After introducing the insanely lightweight HollowGram SiSL2 crankset last summer with the equally impressive Spider Rings, Cannondale’s finally making them available for mountain bikes, too.
In actuality, it’s the same crank arms, just new spindles and spiders. Cannondale’s global marketing manager Murray Washburn told us they build their parts to be strong enough for any application, and in this case that means anything from road to all-mountain/enduro.
Coming for 2014 are double chainring and XX1 mountain bike spiders, shown here on team bikes. They’re through testing and in production and parts kits should be available by late spring or early summer.
UPDATED: Non-muddy pics added at bottom of post, along with photo of the 2x double chainring spider…
When they transitioned from the SiSL to the SiSL2, they eliminated the shoulder on the nondrive side of the spindle and switched the installation order to put the wave washer on the non-driveside. This keeps the spacing between the chainrings and the frame constant, an improvement over previous designs.
Like all of their cranksets, the arms and spiders are interchangeable. The cranksets are available now with road spiders, and mountain bike spiders will be available this spring. Or, if you have an older HollowGram crankset, any spider they’ve ever made will fit on it. This means you can also upgrade your existing cranks to the new SiSL2 arms and spindle to use with your existing spider (yes, you’ll need the new spindle also). To possibly confuse matters more, you can also install older HollowGram crankarms on the new spindle, just not the other way around.
A road compact crankset with 172.5mm arms weighs in at a claimed 484g with the Spider Ring sans BB bearings. Because the Spider ring is a one-piece double, the XX1 compatible crankset with chainring should weigh in about the same even though the MTB spindle will be a little wider and the spider a bit beefier.
For road, the spindle is 109mm wide. For mountain bikes, it’ll be a little wider but the same spindle will work in both 68mm and 73mm wide bottom brackets by using different spacers. All variations of spacers are included in the kit, including red, green and black bearing caps. At present, HollowGram cranks won’t work with PF86 or BB386, and they aren’t claiming any plans to add that width because it would likely cause ankle clearance issues on the crank arm as they would have to flatten out.
Because the arms are the same for road and mountain, they’re interchangeable, so you could move your road cranks to your mountain bike just by switching the spindle and spider.
Price for the SiSL2 mountain bike crankset kit is TBD. They’re also working on a standard HollowGram crankset that’ll be 3D forged and come in around Ultegra price points. This will give them more OEM options for cranks on their bikes but still offer a very, very light part.
The SiSL2 crankset with a mountain double chainring spider on it. This was on a team rider’s Scalpel 29er.
