These Race Face cranks may look like a lot of others out there but beneath the surface they’re quite different. For starters they’re forged from 6066 aluminium alloy.
A much more common alloy for cranks is 6061, but 6066 has a higher fatigue strength – 110 megapascals, compared with 62 MPa for 6061 and 90MPa for 2014 – and it's also ‘stiffer’, so it’s definitely a good choice of material.
One other difference is that the chromoly steel axle is a fixed part of the left-hand crank arm, rather than the right-hand. There’s no performance benefit or drawback from doing it this way, but it does make the box the cranks come in smaller – with a potential environmental benefit when it comes to transporting them.
The Cadence comes complete with a bottom bracket, which had smooth-running bearings out of the box – and they stayed that way too throughout testing, thanks to the high quality of the bearings and the excellent sealing.
Shifting performance was good, and we tested this with SRAM, KMC, and Shimano chains; all worked very well and showed little sign of wear. Also included with the crankset is a pair of pedal washers, which help to prevent the pedals from damaging the face of the crank (we suggest running pedal washers on virtually all cranks).
Out on the road, these really did feel like a high quality set of cranks. They felt stiff, shifted well, stayed smooth, scuffed very little and the weight of 837g – including bottom bracket – is very reasonable for a set of cranks at this price. All in all, a good-looking, high quality product with a performance to match.