Loose Ball Bottom Brackets - 68mm - Tange

Bottom Bracket -Traditional, Pro Quality, Tange, not with crank bolts

sizes: 107, 110, 113, 115, 118, 121

Short story  (long story is at the bottom)
Simple, strong traditional style of the best quality. Sized to fit most square-taper cranks that use the by far most common JIS taper (not old French or Italian or European cranks).

Size to get: Get the size the crank maker recommends. Maybe you know or can look it up online; maybe we know. The length also affects which front derailers work. If you have one of our bikes, take the crank off and measure the spindle. Get the same size in this one. 

If you're not replacing anything AND you want to use a Shimano mountain front derailer and one of our cranks, get a 113 or 118. We are happy to advise over the phone or by email, but we'll want to know what crank you're using.

U-get:
Two sets of 11 high-grade balls in retainer rings
Two cups, with O-ring seals
Spindle to fit your crank
Plastic sleeve to keep out water that may drain down from the seat post, if that’s a problem 4U.

You don’t get:

- Crank bolts. They generally come with cranks, and can be had separately and cheap, if you need them. 

- Grease. We recommend using a grease manufactured by professional grease-makers; somebody in the business of making high-viscosity lubrication for industrial, automotive, marine, or bicycle use. Sta-Lube Blue marine grease is dirt cheap, beautiful, and unbeatable. 

- Tools to install yourself, if you go that way
• Pin tool for adjustable cup: about $10 (not needed if you get the Park HCW-4)
• fixed cup wrench or huge monkey wrench: about $20-45
• lockring tool: about $15 to $45
• skill and/or patience, a can-du attitude, and the assistance of YouTube videos: priceless

To protect our own sanity, we will not coach you through the installation and adjustment process over the phone or by email.

The 115 and 118 are symetrical; all others are asym as follows:

107 Right side +2mm

110 Left +2mm

113 Right +0.5mm

121 Right +2mm

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Long Story
A bottom bracket is the spindle and bearings that the crank turns around on. What a hub does for the wheel, the bottom bracket does for the crank.

Until the Phil Wood bottom bracket came out in the earliest 1970s, all bottom brackets had unsealed bearings held in place between the spindle’s bearing surface and the cup’s bearing surface. They ranged in quality; had nine to eleven ball bearings (usually grouped in a retainer ring) and a one-piece spindle.

The best ones from Zeus, Campy, Stronglight, Shimano, and SunTour had the hardest and smoothest cups, spindles, and bearings, and lasted the longest. The cruddier ones were less smooth when new, got smoother over time.

This style was and is still the simplest, strongest, most crap-and-bad adjustment tolerant style of bottom brackets. They’ll go on and on even bone dry, because the big ball bearings and the interface are a match made in heaven. If you’re pedaling the length of the Silk Road and your bearings are pitted and the grease is gone and the last time you overhauled your bottom bracket you goofed up and put in only eight on one side and, horrendously, only seven on the other, you’ll still be able to pedal thru creeks and mucky bogs from China to the Mediterranean.

This style of bottom bracket keeps working even when it’s been ravaged by cheapness, time, poor adjustment, and neglect.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s racers and year-round, high-mileage riders repacked them a few times a year, something unheard of now. Snce the late ‘90s, this cup-and-cone style bottom bracket has been 100 percent replaced by sealed bearing cartridge bottom brackets, which are fast to install with minimal to zero mechanical skill.  That means bike mechanics can be faster with less skill, and in the market, that trumps any benefit of a cup-and-cone bottom bracket, and fewer badly adjusted bottom brackets.

Sealed cartridge bearing bottom brackets aren’t nearly as tolerant. The balls in the “sealed cartridge” are smaller than the balls in a cup-and-cone bottom bracket, and the weak part is the cartridge that holds them. If that breaks, the balls escape and go who knows where, but they don’t stay where they need to be between the cup and the cone race. I’ve seen this happen many times, even on super expensive bottom brackets. I’ve seen those bottom brackets fail in less than a year, even though they’re sold as lifetime bottom brackets. They’re like a heavyweight boxer with all the moves and power of a champion, starting Round One with cracked ribs and hemophilia.

Tools

You need

(1) a fixed cup tool, for grabbing the thin wrench flats on the fixed (drive-side) cup;

(2) an adjustable cup tool  (“pin tool”) for the adjustable, left-side cup. Once the fixed cup is tight to the frame, all the adjustment is on the adjustable cup; and

(3) A lockring tool, for maintaining the adjustment cup’s adjustment, once you’ve got it.
Bike shops don’t want to do it, either, and by now it’s doubtful that any random bike shop employs a mechanic who still has the skills (and tools). Bike shops don’t want to deal with them. Any high volume bicycle manufacturer who reverted to cup/cone bottom brackets would see its sales (to bicycle shops) fall off by about 85 percent.

If I had to pick one bottom bracket for one bike for the rest of my life, it would be a high-quality cup and cone bottom bracket, for sure. 

It’s with mixed feelings that I even say this, but if you want to understand bearings, get one of these, keep it as a desktop doodle-thing, go ga-ga over the quality, and eventually put it on a bike. 

It took a couple of years for bicycle parts distributor Jim Porter (of Merry Sales) to persuade Tange to remake them. It took a couple more to get all the details right. We may be the only bicycle people in the country who is happy to see these back. They are beautiful bicycle parts, made without compromise or concession to trends, and it is unbelievable that we even have them.

We stock six sizes: from 107 to 121. Use the 110 on bikes that have a non-mountain bike front derailer. Use the 113 or 118 if you have a mountain bike front derailer.

Made in Japan

Note: we order these as they're ordered so please allow a couple extra days for processing