Doge

I was stating net result, not where it came from.

Guessing

Lack of seal drag. Thinner grease. Sliperier cage. Maybe alignment.
Maybe bearings.

Very obvious feel.

HTupolev

Actually, no. The reason I questioned his figure is that it's much larger than what you tend to hear from bottom bracket salespeople.

CodyDog

The average biker will not yield any noticeable benefit from ceramic bearings (my background is in bearings).

John_V 

I'm not going to quote stats from companies trying to sell their products or from people that think ceramic bearings are a waste of time. I'm posting from personal experience. I've read all the posts and have to wonder just how many of the posters, other than Doge, have actually tried ceramic bearings? I also wonder how many naysayers went and spent $2,000-3,000 on carbon aero wheels to obtain whatever small gain they read about in their advertisements? I've been riding on ceramic bottom bracket and jockey wheel bearings for almost a year and I can tell you there is one hell of a difference between them and the steel Shimano Ultegra BB and jockey wheels I had before. I've read and watched just about every article and video on ceramic bearings and almost all of them compare steel bearings to very expensive bearings from Ceramic Speed. Fortunately, Ceramic Speed is not the only place to buy ceramic bearings. You can purchase Grade 5, 24x37x7mm, Enduro, ceramic (titanium nitrate coated) hybrid bearings for $35.00 each; $45.00 for their Ceramic Zero bearings. That bearing size is used in most bottom brackets. My jockey wheels are also titanium nitrate coated, Grade 5, ceramic bearings from OmniRacer and cost me $49.95/set. If the races are treated with titanium nitrate, the bearings last quite a long time with little to no maintenance.

I'm more of a distance rider than I am a speedster. The difference in the effort that it takes to turn the cranks is, as I mentioned, extremely noticeable. It's almost like pedaling downhill the whole ride. I'm riding on one to two smaller cogs with the same effort as I was with my Ultegra drive train. Weather permitting, I ride 40-60 miles a day, 6 days a week. After most of my rides, my legs feel as if they never turned the crank. We don't have a lot of hills here in Florida but for the ones that we do have, I needed to use my small chain ring with my 28T cog to climb most of them. Since getting the ceramic drive train, I climb the same hills with my large chain ring with about the same effort as I did with steel bearings in the small chain ring. Personally, after riding with ceramic bearings, I would never go back to steel bearings in a drive train on any bike. Take this for what it's worth to you but don't knock ceramic bearings unless you have actually tried them on your bike.

wphamilton

While your point is dead on, using the slowest parts on everything isn't that terrible because upgrades are very inexpensive and at that price point tend to also provide the most benefit.

Offer me ceramic bearings for free, and I might still rather have steel ones in my hubs. It's a non-starter.

DrIsotope

Without using a power meter to ascertain if any efficiency gains actually occurred, this is info straight from the butt dyno, which is a notoriously uncalibrated instrument.

Because at the absolute pie-in-the-sky best case scenario, changing all of the drivetrain bearings might free up 4-5 watts.

I've used ceramic bearing jockey wheels on two RDs. I could discern absolutely no difference whatsoever between ceramic and steel.

HTupolev

"Slowest" does not mean cheapest. For example, in the FrictionFacts bottom bracket testing, the super-slow BB was a beefy roller-bearing design. My point is, you don't have to pay out big bucks to end up closer to the super-fast stuff than to the super-slow stuff.

wphamilton

I didn't see the slowest and cheapest even tested by FrictionFacts, but I did see that high quality steel bearings were faster than some of the ceramic in their tests. To get the "big" gains of a watt or two, and not wear out the hubs prematurely, you need to get ceramic races also the right lubrication. It's silly.

John_V 

While a power meter will give you the wattage output data at any point in your ride, it doesn't tell you how much fatigue your body encounters at any point in that ride. I didn't spend $800-$1,000+ on a power meter to give me that single value of data, but I did spend $120.00 on the ceramic bearings I mentioned in my other post. I haven't any idea how many watts I saved or didn't save, nor do I really care. However, what I do have is a pair of legs, which are extremely capable of telling me if they are working harder or not with ceramic bearings vs steel bearings. If my legs are noticing the difference between the ceramic and steel bearings, and they can maintain the same results as before with less effort or give me a little more speed at the same effort as before or show less fatigue on longer rides, then they are happy leg. When my legs are happy, I'm happy. And to me, that's what counts, even if it isn't a pie in the sky scenario..

In the eight years and 70,000+ miles that I've been keeping track of my daily rides, I have yet to have the opportunity to stand on a podium, get a trophy/medal or get a hug and kiss by a hot babe in a bikini at the end of any of those rides. So, if I'm seeing less effort to pedal my bike with ceramic bearings vs steel bearings, then I guess I'll have to continue using my legs and my notoriously uncalibrated butt dyno to gauge those rides.

DrIsotope

If the singular end goal is happiness through confirmation bias, then you're sitting pretty. Do not venture anywhere near a power meter, as it will remove any and all doubt.

