Do you grok SPD?

[xela]

When I got my recumbent trike three years ago, I also got SPD pedals and shoes: The test ride alone had shown me how much trouble I'd have keeping my feet positioned on pedals 80° off horizontal.

The SPD shoes I got at the time kill me to walk in — to the point where I always bring another pair of shoes with me when I ride. I recently decided to try solving this by way of Zappos* and now I have a pair of SPD shoes that I can walk comfortably in.

Now I need to install cleats and set them up. Last time, the bike shop charged me like $40 for this. Is it really that hard? Have any of you done it? And would you be willing to help me do it for myself?

Thanks in advance!

---

* I'm a big fan of Zappos. My experience of shoe shopping has way too often been:

• Go into the store.
• FInd something I like
• Be told by the salesman they don't have it in my size, but
  • They have this other "similar" shoe I don't like as well
  • they have it in a different size that's close enough
• I try on the shoes
• lather, rinse, repeat
• I eventually leave the store with a pair of shoes
• which when I try actually wearing them in the real world turn out to
  • hurt like hell
  • provide no support
  • be hideous
  So
• the shoes gather dust in the back of my closet
• until I give them to Goodwill.

'With Zappos, I order a shoe, it arrives, I wear it around the house for an hour or too. Maybe two or three times over a period of weeks. And if I don't like them, I go to the website, print out a pre-paid shipping label, and ship them back. All at no extra cost. Often (as with my new SPD shoes) I'll order four or five pairs, some of them the same shoe in different sizes, and keep only one. Or none. Zappos is fine with that. And so am I.

Comments

[cfox.livejournal.com]

I've seen it done, as in I bought Monty a pair of the shoes as a gift, and I watched him screw his cleats onto them, and he made it look easy.

The screws in question take a hex key.

The insole of the shoe comes out, so you can position the part that the screws go into. Maybe it ships with thin rubber that needs to be cut away from where the screws go in? I can take a look at his shoes when I get home, and see if I can confirm or deny that last one.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thanks. dzm helped me with them and they're working great.

[narya.livejournal.com]

If you don't hear anything from dzm, you might ping him after July 1...he may well know but is hosed with a work deadline.

[dmaze]

When I got mine the shop did some mildly involved alignment work on the cleats. Mechanically it is just a pair of hex bolts, but for anything better than "looks more or less straight" you'd probably need a helper. I've never tried to do the alignment myself.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I just want to let you know they've been working great. Thanks for your help!

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Sorry, haven't caught up on LJ in ages. I have done my own cleat installs, and the big thing is getting the alignment right. This is easier if you already have a pair of shoes to work from; getting the forward/back alignment is pretty easy (they go under the balls of your feet), but left/right and rotation (you get a few degrees of this) is trickier. I just fiddled a bit and then tightened down when I was happy.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

dzm helped me with them a week or so back, and they're working great. And yeah, letting my old shoes act as a guide was totally the way to go.