Hope F22 Flat Pedals

Next, the pin configuration has changed as well. Where the F20 featured 20 pins, the F22 has — surprise — 22. The design of those pins is what’s more noteworthy, with the F22 featuring hexagonal pins that offer a few more biting edges than a conventional round pin. All main pins thread in from the bottom, except for the outermost pins which have a larger hexagonal base to allow easy removal with a wrench or socket if you manage to mangle them in use. Compared to the legacy F20 pedal, the main pins are taller (5 mm) and thinner with the option of removing an additional washer to gain another millimeter of pin height. The innermost pins are a bit more squat at 4 mm to provide some additional sense of concavity underfoot. The pins are properly toothy and seem eager to eat shins, but fortunately, the grip afforded is impressive — more on that below.

There are a few things about the pedals that haven’t changed since the F20, all of which are time-tested features. The axle system still features a large Igus bushing and 3 bearings (that’s a bearing or two more than many competitor pedals) spinning on a high-quality chromoly axle which Hope claims has been revised to be a bit stronger, and the body is machined from 2014-T6 aluminum. They’re easy to disassemble, well-sealed, and should last a damn long time.

That’s a lot of tech specs about a pair of flat pedals, but I’d sum up the F22 as a beautifully made, not-that-concave pedal of relatively average dimensions with some scarier-than-average pins.

On the Trail

Zack Henderson: Hope’s F22 pedals sure are nice to look at, so it was almost a shame to stomp my grubby shoes onto them for the first ride. Even in the parking lot, it was abundantly clear that my hunch about the rather sharp pins was correct, and they bit into my Ride Concepts Tallac shoes with authority.

The rather sharp F22 pins have their work cut out for them since the platform’s concavity is relatively minimal, but the taller pins on the front and rear edges, paired with the slightly shorter pins nearer the axle, do a good job of creating a sense of fore-aft concavity while biting deeply into the shoe. The pedals still feel a bit flatter than some competitors with a more pronounced concave in the platform itself, in part because the sharp pins sink into your shoes fairly deeply, but they’re a fairly neutral-feeling pedal that shouldn’t take much of an adjustment period.

As someone who switches between clipless and flats with some regularity, I’m pretty particular about pedals offering a locked-in level of grip and being large enough to easily locate while riding, but without being so large they become a magnet for pedal strikes. The F22’s pin design and configuration left very little to be desired on the grip front — even with the pedals in the stock shorter pin configuration (i.e., washers installed), the grip was impressive. The more traditional offset parallelogram design means that the effective contact area is somewhat shorter than some newer symmetrical, non-offset designs like the Deity T-Mac, and I ended up preferring the longer pin configuration (i.e., washers removed) in combination with the slightly average and flat-ish platform size to allow maximum grip along with a greater sense of concavity from the longer pins around the outer edges.

The pin configuration offered lots of highly tunable grip and the asymmetric shaping mitigated pedal strikes, but the pedals didn’t jive as well as I might have hoped when it came to my preferred foot position of having the ball of my foot in front of the axle. With most pedals, I find that keeping the axle nestled in the front portion of my arch allows my foot to conform to the pedal a bit more while also reducing strain on my calves during longer descents, the tradeoff being that some smaller pedals with non-symmetrical platforms and less aggressive concavity can tend to want to “roll” forwards underfoot.

This is exactly what I experienced with the F22, and it makes sense — the portion of the pedal behind the axle is shorter than the portion of the pedal ahead of the axle, leading to the pedal wanting to roll forward when running into obstacles — especially when paired with the less pronounced concavity that leads to the foot feeling more “on top of” versus “in” the pedal. I measured the axle-to-rear-pins distance to be 43 mm and the axle-to-front-pins distance to be 53 mm, further confirming what I was feeling. This sensation is why I’ve more recently gravitated toward more symmetrical parallelograms like the Deity T-Mac, Chromag Dagga, and Tenet Occult / Omen (see comparisons below), which have a more even distance between the pins and axles on both the leading and trailing edges.