Let me start out by saying that I find the technical content put out by Hambini to be incredibly useful. I’ve also seriously considered getting one of his Shimano bottom brackets (BB) for my Tarmac (but then I got a Specialized Power Crank instead). That said, I do find his presentation style to be a bit abrasive and unnecessarily confrontational. But, clearly it’s working for him; just look at the subscriber count…

With that out of the way, I’ve been struggling with whether to say anything about the e.g. below, and some of the other frame OEM “reaming”, that he has been doing lately. But since I also have a Canyon Aeroad, and my anecdotal experience with the bike doesn’t quite match up with his conclusions as they are presented, something was bothering me, and I finally put a finger on it.

My bike works fine. I had no trouble pressing in a Shimano BB86 BB, and I’ve yet to have any weirdness with bearing life in the time that I’ve owned it. Obviously, I’m just one sample, but I know quite a few other people who also have Canyon bikes and don’t have any abnormal issues with their BBs. It’s possible that we got lucky. It’s possible that there are issues lurking that either we’re too unsophisticated to notice (TBC, I don’t mean that in a passive aggressive way) or just haven’t surfaced yet. But, I suspect that the real conflict between my experience and what Hambini reports comes down to the sample.

In a nutshell, no one sends him a frame that works the way it should. So out of the thousands of Canyon bikes out there, it’s quite likely that the vast majority of them work just fine, some are borderline, others fall well into Hambini’s chart of obscene engineering. So what he presents as significant probably isn’t. The best analogy I could come up with, is if you imagine the patients an ER doctor sees; they are all sick or injured. If that doctor then concludes, based on their inadequate sampling technique that every person is sick or injured, obviously that’s not an accurate, or significant finding.

TBC, I’m not defending Canyon. Given his observations, there are clearly WAY TOO MANY Canyon (Orbea, Cervelo, Cannondale, etc.) frames out there that should not have made their way to market. It’s more that the pedantic side of me is annoyed with lack of nuance provided in his conclusions.