Restoring a pair of Shimano Fullfit pedals

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In this article I’m going to cover the Shimano Fullfit pedals from the eighties. Or rather the Shimano PD-A100.

It’s one of the strangest retro pedals I’ve ever seen. The Koga Miyata Adventure I restored originally came with these pedals. But the bike only had one left. And since you can do very little with just one pedal I decided to ditch it.

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They must be quite rare because I’ve never seen these pedals in the wild before.

Until I was able to pick up a second-hand pair for 10 euros.

So what problem did the Shimano Fullfit pedals try to solve? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information online about these pedals other than some other second-hand offerings.

1986 was the year the Koga Miyata Adventure was introduced. But already in 1987 the Adventure type featured another standard non-caged touring pedal. Which means that this pedal only lasted one year.

The pedals are directional and can only be ridden on one side. They offer a toe-clip adapter unit, but the toe-clips that I received with it weren’t the original ones and didn’t fit.

Size and weight

They are considerably bigger than the pedals I used from a donor bike I found, and look decidedly different with their octagon-like platform. The fact that you have a considerably larger platform does make them more comfortable than the rather tiny pedals I ran before.

The platform kind of stays in the same plane because the are weighted at the bottom. This makes them extremely heavy at 296 grams a piece compared to the other, already heavy steel pedal, which is 208 grams.

Restoring the pedals

The body was made from aluminium, so I was able to polish it nicely with both a dremel and polishing wheel.

I’ve ridden pedals with toe-clips extensively in the past, but always had the right type of shoes for them. For convenience sake, I finally decided not to add the toe-clips here. Even after I had restored one of the toe-clips.