There's nothing wrong with riding by RPE. But it is not useful in determining efficiency, at all. It has zero value in that capacity. Power is power, with the other variables removed. RPE is all of those variables.

At the end of the day, wants > needs, and a ceramic BB is on your list of wants. No problem.

smashndash

CeramicSpeed wants you to believe that all steel bearings are created equal. There is SO much more that goes into bearing design than just the material of the balls (the races are steel except for some pulleys).

Shimano makes extremely slow bottom brackets. I was truly shocked when I saw a CS display that had a Shimano BB and a CS BB available for people to toy with. I agree that the difference between CS and Shimano is huge. But what about the difference between CS and SKF or NTN contactless bearings? Nobody here seems to have mentioned that there are truly top tier ($20-$60 apiece) steel bearings available too that will be almost immeasurably slower than CS (certainly imperceptibly so) but far, far more durable and will quickly outpace any ceramic bearing.

also, if you’re looking at ceramic bearings but haven’t yet switched away from plastic press fit cups, you need to do that ASAP. The losses in speed and bearing life from poor fit are far more apparent than those from bearing design. BBInfinite makes one-piece BBs with average (enduro) bearings that spin very well. Hambini puts top tier bearings in his and those will only spin better. You can also put NTN or SKF bearings in the BBinfinite sleeve if you prefer that.

TL; DR: There is a huge variety of bearings out there. Don’t compare CS to Shimano. Compare them to NTN or SKF (contactless) and you will be surprised. Also Enduro is not top tier. They’re just a company that realized that cyclists are an easy bunch to fool.

John_V 

Besides Shimano bearings (Ultegra & 105s), I have had other steel bearings on my bike. The best ones were my Hawk Racing BBs. Unfortunately, the Hawk Racing BB that I put in my CRS, when I first bought it, only lasted around 2,000 miles before the cups started creaking and neither I nor the LBS were able to correct it.2,000 miles for me was 2 months. I replaced the BB with a Wheels Mfg thread together BB with Enduro angular contact bearings. Those too, were leaps and bounds better than the Shimano Ultegra bearings.

Some of the steel bearing manufactures also want to make you believe that their bearings are just as good as quality ceramic bearings. Hawk Racing has an entire page on their website about it. While the bearings in a Hawk BB are extremely smooth and turn with not much effort, they come in a distant second to the ceramic bearings that I currently have. Are the Enduro ceramic bearings that I have the best on the market? I don't know and they're probably not. But my LBS is a Wheels Mfg dealer and he had them in stock.

Ceramic bearings are no different than steel bearings when it comes to grade and quality. Both have their low end, mid range and high end bearings. It all comes down to how much you are willing to pay for them. I've seen jockey wheels on eBay, from China, with ceramic bearings selling for just over $5.00 ea. Not exactly something I would put on my bike and make a comparison with. I certainly would not buy Ceramic Speed products since they are way over priced and there are other companies that make just as good of a product for far less money.

smashndash

I don’t understand the bike community’s reverence for tiny companies that have a tiny share in an extremely niche sport. Enduro is a bike brand (kind of). As is CS. And Hawk Racing. NTN Corp is a bearing company (mainly) worth $1.6 billion and has a revenue of $6 billion a year. NSK, also a Japanese bearing company. Revenue of $9 billion a year. These are big companies dedicated to just making bearings. They do not give a crap about small fries like CS. Maybe Enduro, since they make industrial grade bearings but I have no idea how big they are - I don’t think they’re publicly traded.

Anyway - I don’t mean to say that bigger companies always make better products. But with bearings, which are a commodity item, the economy of scale will go to the bigger companies. Which means that if a much smaller company is delivering a “similar” product at a similar price, you should be somewhat suspicious.

woodcraft

For me, RPE is accurate to +/- 75 watts, relative to the power meter-

at the end of a long ride, power can be 1/3 lower w/ same or higher RPE.

John_V 

The larger companies have more money to spend in advertising and trying to make you feel that you absolutely can't live without their products. The smaller companies, I assume, won't spend that much money on advertising in a niche that they don't have a foothold in because they probably feel as if they don't stand a chance with companies already established in that niche. I read where Specialized has signed an agreement with Ceramic Speed to put their bottom brackets as standard equipment on their top tier S-Works models. Colnago has been doing that for two years on all their UCI approved carbon frames. Colnago is just using the Ceramic Speed bearings and putting them in their proprietary, threaded bottom brackets. Still, it's jumping the price up on those models just because of the Ceramic Speed claims.

Kapusta

The main advantage of going with ceramic bearings will knowing that you have done your part towards the LBS having a profitable month.

smashndash

Like I said, these big industrial bearing companies do not care about the bike industry. They make close to 0 effort to appeal to cyclists. The only exception I can think of is SKF with their MTRX bearings recently being “marketed” towards mountain bikers, but hardly anyone knows about them, and they’re conspicuously unavailable in a few common sizes for bikes - such as Shimano BBs. So cyclists definitely don’t feel as though they cannot live without them. CS and Enduro, on the other hand...