One of the curious things about buying bikes these days is a good number of them don’t come with pedals. The logic is that pedals are a personal item, and any that are thrown in with the bike are likely to be thrown away soon after.
Given that Hyro is the first road bike or cyclocross bike I’ve ever purchased, this was a mild inconvenience. I decided to stick with what I knew best: flat or platform pedals. Having had a bad experience with Bino’s stock, plastic-bodied folding pedals, where the pedal axle broke inside the body with zero possibility of repair, I wanted to invest in quality items this time around.
Shimano’s Saint component group was made for downhill mountain bike racing, and it provides a high-quality set of flat pedals in the PD-MX80s.
These chunky things have a smattering of height-adjustable and removable traction pins, which you can install, remove and adjust through the reverse side using a provided T25 Torx wrench and washers. They have a slightly concave profile for better foot location, and will install onto cranks using either a 15 mm pedal wrench or a 6 mm hex key.
Their 500 g weight aside, these have generally been very good pedals. The platform is very stiff and gives a lot of surface area to drive your foot against. Even with lots of kilometers and quite a few rainy rides on them, they’re still on the factory grease, and they still have that reassuring buttery resistance of a well-greased pedal.
My only real problem with them is the traction pins. These can be sharp. They’ve already drawn blood from me a few times and left me with a few battle scars and an infected ankle, which is no fun at all. You could certainly run the pedals with no traction pins, but your foot retention suffers – especially in wet, rainy conditions or on trail parks.
the accidental randonneur 