Hong Kong based Bike Energy Lab Ltd is crowdfunding for the Cleat Key; a new bike fit tool designed to make road cleat rotation angle setting easy and repeatable. Mechanical Engineer Anthony Pringle, is the Cleat Key’s designer, an avid road cyclist with 35 years of bike fitting experience. Having watched a multitude of cleat fitting tools come and go over the last few decades, Anthony decided none of them were quite up to scratch, and so he set out to create his own.
Cleat Key
The Cleat Key is designed to work with two of the most popular road cycling cleats on the market; the Shimano SPD-SL and Look Keo. Designer Anthony Pringle says it is the only tool he knows of that tells you quickly, clearly and accurately what the cleat rotation angle is.
The Cleat Key is made of PMMA OM92 acrylic, and aircraft-grade 6061 aluminium alloy. The alloy portion clamps the Cleat Key to the shoe cleat, allowing you to roate the loosely fitted cleat to its correct rotation angle relative to the mid-point of the back of the shoe, before tightening the bolts to finish the instalation.
Along with the Cleat Key comes a specific protocol that riders can follow to determine exactly what the correct heel-in or toe-out angle is for them; you don’t have to use it of course, but it could be a useful starting point if it’s your first time doing this. Once you’ve decided what the correct angle is, the Cleat Key tool can help you set it correctly, and in an easily repeatable manner, taking away the eye-balling guess work.
Riders who already know their preferred cleat position can also use the tool to measure the roation angle on their current shoes, so they can easily reproduce that angle when they come to need new ones.
On Kickstarter, the Cleat Key has already massively overshot its crowdfunding goal of £3,960, with the amount backed now totaling £35,598 at the time of writing. They are still accepting backers, however, but only for the next 50 hours! Pledge $89 USD to secure one Cleat Key.
