Ceramic Vs Steel Bearings Bottom Bracket

There has been a lot of hype about ceramic bearings in recent years and many people claim they offer a performance upgrade.

Ceramic vs steel bearings bottom bracket. Cost of purchase for ceramic and steel bearings. Ceramic bearing equipped bottom brackets or hybrid ceramics to be more precise are generally much more expensive than their stainless. Quality hybrid ceramic bearings are better than steel bearings in a bicycle bottom bracket application because they have rounder balls for lower resistance better races for lower resistance and are grease efficient in low rpm low heat environments for lower resistance. The results illustrate the cost to benefit ration nicely.

Initially the enduro bearing has lower friction at around 600km of use the ceramic bearing has worn a track into the comparatively soft steel races and the bearing friction starts to increase dramatically. The graph below shows a comparison between two steel bearings skf and ntn and a ceramic bearing enduro. A bb30 bottom bracket that uses ceramic bearings will weigh 3 5 grams less than its stainless steel counterpart. The average frictional losses of the ceramic bottom brackets is 0 60 watts while the average frictional losses of the steel bottom brackets is 1 02 watts.

The highest performing ceramic threaded bottom bracket outperformed the highest performing steel threaded bottom bracket made by hawk racing by less than 1. This difference between the ceramic and steel with no further explanation can lead to a quick but inaccurate conclusion that ceramic bearings generally exhibit less friction than steel bearings. The silicon nitride used to make ceramic bearings combines a set of material properties that makes it perfect for bicycle bearings. While the first two items were more prevalent distinguishers between ceramic and steel bearings in the past today there are often comparably built steel versions of a given bearing assembly.

However the ceramic bearing costs just short of twice as much as the hawk racing bearing. He was so frustrated with bottom brackets failing due to the heavy mud in belgian cyclocross races that he started buying whatever was the cheapest available. The results were new bearings for every single race a lot of work for stef and helen racing world cups on bearings similar to the.