Advantages: Cheap, extremely durable, abuse tolerant Disadvantages: Poor crank choice, may not be suitble for extreme use
...ones. From personal experience the Shimano ones look to be better made, and a bit more durable. Truvativ ones seem to have a habit of failing suddenly - they still give a long service life though.
Overall
Not the lightest, stiffest, or most sexy, but yesterdays technology delivers a cheap, highly durable, abuse tolerant, fit and forget item. ...
Advantages: Light, Strong, twice as strong as competitors, isis Disadvantages: non
...Series of Bottom Bracket from Race Face Have an amazing Spec for the Price, There Retailing at Around £45 for something that is twice as strong as the competitors.
When I say Twice as strong this is because the The whole case has been shot penned to harden it and There are two sets of bearings in the drive side of the bottom bracket to allow for great strain to be put on it, as your drive side takes the power to the chain. Plus a few other tricks ... ...in bearings in most BB. Race face have gone a step further though as the bearing have been bought in and disassembled and the grease replaced with there own mix that is said to increase the life up to 4X.
I have ridden with a race face BB on my pashley for 4 years with no slack or knocking from by BB in that time. It's still going strong, even though it has been smashed many times from going to the bash ring.
The factory and Shimano BB have nothing ...
I have had three or four of these because they were cheap, it turned out that in the long run it was cheaper to save up and buy a decent bottom bracket. Everyone of these that I bought broke in under a month, the same two faults occured each time. 1) Mud and grit easily get past the seals and wear out the bearings causing them to cease or rattle. 2) The ends of the tapered arms round off very easily, even during light XC and commuting use I have ...
...in my case the first UN72 I fitted was to replace an old bottom bracket with worn bearings which made my bike sound like someone had filled the frame with a handful of gravel when I pedalled it. The difference in this case was huge. If you have a bike that you're thinking of upgrading, provided that the current bottom bracket is causing you no problems, changing to a UN72 is going to bring you no benefit, bottom brackets not being the sort of thing ... ...of the assembly. As the UN72 is sealed then it's pretty much toast once the grease has been washed out, you can't strip and regrease it. Provided you don't commit the cardinal sin of pointing a hosepipe straight at it though, this shouldn't happen easily.
I've got no complaints about this part whatsoever. It's well enough sealed to last for ages and it's long life means the fact that you can't maintain it isn't an issue to me. It may not be very ...