Campagnolo Ultra Torque Discussion

Just a quick animated video made on xtranormal about Campagnolo Ultra Torque design issue and such.

Transcript

Did you hear about the issues that some folks are having with their comp hog Nolo ultra torque system? No, I have not. What seems to be the problem? Well, from what I understand, it is an issue with the design of the crank set and bottom bracket that doesn't effectively allow for bottom bracket shell width discrepancies without the use of a wave washer. What does that mean? It means that the design does not allow for the typical industry bottom bracket, shell width variances. Do other designs account for these variances? Yes, most of them do. That's strange. Then why is this an issue? Because on some bikes with a bottom bracket shell width, that's on the higher end of their allowed tolerance of plus or minus 0.2 millimeter. It has been found that axial movement towards the drive side of the bike develops under load of the pedal stroke.

So why is this a big deal? Well, this usually manifests into an annoying knocking or clicking noise that will eventually drive you and your writing partners nuts. On top of this. Usually when our bottom bracket developed Saxy play, that usually means that the bearings are shot and it's time to replace them. That seems like kind of a halfassed way to address the issue of Bolton brackets, shell with variances for such a high end component. Well because campy designed the system and decided to incorporate a by actual design into the crank set, there wasn't much more that they could do that was in both costly in a real labor intensive. Does to know about this issue? I'm sure that they do. Are they admitting that some folks might experience this issue? No. Has there been any press release or technical bulletins released or sent to any of the campaign pro shops, service centers bringing this to their attention?

Nope. How about to those who dropped a large amount of coin for this system? Not a word. Well, if you look closely at the latest version of their instruction manual, they did tighten up the tolerance spec from plus or minus 0.3 millimeter to plus or minus 0.2 millimeter. Besides that, nothing else that I am aware off. You must be a campy height, huh? No, I am not. Then you must be working fishy. [inaudible] negative then why you putting so much effort into making this public? Because if I dropped 300 to a grand of my harder and cash and my outer torque system developed and obnoxious noise, I'd be pissed. And I would hope that someone would step up and make the public aware of the problem and if possible, come up with a fix. But I thought that the Italian campaign designers and engineers are the best in the business. That might be the case, but they are not perfect. Nobody is. Remember that it took the Nissan NSX to persuade the Ari engineers to build cars that did not have parts that fell off of them. Neat. I say Fiat, fix it again, Tony. So what is an ultra tool Kona that has a clicking or a knocking bottom bracket to do? Perhaps you should first Google compact NOLA problem and see what you find.