similar design from TRP uses two opposing M5 set screws that won’t strip out.

Really the idea of using set screws into braided brake cables is jackass in the extreme — the adjustable end of the straddle cable should either use a clamp to hold the cable to the arm (like Shimano), or thread the cable through a hole in the primary bolt with a nut and washers to clamp it (like Mafac).

My Tektro 720s did the same thing. Instead of the screw cracking or falling out, the hanger itself simply fell apart JRA. I switched over to a standard Dia-Compe straddle cable before selling the brakes altogether when they didn’t work with my new frame. And yeah, the idea of putting set screws into braided cable is pretty fucking stupid.

As for Velo-Orange, I hate most of the stuff they make. It all smacks of cheap Chinese catalog items. The reason why they have some much JA stuff, like that tall-stack pseudo-“classy” threadless stem with a befuddling 31.8 clamp size, is because some factory in China is making it for Felt or whomever, and Velo Orange just sticks their hand up and says “Oh, me too!” And then there’s something stupid like that stem that they’re trying to sell, while extolling the virtues of quills and a 26cm clamp size.

[quote=blasdelf]
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is getting involved[/quote]

shit.

I, for one, will be ordering a pair of these, simply because of the name. Frog bollox. Brilliant!

got my vo post and stem. actually nicer than i expected.

Are their rings really stiffer than TA’s?

Feels like it.

They are also not true.

It might help if you gave them some constructive feedback on the crankset. They might get it right eventually.

http://twitter.com/#!/Velo_Orange/status/28002000599

Someone posted it to the 650b list and got consternation in return: http://search.bikelist.org/getmsg.asp?Filename=650b.11010.0072.eml

What are they going to do with us whippersnappers?

I guess I’m amazed that nobody has posted one of their model builds for fun. J.P. Weigle, dude is not. It’s maybe more like if a Rivendell got knocked up during an exchange summer in somebody’s imagination of France in the '80s.

Improve your quality?

ouch htey really sick burn’d us.

Velo_Orange: Dear world- what would you do with this forum thread: http://tarckbike.com/node/16147 It really does keep me up at night…

No_Face: @Velo_Orange ignore it. You don’t compete with the parts suppliers that these guys reference and buy.

Velo_Orange: @no_face ignorance is not bliss in this case. Much of the criticism is simply wrong. There is room for improvement. Which we are addressing.

Velo_Orange: @no_face new website w much better nav and payment . New customer svc changes. And we are always making our stuff better.

Velo_Orange: @no_face w/o feedback via direct customer svc or indirectq market/sales, we are in the dark. But “yo, dis sux, brah” isn’t helping anyone.


My experience with VO:
@ChrisKulczycki is anyone monitoring the info@VO email address? I’ve sent a couple msgs re: an issue with an order, no reply to date…

[quote=blasdelf]Someone posted it to the 650b list and got consternation in return: http://search.bikelist.org/getmsg.asp?Filename=650b.11010.0072.eml

What are they going to do with us whippersnappers?[/quote]

we need a more thoughtful, serious discussion about how VO is entirely over-rated.

I don’t really like when someone here goes out of their way to link our criticisms to the object of said criticisms.

But I read back through this thread and it is much less juvenile than most of the anonymous bashing we normally offer. There’s valid criticisms based on personal experience, as well as defense of products that users have liked (setback seatpost is universally agreed upon winner!) and of the service one can expect from a smallish e-commerce retailer.

So do with it what you will, Mr. Kulczycki. If you want to dismiss it as ‘yo dis sux brah,’ that misses a lot of the objective criticisms presented here, in an environment where people were having a conversation amongst themselves about real perceived deficiencies in your products.