I recently added an oval chainring from absoluteBLACK to my mountain bike. After a few rides on it now, these are my impressions.
First of all, the thing looks quite incredible, and it is insanely light! For something which replaces the chainring and spider on my X01 cranks, I wondered if this piece of CNC artistry would hold up. So far, so good. Installation was problem-free, the chainring fit nice and snug on the splines which hold it in place.
So how does it pedal? I came straight from a round chainring in the same diameter. Straight away I noticed that my cranks kind of ‘fell through’ a segment of the pedal stroke – which took about 20 minutes to really get used to. After a decently tough hour and a half out at Mt Stromlo, I realised a few things. First, the ovalness was no longer odd. Second, my knees and hips seemed a lot happier, and finally, I had to change timing of pedal chops to get up steep rocky sections just a touch.
On the knees and hips thing, I’m pretty sure that the spiel about modern oval chainrings is actually true – I think my knees are getting less stressed because there’s that little segment of the pedal stroke I don’t have to push through each revolution now. I notice it jumping back on my commuterbeast, which still has a round chainring (for now).
I didn’t go any faster. But thats OK – I feel like I got some fun factor back!
…would I recommend absoluteblack chainrings to you?
Yes, I would! I will keep making notes about them – how many kilometres they last, how they hold up to being abused and so on. But on first impression they’re worth investigating if your knees are unhappy, or you’re in the chainring market.