SMOOTH OPERATORS
Denmark’s CeramicSpeed has long been the pro riders’ secret weapon, so CyclingPlus headed to Holstebro to find out how small things can make a big difference
Often when it comes to technology in bikes, seeing is the beginning of believing. The latest generation of aero road machines – Specialized’s Venge, as ridden by Peter Sagan, for example – looks fast even when standing still, as do similar offerings from Cannondale, Trek, Cervélo et al. Also consider helmets from Giro, Lazer, Kask and so on, and wheels from Zipp and the like. The aero technology is on show and designed to reduce friction with the air. Mechanical friction has, however, been a long-term bugbear of numerous designers and engineers.
It’s fair to say that Danish company CeramicSpeed is obsessive about reducing friction, and claims that with a full set of its bearing upgrades and friction-reducing parts, you can save up to 12 watts of energy – about the same as we’re seeing from the latest versions of aero road bikes over the previous ones.
CeramicSpeed’s founder, Jacob Csizmadia, is just the sort of obsessive that seems to gravitate towards cycling technology. Within moments of meeting him at the company’s HQ he’s delving into reference books, historic catalogues and working through complex equations to show the advantages of low friction.
For Jacob it started with skating, initially the traditional roller boot kind, then in the ’90s gravitating to five-wheeled roller blades for speed skating. His favoured speed skating was endurance/distance events setting multiple world records, culminating in skating a huge 505km in 24 hours. Jacob explains: “I did a lot of skating when I was a kid, I did my first race in 1996 in Copenhagen. I got my first world record in 1997, when I skated from a small city in Denmark, travelling 402km in 24 hours. After this I changed to longer frame skates with five wheels, which got a lot of attention, and I received sponsorship from SKF, one of the largest bearing manufacturers in the world. The company makes pretty much every type of bearing, and in the ’90s started with hybrid ceramic, so I used these in my skates’ wheels.”
Ceramic has the benefits of lighter weight, longer life span, less friction, contact and load, and can last up to 10 times longer than traditional metal bearings, so there are fewer service intervals.
Roll with it
“I saw the possible savings and performance benefits, so in 1998 I used my first ceramic bearings for skating. I did my second world record in 1998, skating 505km indoors in a supermarket! There’s no rain, no change in climate, a constant temperature and the vinyl surface was smoother than a road. I’d trained harder but I’d say that the ceramic bearings gave me a five per cent advantage. I averaged more than 24kph, when you include breaks. If you lift each leg every 5m, say, that’s 50,500m, so 10,100 lifts. My boots weighed 1.5kg each, so lifting 160 tonnes in 24 hours. As the bearings were smoother, and reduced the weight over standard bearings by 20 per cent, over that time it’s tonnes of weight saved.
“Six months later I was working full time for SKF on its ceramic bearing projects. SKF wasn’t so interested in advanced technology for sport, or specialist industrial applications – the ceramic bearing market is around one per cent of that of normal steel bearings. The initial cost is higher, but in the long run it saves money – think of an industry with lost production time because the bearings need servicing and changing more often – but the problem is not many look long term, they just want short-term savings. The cost is prohibitive, but I’ve yet to find any application where a steel bearing is superior to ceramic. With SKF developing products that lasted five times longer than standard, it wasn’t great for business.
“With the knowledge I’d acquired, I decided to start out on my own. I had an apartment where I developed, assembled and ran the company. Now we have our Danish facility, a test lab in Boulder, Colorado (CeramicSpeed acquired the specialist Friction Facts’ test lab in 2016), and have sports and industry arms. The industrial side is around 20 per cent of our business, and its forward-thinking businesses where our bearings can improve efficiency, expend less energy and allow for greener running.”
Precision production
I’d imagined that bearing manufacturing would be a big industrial process, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Production at CeramicSpeed has more in common with the Atelier approach to fine watchmaking.
The key element is the ceramic ball itself, which starts as a powder compound of silicon nitride. They start out as rough, almost dough balls, which are then compressed under huge pressures. From here it’s a process of polishing, taking between 50 and 70 days. After this, each bearing is checked meticulously for any surface imperfections of even a few microns – a micron is a millionth of a metre or 0.001mm.
It’s astounding just how hands-on the process is. The races in which the balls will be set are all machined from the same piece of material,
“Production at CeramicSpeed has more in common with the Atelier approach to fine watchmaking” Warren Rossiter
and inner and outer are cut from exactly the same piece to ensure perfect alignment. They stay as a pair and are assembled together. The balls are set into the races by hand using tweezers. Once the balls are in place the rotation smoothness is checked, and only if this passes the test of some extremely experienced assemblers does it proceed to seal stage.
