What is the "standard" between peddles? Q-Factor

[markz]

I am looking at my Strong ebike and I wonder if the peddles are a little further away then average. Sometimes I feel like I am peddling bow legged outwards because of the down tube where the battery goes.




I found this
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/cranks.html

Tread ("Q Factor")

The tread, or "Q factor" of a crank set is the horizontal width of the cranks, measured from where the pedals screw in. The wider the tread, the farther apart your feet will be. It is generally considered a good idea to keep the tread fairly narrow. There are three main reasons for this:

The hip joint is optimized for walking, and in normal walking the footsteps are pretty much in line, with little or no "tread."
For standing pedaling, the farther out the pedals are from the centerline, the harder you have to pull on the handlbar to counterbalance the tendency of the pedaling force to tip the bike sideways.
The wider the tread, the higher the bottom bracket needs to be to prevent clipping a pedal while pedaling through a turn.

Older bikes were generally designed to keep tread to a minimum, but starting in the late 1970s there has been a trend to wider tread, for a variety of reasons:

The popularity of triple-chainwheel cranksets has moved the right side outward.
Front derailers designed for triple-chainwheels have a more 3-dimensional shape to the derailer cage, which requires more clearance between the large chainring and the right crank.
Mountain bikes have wider-spaced chainstays for tire clearance, which requires moving the chainwheels outward so they won't hit the chainstays.
Newer bikes with more sprockets in back move the chainline outboard.

http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/what-is-q-factor-and-does-it-make-a-difference-187403

Very roughly speaking, Q Factor tends to be about 150mm for a road bike and 170mm for a mountain bike.

Mine are 182.5mm - I am thinking I should take my bike in to the local bike shop and pay for a fitting. I hope it aint too much money.

 

[leew]

I have noticed that most crank drive motors have ridiculously wide Q factor which is one reason I went for direct drive hub on my current project. My legs and knees do not get on well with wide q factor. On my current project I am using a crankset with a Q factor of about 145mm which is about the lowest you can get with a readily available crank-set. I do however have a (non electric) race bike with a 60mm Q factor which feels good on my legs . For my next project I also want to build a narrow Q factor, somewhere around 80-90mm I hope.

 

[markz]

I think it depends on your bodies hip width, I read a bit on this last night somewhere on the interweb, to think of a comfortable Q factor as the width of your feet on a casual walk. Another article stated how Lance Armstrong went with a really small Q factor in a race and it helped in the beginning but over all it may be have a detriment. Im too old to ride hard.

 

[dogman dan]

Fat battery on the middle frame does mean pedaling bowlegged. Maybe you get used to it, maybe you don't. 6" wide frame is about the max that works for me, but if I just came from 10,000 miles on a slim road bike, I'd think it was way too wide. Took me a while just to get used to mtb pedal spacing. the mtb uses the same bb more or less, but the cranks have a bend out, so the chain will clear the fatter tires. Worse still of course, on a fat bike.

For most people, just standing naturally, the knees will have about 3" of space between them. not 6" But the actual feet will be right around 6" of space, when the knees are 3".

On the longtail I built last year, the crank I used has just about 6" of space between the pedals. I built the frames battery tray 5 and a quarter wide, so I could clear the frame with the pedals. feels fine at the feet, but of course I have to point the knees out. Usually I do this by putting my foot on the pedal crooked, resulting in a bowlegged stance. simply rotating my toes out, makes the knees open up. All stuff you kind of do without thinking, if you skied for 30 years. For others, opening the knees makes the hips feel real funny.

 

[The fingers]

Probably makes some difference if you are pigeon-toed, bow-legged, knock-kneed or as I am: duck-footed. I pedal flat-footed or I loose power and I stub my toes all the time. Maybe that's why I never became a lycra/roadie; those rat-trap stirrup pedals never caught on with me. (In diving class, I was referred to as Mary Poppins for the way my feet entered the water like a duck landing on a pond. :lol: )