Capitalist Pegs

Don't be fooled by the picture - This is serious mum!

In the last few years pegs, those simple, humble metal tubes have been designed to within an inch of their lives and are now fully fledged tools of capitalism.

You pay more for them than ever (yes, yes, Plegs excluded) and their lifespans are shorter than ever. They've become semi disposable. Of course really they are just keeping up with the state of things. You change your computer every couple of years, you change your phone yearly and you buy new pegs every six month. Hooray for capitalism - everyone wins. People love to have new things and companies love to sell the stuff. Perfect. There are a few down sides but lets not talk about them...

But this new wave of capitalist pegs must be ticking boxes. The amount of new light weight (read: short lifespan) pegs available growing, it seems that most people are willing to pay the money to save the weight.

Not Plegs, I hear you say. Plegs are cheap. Yeah, but even if you divide the dollars spent by the lifespan of the peg?

On that topic: The bitter battle of the Plegs continues to be waged on the SPRFLS site. And George from G-Sport has made a pretty long and interesting reply that's worth reading. He talks a bit about the curse of the colourway - basically to make a dollar in bmx you've got to keep up with demand for endless colour variations.

Plegs are now ticking that box.
In fact they are kind of like the perfect storm of modern bmx parts - they combine 3 of the things that people get really upset about: they're plastic, they're light, and they come in a bunch of candy coloured variations. If they had a low slung top tube and wore tight jeans, people would be burning effigies of them at skateparks all over the world. As they are they just tend to bring out spite and slander from people who have never even ridden them.

Maybe pegs fire people up like this because it's such an obvious change. In the space of 6 or 7 years pegs have gone from being 300g (3/4 lb) lumps of steel that you'd bash on things for years to 100g (3.8oz) pink translucent plastic sleeves that you update to match you hair colour.

It must have hurt G-Sport's sales when just around the time that Plegs were about to drop that 7075 aluminium pegs started poping up. I think it was Tree that started the ball rolling with their Trick Sticks. (?) The aluminium pegs are the same weight as the plastic pegs, but in my experience last a lot longer.


Tree Trick Sticks. Weight: 1.5” dia. = 108g/ 3.9oz each, 1.375” dia = 97g/ 3.5oz each
I think everyone had just always assumed that since you couldn't really grind an aluminium rail, that aluminium pegs would be useless. This is off the Tree website:

These aluminum pegs grind faster than titanium on steel. Just to clear any confusion, aluminum is not inherently a high friction material. Everyone has had there experience of aluminum railing being very slow, but aluminum railing is made of a very soft corrosion resistant grade. Like all metals, the higher quality grades are harder and have a lower friction coefficient. Skateboard trucks have always been made of aluminum.

So aluminium is OK, but what about this one way shit?



One way shit:
Colony One Way: 110 g / 3.88 oz
Fly Alloy: 89 g / 3.1 oz
Eastern Slit: 119 g / 4.2 oz

In my book this is one of the less useful ideas going around.

A peg that shaves some grams by having less material on the top - so in effect rather than being able to rotate your peg 10+ times, you have just one spot to grind on it. That equals one tenth the life - or at best one fifth, if you take into account some extra thickness on the bottom of the peg. So you save a bit of weight and lose a lot of life. And they're expensive. Weirdly enough, Colony came out with the idea and companies just copied them.

So spend some money, take your pick, save some weight, style it up - capitalist pegs. They're all the rage.

The Rising of the Plegs

I made a disparaging post about Plegs not long ago. It wasn't the Plegs' fault - I was angry. Hold on a minute... it was the Plegs' fault - those things are just too damn soft. A peg that you have to rotate every other time you ride is too soft.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a G-Sport enthusiast. I own a Ratchet and it's a thing of beauty - solid, unbreakable, functional beauty. But can the same be said for Plegs? I'm still unconvinced.

BUT WAIT, just when you thought it was all over - Let the convincing begin:



I know it's old news. But a whole 2 days old and 74,000 tweets later, it's still worth a mention.

Not least because apparently this new incarnation uses a variation of the original plastic compound that according to GSport and Odyssey, and this guy Will (?), is a lot harder than the originals:

They’re really hard wearing. I genuinely think they’d last me about 2 years of continuous use on the front… I basically haven’t been rotating my front pleg much just to see how durable they really are. They have worn down loads (see picture) and still haven’t failed. My general riding involves a lot of tricks that are hard on the front peg and I’ve been going out of my way to give it extra abuse when the opportunity arises. I’m pretty sure had I worn down an old style pleg in this way, it would have cracked and failed by now, but that’s just from a subjective point of view I guess.

So there you go. Will likes 'em.

And you just know that as I type this there are at least 1000 kids who don't give a shit about how hard they, are or how long they last, sitting at their computers planning *crazy* translucent Pleg and Twisted PC Pedal combos - it's like bmx is 10 years behind the apple mac.

All that aside, the thing that really got me about riding with Plegs was the sound they make - or the lack of sound. Grinding in eerie silence is... eerie.