Any bearings that don’t feel right are disassembled then reassembled with new balls. It has to be an incredibly precise assembly to ensure they all have the same amount of contact. Seals are then fitted and rotation is checked again. When it passes this test, it can go through to assembly into a bottom bracket, headset or jockey wheel, but not before the seals are removed and the bearings lubed with one of CeramicSpeed’s proprietary oils.
DIY Upgrades
As part of my visit I’m upgrading the bearings on my long-term Giant TCR Advanced SL Disc, including building my own system to replace the jockeys on my SRAM eTap rear mech.
With tweezers in hand I try to pick up 3mm diameter, super-smooth ceramic balls and drop them into a set of races; it’s like my own personal game of Operation. I’m also being watched over by Thomas Hübertz Lund, the man who sets the standard and trains CeramicSpeed’s staff. My first few go well, until I shake a little and literally drop the ball – a tiny black ball onto a black rubberised floor. We find it and Thomas puts it into a digital bearing sizer to check the measurements. It turns out this one is a micron larger in diameter, so it’s not the one I dropped. We soon locate mine and it’s sent to be cleaned to go back into production.
After inserting the bearings into the races, then pressing in the seals – checking the spin smoothness and noise after each seal fitting – and applying lubrication, it’s then pressed into the jockey wheels, checked again, then removed so a bearing Loctite can be applied to seat the bearing properly. The bearing is checked again, my top pulley wheel passes with flying colours, but the lower fails the noise test. The lower pulley is disassembled and the bearing is replaced by one Thomas built, and I’m left to reassemble. It’s a nerve-wracking 30 minutes, but the final product is super smooth and both pulley wheels spin for an almost unnatural amount of time.
Chain reaction
Aside from the high-tech ceramic bearing systems, CeramicSpeed has also introduced a special chain called the UFO. At its heart is a standard chain – for SRAM bikes it’s a KMC SL11 – but a specially developed formula and process makes it the lowest friction chain on the market. Inside the chain room are walls with myriad jockey wheels mounted in a
seemingly random pattern. As part of the preparation each chain is broken in by running through the twists and turns. The chains are then sunk into a bath of heated, proprietary recipe wax, then baked in an oven. I expected the recipe to be a mix of weird chemicals, but the shelf consists of virgin olive oil, rape seed oil and other natural oils you’re more likely to find on supermarket shelves than a chemistry lab.
The chains are later dipped in a powder Teflon before being packed ready for use. Dennis Jehs Løh, CeramicSpeed’s pro rider liaison, the guy who fits parts to the likes of Peter Sagan’s bikes, explains the UFO chain alone can reduce friction through the drivetrain by as much as five watts. When combined with the savings from a complete system, you could save as much as 16 watts.
“Ceramic bearings are better than steel, but they’re not all the same,” explains Dennis. “Our ceramic bearings are the best quality and our material supplier is exclusive to us. In independent tests, after 600 hours our bearings are still in perfect, unmarked condition. We’ve seen other bearings mark and roughen up after just 10 hours. We can safely claim that our ceramics are 100 per cent smoother, 15 per cent harder and 99 per cent stronger than rivals.”
It becomes apparent that the bearings are expensive for a reason, but CeramicSpeed understandably backs its products. Its standard, uncoated line of bearings have a warranty for four years, while the coated products extend that to six years. With recommended service inspection intervals of 5000km they are certainly built to last.
Enjoy the silence
So, am I sold on ceramics? Honestly, time will tell as I put my bike through its paces, but on a first outing around the fjords and rolling hills in Denmark my TCR felt impossibly smooth. Shifting was slicker, and moving to oversize pulleys on SRAM means you increase the capacity to 32t without having to switch to a long-cage WiFli mech.
The bike seems to hold speed better, and it’s also really quiet. SRAM’s one-piece cassette has a reputation for resonating any chain noise, but the waxed UFO item eliminates noise. Whether that’s due to a loss of friction or not I can’t tell, but my bike is riding better than it ever has.
Back home, my rides have seen a small improvement in average speed. On one of my most familiar test loops of 68 miles I was over three minutes faster than on the same bike ridden two weeks before the upgrades. I could just be thinking the bike should be quicker, so I’m riding quicker, but it doesn’t really matter, as these parts should last longer, the bike feels better and I’m enjoying it all the more. It’s an expensive proposition to upgrade the complete bike, but if you’re looking to eke out every last bit of performance, and you can afford it, CeramicSpeed may well have the answer.
“We can safely claim that our ceramics are 100 per cent smoother and 99 per cent stronger than our rivals” Dennis Jehs Løh