Arkoza Cranks - Refinement, Style and Strength

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]Crank arms might not seem all that exciting, but you might have caught our interview with the folks at Arcosa back at Sea Otter Classic. Ever since then, we've been stoked to get our hands on these things. Stay tuned to see how you can get a discounted set, win a set, and learn all about our Kosa Cranks. There's a number of brands in the mountain bike space who have leveraged years of experience in manufacturing, tech, or other industries before making mountain bike products. Our Kosa Cranks is one of those brands with a really neat story about how they started. Let's dive into it. See how you can win a set and what makes these cranks so unique. Argus machine have over 60 years creating and fabricating products and threading for high stress high demand industries. And what's really neat about the brand is that every year they have an in-house think tank where their own employees get to pitch them on products that they are passionate about and that they think could stick. Now, needless to say, there's a couple of employees that work at Argus who are diehard mountain bikers, and they thought that they it would be a great opportunity for them to leverage their experience in metal machining and fabricating and offer a high-end boutique EMTV crank set, and that was how AOSA was formed. As far as like the other industries that your company is a part of, can we talk a little bit about how that translated over to what we're holding here? Yeah.

[00:01:21]So, our parent company, Argus Machine, they've been in the oil and gas industry for 65 years, and we were really able to leverage the 60 years, 60 plus years of manufacturing experience that they have in pipe casing, threading, um, pressure vessel design, that kind of a thing.

[00:01:38]>> Yeah, that's a pretty wild transition to be going from, uh, gas and pipe to bicycle cranks.

[00:01:44]>> Yeah, absolutely. Very different. So, moving into the actual manufacturing and the designing of this, right? I mean, sure you guys have uh experience in making cool stuff out of metal, right?

[00:01:55]And machining, but how does that translate into knowing how to make a mountain bike crank? Can you talk to us about that research? What testing development?

[00:02:04]>> So, I mean really the crank arm, it started off with a very basic shape and design. Um, how do you design a crank arm? We had no idea.

[00:02:13]>> We saw stuff that we liked. We knew what our target was. Uh we had a target length. We had specific design criteria that we wanted to hit and then it was kind of well let's see what the science and the math tells us. Um so we kind of leveraged topology studies some FEA and that showed us really like what our general map should be.

[00:02:34]>> As far as material selection, what were the parameters and what made you choose the type of material to use and and what is that material?

[00:02:40]>> Yeah, so we're using 7075 T651 specific temper. um strength to weight, right? We really wanted a good premium high performing product, but that's also going to be as light as we could get it.

[00:02:52]Um machinability is definitely a part of it. I mean, as strong as we wanted these crank arms to be, we also wanted them to be super rad. And so, being able to machine and develop them how we wanted to, that was a part of it, too. How much time did you spend in design testing to see how much material you could take away and how you could sort of maximize a cool looking shape that balanced weight and strength?

[00:03:16]>> Yeah, hundreds of hours.

[00:03:18]>> I even could imagine >> hundreds of hours and I think over a 100 iterations of the actual crank arm um before we started producing them. And so it was it was quite the process. So, Arcosa will be offering the cranks in 155, 160, and 165 mm lengths. Again, they are fully CNC machined in Canada at a 7075 aerospace billet. They have an IS-plline as well as an eour mounting solution. So basically what that covers is your Bosch CX Gen 4, Bosch CX Gen 5, Specialized 3.1, the Pizua Ride 60, and of course the Avenox M1 as it sits right now. Preliminary testing on the Avenox M2 is looking good. They have test fitted it. It all seems to be running well, but stay tuned for the final confirmation on that. Um, go sign up at Arcosa's website for their newsletter and get entered into that giveaway to pre-register for your cranks and you'll get an update when they finally give that stamp of 100% certainty.

[00:04:23]So, you said that there was hundreds of iterations. Uh, one of the other important factors, I guess, about a crank is not just putting them on and them staying on, but removing them. talk to us about how much effort went into the extractor setup and how that system works.

[00:04:38]>> Yeah, so we actually put a lot of thought into that and what we wanted to do was keep it simple and keep it easy.

[00:04:43]Um, so having that teflon insert there making extraction nice and smooth. One key is a 10 mm Allen key cuz who wants to go find a specialty key, specialty tool if you don't have to. So you're stuck on the trail, you need to pop it off, do any sort of maintenance. We wanted to keep it nice and easy. And honestly, putting these on a handful of times already, I can tell you I think we nailed it.

[00:05:06]>> Now, while some might reference other CNC machined boutique crank brands, um, Arcosa have pointed out to us a couple of unique and different things that they do. One of the things that they focus on here is thread clipping. And essentially that removes the first and last imperfect threads so that you have less chance of cross threading or damaging the threads as you put pedals in or out.

[00:05:30]Also, the clearance from the end of the crank arm to where the pedal is has been absolutely minimized to make sure you've got enough material there to keep the crank strong and avoid impact. But also by minimizing this length, you've got less chance for the crank arms themselves to bottom out and hit the ground. Also by doing a lot of FEA and typology analysis, they realize that not bending or twisting the material like some other crank arms can do will result in a much stronger and durable and reliable CNC machined crank arm. So, they optimized where and how much material was removed from these crank arms to give them a stylish look, but also maintain the strength and reliability that they wanted out of these cranks, which is also backed up by a 5-year warranty.

[00:06:21]All right, folks. So, without over complicating things, cranks, they kind of have a very important but not all that complex job, and that is to keep the pedals attached and to keep themselves attached to the bike. I'm happy to report that they have done both of those things, and they've done a great job at looking good while doing that. One of the things that a couple of people have noticed beyond just the awesome looks is how slim it is below the end of the threads to the bottom of the crank arm. As we said, that was something that they intentionally focused on to maximize clearance for technical rocky climbing, getting over roots and rocks. And uh there's been no shortage of that so far in our test riding. So, for those of you who are interested, we'll put a link down below.

[00:07:03]You can head over to Arosa's website. Uh as we said, they are doing a sign up process for these limited drop batches.

[00:07:12]right now. If you go sign up at the time of this, you know, video being published, they will be doing a really cool giveaway that we worked with them on for some limited edition anodized splatter colors that are really wild and really eye-catching. So, uh, with enough pressure, we might be able to talk those guys into making more or having that be an upgrade option for consumers in the future. Let us know if you think that's something worth doing. And if you're the type of rider who likes to know about cool stuff like this long before it comes out, go check out our members community. We published a really neat sneak peek and talked about these cranks in depth a couple of months ago in that members platform. They were some of the first ones to get signed up onto that giveaway list as well as get the email notifications when this first batch was going to drop. So check out the link to that members community down below.

[00:07:56]Thanks to our KOA for the support and helping making this video and uh stay tuned. We'll be working on a long-term review of these cranks in the future.

[00:08:03]Thanks for watching.