About Us

Our mission at TripleCrank.com is to provide practical cycling information for people of all abilities, especially beginners. Here you’ll find comprehensive buying guides, bicycle and gear reviews, and detailed how-to articles. While our main focus is to help you make the best choices when shopping online, we’ll also assist you in finding a good bike shop, and we’ll even guide you through the tricky process of buying a used bike.

TripleCrank.com aims to be the antithesis to all the biased, inaccurate, vague, misleading, and just plain bad biking information online. The Internet is full of “authority” websites that seem as if they’ve been written by robots, loaded with reviews of products that the authors have obviously never used. Everything you’ll read here is a direct result of many years’ experience in the biking industry, as well as a lifetime of biking passion. We hope to be of help when your local bike shop is just a little too far.

A word from Kai, the editor of TripleCrank.com: As the owner of an independent bike shop in Portland, Oregon, since 2010, I’ve worked on thousands of bikes of all kinds and I keep learning new things every day. My love of cycling was hatched during my first bike tour down the gorgeous Oregon coast back in 1999. Since then I’ve enjoyed many trips, from short overnights to a month-long tour down the coast of California.

Note: As a participant of the Amazon Associates Program, this site earns from qualifying purchases. Anytime you buy a product through this site through an “affiliate” link, we make a small commission on your purchase. This comes at absolutely zero cost to you, and helps us publish more great content!

By the way, what is a Triple Crank?

It’s a bicycle crank that utilizes three chainrings. Popularized in the 1970’s on touring and mountain bikes to add lower range climbing gears, a triple crank is essentially a double crank to which an inner chainring has been added. Sadly, triple cranks are going out of fashion these days. Manufacturers are trending towards relatively simpler double- and single-chainring setups, with the latter being especially popular. Triples are still found on touring bikes, but are most common on less expensive mountain bikes and hybrids.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

While a single chainring needs no front derailleur, and therefore no left shifter, this setup sometimes requires a different chainring, rear derailleur, and cassette for everything to work properly. Single-chainring (or 1-by) bike drivetrains are the future, so we might as well all get used to the trend, but regardless of this shift (pun intended), triple cranks are still great for many bikes.

If you have any specific questions or comments, leave a comment or drop us a note on the Contact page.