Outlier Void and Pendulum Pedals
Blister’s Measured Weights:
- Void: 230 & 230 g
- Pendulum: 206 and 207 g
MSRP (both): $299 CAD ($208 USD at the time of publication)
Intro
Outlier is a new, Calgary-based brand offering two different flat pedal designs that are, well, outliers from the rest of the market. Both the Void and Pendulum use machined aluminum bodies with stainless steel spindles and nine traction pins per side. So far, so normal, but it’s more about what they don’t have — anything in the middle of the pedal.
Outlier doesn’t stop there, though — the Pendulum pedal takes the wild design to a whole new level by using a single-sided platform that’s offset well below the centerline of the spindle to make what is, from the standpoint of the distance from the center of the spindle to the top of the platform, a negative thickness pedal. Let’s dig into the details.
Design
A lot of design elements are shared between the Void and Pendulum, with the Void’s more conventional dual-sided layout being the main thing that separates it from the single-sided Pendulum. So we’ll start with the stuff that’s common to both pedals.
Both versions use a uniquely short stainless steel spindle that doesn’t extend beyond the inner side of the pedal body, leaving a large…void in the middle of the pedal. Two cartridge bearings are housed inside the sizable bulge in the inner side of the pedal body, and each side’s traction pins thread in from the opposite face of the pedal. The distance from the mounting face on the spindle to the usable part of the platform (i.e., outside of the bearing bulge) is about 24 mm on both models.
The idea behind the unorthodox platform layout is to make pedals that are very thin but still feel concave, by allowing the shoe to flex down into the opening in the center of the pedal a bit. We’ll get into the details for both pedal variants below, but they are very notably thin, especially for pedals that aren’t totally flat or even somewhat convex like other very thin pedals often are. Thin pedals help a little with pedal clearance but also make for a more stable feeling platform to stand on, with less tendency to tip fore-aft with slight shifts in weight. That second effect is far more noticeable on the trail, in my opinion. I’ve talked about my preference for thin pedals and the sense of stability that they afford a number of times, and it’s a big reason why I’ve personally settled on the HT X3 pedals as being my long-preferred clip pedal option. (OneUp’s new Clip Pedals are about the same thickness as the X3s, and my early impressions of them are also quite positive.)
Anyway, there have been a variety of attempts at making extra thin flat pedals over the years (the OneUp Aluminum Pedal and the Canfield Crampon being the most common recent examples), but they’ve generally gotten there in part by being very flat, or even slightly convex, in their platform profiles. That works great for some folks, but others distinctly prefer a concave pedal that one’s foot can settle into a bit — myself included. Outlier is trying to pull off pedals that are exceptionally low profile while still affording some concavity.
The bodies and spindles of both pedals are machined near Outlier’s headquarters in Calgary, Alberta, and Outlier offers a two-year warranty on both. There is a rider weight limit of 250 lb / 110 kg for both models, and Outlier recommends them for folks with US 7 men’s / 8.5 women’s / 40 EU sized feet and up. Outlier also says that the installation torque is more critical with their pedals than most, since installing the pedals on a crank arm also serves to preload the bearings; 30 Nm is the recommended spec.
With those general principles behind the design out of the way, let’s talk about how the two models differ:
Void
The giant opening in the middle of the Void pedal body is certainly eye-catching (and has attracted a lot of attention at the trailhead), but they’re actually the more conventional of Outlier’s two pedal designs. They’re symmetric and double-sided, with the pins slightly staggered to sit a little farther outboard on the leading edge and inboard on the trailing one, but there’s no fore-aft offset to the pedal bodies themselves. The platform is 115 mm long and 115 mm wide, measuring 100 mm from the end of the axle to the outer edge of the platform, and it’s 9.9 mm thick — thinner than the OneUp Aluminum Pedals at the spindle, and about the same as Canfield Crampons.
