I wasn’t trying to open a new debate on BBs all over again, I just wanted to explain why we use Spanish on our frames. Russ on his SPRFLS blog said I was making and impassioned defense….if you read it again you’ll see that it’s not exactly impassioned “This is just my common sense look at the bottom brackets and why I think that the Spanish BB is the best choice for our frames.” I had no idea that people had such strong feelings about bottom brackets. In all of the years that we have run the Spanish on our frames I haven’t heard any complaints about the bearings blowing up. Not from the team guys and not from customers so I was sure that the bearings were holding up so I was comfortable saying that performance wouldn’t be sacrificed. I agree that 100g isn’t a lot of weight but 100 grams here and there adds up (hollow stem bolts save about 2g per bolt). In the comments we’ve heard from both side of this but one poster on the SPRFLS site summed up my thoughts really well.

Mr B said:
“Most people seem to be saying that mids are better because the extra strength is worth the extra weight.

If this is the case then why does everyone run stems with massive holes milled into them? Surely by then the weight saved isn’t worth the strength lost?

The reason people run stems with the holes is because they are strong enough for the job in hand, so we then need to ask ourselves what strength do we need from a bottom bracket.

Isn’t it possible that a spanish bearing is strong enough and that mid are overkill?
Has anyone actually had problems with disintigrating spanish bearings?”

I’m going to look into the claims of failing bearings and see where that leads us. I’m not trying to convert anyone from Mid or tell people that the BB they have is inferior, I just wanted to answer the question of why I’ve chosen the Spanish BB’s for our frames.