Mark Stonich showed a new experiment with making short cranks by just drilling a new set of pedal axle holes farther down the crank arm and cutting off the end section. These are 147mm, cut down from 170mm, for Nan Wheeler. Mike W. says his wife weighs in at about 100 lbs, so reliability shouldn't be an issue. (I don't think I'd do this for Caswell though. M.S.)

This is a little tricky in that the crank has to be one of the few that has an arm wide enough to have a decent amount of material left for strength, after the new hole is drilled. It is also tricky getting the new hole parallel to the bottom bracket spindle (though Mark says that stock cranks have a surprising amount of variability and are not always very parallel themselves!).

Mark made sure the new threads were parallel to the threads for the BB extractor, thinking they would be parallel to the BB spindle. Not so, had to do some cold setting with screw-in pedal extensions and honking big pipes. If he decides to do it again he may get Todd Sorlie to make him a drilling fixture of some kind.