Look for: 26-38-48t gearing + Fatbike + 175mm arm length

[thunderstorm80]

Hi,
I found a Fat-Bike I desire very much for my road touring bike build, but it comes with the regular 170mm pedal lengths.
I noticed a bad trend in the recent years where 175mm lengths have almost vanished, while in fact many people as tall as me cannot use 170mm pedal lengths.
Since this is a hollowtech II system, I cannot just remove the pedal arms and install longer ones. I have to replace the entire crankset.
The original crankset is 22-32-44t but since the frame offers plenty of clearance, I wanted to install 26-38-48t crankset which would be more natural for road conditions with a motor as assistant.
The BB shell is 100mm long.

So I have those options:
1. Keep the hollowtech BB, and find a hollowtech crankset with 26-38-48t + 175mm pedals.
2. Take a REGULAR (68/73) hollowtech crankset and install it with some sort of a BB extension tube. Do such thing exist or possible?
3. Dumping the whole hollowtech components, and getting any type of BB spindle + 26-38-48 + 175mm pedals. Seems most likely to succeed. Since I am not a great expert in all the BB types, and the internet has barely any info to compare the different systems (and 3D models/rotatable images could have been great to understand), I rely on what you will recommend me.

Thanks for any help about this...

 

[bchaney]

First, are you sure that you'll be able to tell that the arms are 5mm short? That's less than a quarter inch. I was researching cranksets myself recently and what I read is that most people can't tell a difference in arm length. Cheapest solution would be to raise your seat 5mm . If you are deadset on getting that 5mm in the arms, option 1 or 3 should work. I doubt an extension is available and if it was I would be concerned about it structurally. Hollowtech is supposed to be superior to the square/splined BBs, so I would try to keep it. You could try to find a set of arms like the ones linked below, then swap your existing chain rings onto them and reuse the hollowtech BB.

http://www.wiggle.com/race-face-ride-fat-bike-cranks-with-bb/