The Great Parts Switching Cascade

 So the chrome Super Le Tour had decent pedals, but the toe-clip was a little short it seemed to me.  I had a pair of MKS city pedals with nice wire toe clips that I bought from Compass Bicycles many years ago, so I went to switch the pedals out.

The drive side was a little tight, but the pedal came out fine.

The non drive side was almost impossible to remove.  I kept thinking that I should just leave it alone, but once I know something is not right, I try to fix it, unless it is completely out of the range of my influence, like politics.  I had to press down so hard on the pedal wrench, the palm of my hand was bruised for days.  The pedal did finally come out, but it took most of the threads in the crank arm with it.

Oddly enough, there were still enough threads in that crank that I could thread the MKS pedal on, and it stayed for a ride around the block, but I knew I should not trust it, and the kind folks on the Bike Forum backed up that feeling.

So, I was short one non drive side crank.  I looked on Ebay, and there were some Le Tour cranks, but none of them seemed like they were from a Super Le Tour, and I would be stuck with the drive side crank from Ebay as well, and the chainrings from the plain Le Tour look like they were riveted on.

Then I remembered I had a single speed project bike in the shed that never got off the ground.  I built it for riding on icy days in the winter, but I found one speed was not enough to get through six inches of snow all the way up the hills to work.  I took the relatively unused Velo Orange single speed crank off that bike and put it on the Happy Little Three Speed, and moved the non drive crank from the Happy Little Three Speed to the Chrome Super Le Tour.

So the Happy Little Three Speed now has a new crank. I also finally replaced the old cup and cone bottom bracket with a cartridge bottom bracket, (a $12 cheapy from online).  The 113 mm spindle length is just right for getting the chainring under the chaincase without the crank hitting - though I did have to do a little bit of bending of the chaincase to get the clearance right.