Bought new Lake MtB shoes and Crank Brothers Candy Pedals for commuter bike. After 20 miles, I saw a bike quality screw on the floor; it was a cleat screw. The other three screws were loose. I thought I put them in pretty tight. How tight do they need to be? Should I use a loctite type product?

Thanks in advance.

Yes, use loctite.

With Look cleats the screw heads get worn away and anything that makes getting them off more difficult is a bad plan. If the screw heads on your cleats are better protected Loctite shouldn't cause a problem. In any case, I'd consider using Loctite on one screw and figure I could loosen it by taking out the other(s) and then turning the cleat side to side until the screw breaks loose, but I'd hesitate to use it on all of them.

With Look cleats the screw heads get worn away and anything that makes getting them off more difficult is a bad plan. If the screw heads on your cleats are better protected Loctite shouldn't cause a problem. In any case, I'd consider using Loctite on one screw and figure I could loosen it by taking out the other(s) and then turning the cleat side to side until the screw breaks loose, but I'd hesitate to use it on all of them.

I have Look pedals and cleats for my road bike and they never loosened so I was very surprised when these did. As you point out, Look uses a screw with a large, prominent, protruding head and a single slot. The Candys (and I presume all Crank brothers products using the eggbeater design) use a flat head, hex drive screw whose head is flush with the face of the cleat so I don't think the screw head will wear.

I was having an issue last year with my cleats. I have DMT shoes and SPD-SL shoes.

I never had any bolts come out, but they would loosen, and then the cleat would move while I was pedaling, which had a risk of me getting stuck in the pedals. The stock bolts that came with the cleats could not hold enough torque to keep the cleats from slipping.

I ended up finding a local fastener manufacturer, I took the bolts in that came with the cleats & shoes and showed them to the guy. They ended up giving me matching bolts in hardened steel that have worked great, no slippage. And they thought me coming in for such a small order for such a weird thing was so funny that they gave me more bolts than I will ever need, for free!

You may want to look around your area and find out if you can get different bolts... unfortunately most bicycle shoe/cleat bolts are metric and places like Home Depot do not carry hardened metric fasteners. :(

For the life of me I don't know why look uses the slotted head screws they do. It takes a very big screwdriver to properly fill the slot and tighten the screws properly. Fortunately I have such a tool and have no problems torqueing the cleats down so they stay put and then removing them.

They should use allen wrench style screws so you don't need a special screwdriver to tighten them down. You could go out and buy screws of the same size with allen wrench style heads. Or take one of the screws over to Sears and get a giant screwdriver to fit it.

Bought new Lake MtB shoes and Crank Brothers Candy Pedals for commuter bike. After 20 miles, I saw a bike quality screw on the floor; it was a cleat screw. The other three screws were loose. I thought I put them in pretty tight. How tight do they need to be? Should I use a loctite type product?

Thanks in advance.

Greasing the threads and any washers allows you to more easily apply enough torque to the screws to get them to stay in place. This also prevents the corrosion that can make it very hard to remove them. If you think about it, the reason the screws are loosening is because something in the system is flexing enough to release the pressure on the threads so they can work their way out. Applying enough torque in the installation will prevent this.

With Speedplays (I know, not really a consideration here) the cleat platform is sensitive to warping so the Speedplay instructions are very specific about using a very low torque. They're solution is blue locktite. I have the Zeros and if you install (or reinstall) the cleat attachment screws without locktite, they will work their way out - YMMV.

Bryan


Greasing the threads and any washers allows you to more easily apply enough torque to the screws to get them to stay in place. This also prevents the corrosion that can make it very hard to remove them. If you think about it, the reason the screws are loosening is because something in the system is flexing enough to release the pressure on the threads so they can work their way out. Applying enough torque in the installation will prevent this.