Pendulum
The Pendulum is where things get really wild. In contrast to the Void (and just about every other flat pedal out there), it’s a single-sided design, with the pedal body offset downward so that most of it — including the top face — sits well below the center of the spindle. The reverse side of the pedal body has no traction pins and no real flat surface to stand on.
The idea here is that by having the pedal body offset like that, you can make a pedal that feels really thin by putting the sole of the shoe below the centerline of the spindle (i.e., negative thickness, in a sense). That geometry also means that the pedal doesn’t need to be two-sided because it’ll self-right itself due to the offset pedal body and the effect of gravity.
That single-sided form factor also opens up a couple of other interesting possibilities. The underside of the Pendulum doesn’t have any protruding pins to catch on anything and is very heavily chamfered to help the pedal deflect off obstacles rather than hanging up. Its top-down profile is also asymmetric to better follow the contour of a foot — since the underside doesn’t need to match, Outlier can get weirder up top.
But it’s really the dropped platform design that caught my attention. I laid out the reasons I like thin pedals earlier, and the stable-feeling platform you get from them is at the top of the list. The Pendulum pedals put the top surface of the pedal body 6 mm below the center of the spindle — something like 14 to 18 mm below the top surface of most pedals, and about 11 mm lower than the Voids. That makes the Pendulum wildly thinner (or maybe we should just say “lower”?) than anything I’ve ridden before.
At least on a mountain bike, or in over 20 years. The idea of offsetting the pedal surface below the spindle isn’t a new one at all — Shimano gave it a whirl with their Dyna-Drive pedals way back in the late 1970s. Those were, of course, designed for road applications — mountain bikes didn’t really exist yet — and used dedicated cranks with much, much larger diameter pedal threads so that the bearings could be housed inside the crank arm. I actually owned a set briefly, on a Look La Vie Claire that I bought as a middle schooler who couldn’t afford anything more modern and still thought that racing road bikes sounded like a good idea.
Anyway, there have been some more recent attempts to make extra thin flat pedals by using a stubby axle with the bearings mounted inboard, including the Flypaper pedals from about 15 years ago (which used a custom FSA crank to house the bearings). Most variants have been truly flat across the top, though, and I’m not aware of any that offset the platform as the Pendulum does, so it’s easy to imagine that they could feel pretty different from anything else out there.
Some Questions / Things We’re Curious About
(1) How do the Void and Pendulum feel, with nothing to support the foot through the middle of the pedal?
(2) What are they like to pedal? Regardless of the pedal offset, the actual path your foot follows is still a true circle, its center just shifts up and down depending on the pedal thickness, so in theory, they should feel pretty normal from that standpoint…but do they in practice?
(3) And for the Pendulum in particular, does it feel extra stable as it seems like it might? Does it self-right reliably and quickly? Does it feel like it comes at the cost of pedal clearance, or does the lack of pins on the underside make up for it?
(4) How do the bearings hold up long term? And how much of an issue does the large bearing bulge present, if any at all?
Bottom Line (For Now)
Outlier’s new Void and Pendulum pedals don’t look like anything else out there. Rather than just being different for the sake of being different, their respective designs seem like they could have some genuine upsides for some folks. We’ve got a pair of each in for review, and will be getting takes from multiple reviewers, so stay tuned for a Full Review to come. And in the meantime, you can check out our early on-trail impressions in our Flash Review, linked below.
Flash Review: Our Initial On-Trail Impressions
BLISTER+ members and those who purchase our Digital Access Pass can check out the Flash Review below to read our initial on-trail impressions. Get our Digital Access Pass to view all our Flash Reviews and Deep Dives, or become a BLISTER+ member today to get access to that and a LOT more, including the best worldwide Outdoor Injury Insurance, exclusive deals and discounts on skis, personalized gear recommendations from us, and much more.
Flash Review: Outlier Void and Pendulum Pedals
Do Outlier’s Void and Pendulum pedals feel as wild as they look, or does their unconventional packaging wind up feeling more akin to other flat pedal designs than you might expect? We’ve got some early thoughts.
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