I sense that spending hundreds on pulley wheels will make your wallet lighter, so your w/kg will almost certainly increase.

---

***

The 'smoothness' you feel while spinning the cranks, or the pulleys, while you're off the bike has no relationship to the actual drivetrain friction. Shimano pulleys tend to test very well if I remember correctly under an actually relevant test, i.e. under load. TLDR I wouldn't worry about it, you're unlikely to pick up anything meaningful.

I run a combination of ceramic bottom bracket with ceramic pulleys with a smooth chain like Premier. I am a big fan of BB and pulleys from BBInfinite, super smooth and you will easily feel you can significantly reduce drivetrain losses with better components. I have some Kogel parts as well, they are great but BBInfinite is a bit better.

A Wippermann chain would be better than Shimano.

Hawk Racing pulleys.

---

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I really doubt anyone can actually feel the difference in losses.
Yea when on no-load and spinning the cranks or pulleys etc they may spin faster / longer / quieter / what ever subjective criteria there is. But that bears little relation to when loaded. OK if it's dog rough and the bearings are fooked or there's a load of grit in the chain.ornits half seized. But not when 'normal'.

And there's NO way someone can feel what is likely to be just a few watts difference through hands/feet/arse when on the road. No way. It's hard enough to measure that accurately and repeatably with proper instruments, never mind a pair of uncalibrated butt cheeks ! Smoothness and quietness does not necessarily equal efficiency - being quiet may just mean lots of damping which means losses.

If you say so, it must be true, right?

Decent and cheap sealed bearing pulleys will save you .4-.5 W vs Ultegra according to testing. <$20. There isn't much to gain by spending more.

Yes... run Shimano chains and cassettes, not Sram.

I tried a set of the cheap eBay pulleys years ago and they were not worth the hassle and had worse shifting performance. The Hawk bearing at $60 might be worth a try.

Probably one thing to keep in mind is that the lubricant you use is probably more important than the bearing itself. You could probably get more bang for the buck by cleaning out the existing grease in your bike and replacing it with some of the fancy stuff.

I disassembled, cleaned and oiled all my bearings with a very light bearing oil. I can tell the difference when I spin the crank without the chain on, but I don't see any difference in the pulleys. The weather seals provide enough friction for those tiny bearings that you can't feel any difference when you spin them by hand. Without the weather seals they spin just like the videos on those websites, but once you seal them they don't have enough mass to keep spinning on their own. I don't race indoors, so can't skip the weather seals.

I just don't see how $400 pulleys would make a difference if they are weather sealed (totally just my two cents). I did buy Chris King bottom brackets, but that was only because the stock units couldn't be taken apart, cleaned and oiled. With that said, those hangers with big anodized pulleys look a lot cooler than mine.

Good chain with good wax/ptfe/molyb and call it a day.



Joe

Anything with the word ceramic in it will save you loads of Watts.

Ceramic bearings in hubs, 50w saving each
Ceramic bearings bb 40w

The jockey wheels are a double whammy, ceramic and oversized. So that's 100w saving.

Get a wax chain and that's easy 30w.

Best of all use latex for your tubes and run tyres at 10psi, that's a guaranteed 200w.

Latex underpants make you more aero too.

I snagged a couple of pairs of Kogels off eBay for quite a bit less than retail. I gotta be honest: they're not objectively worth it, even at the discounted price.

Is it a real life improvement? Depends on what you mean. I think I can just barely perceive the difference in effort going from standard butyl tubes to latex. I haven't done the math, but I think that's maybe 2-3W at cruising speed (18-20 mph), maybe 4-5W at a fast group ride speed. Ceramic pulleys are not a perceptible difference. Dave Rome of Cyclingtips reviewed the full Ceramicspeed OSPW and he said that it wasn't a perceptible difference. With a clean drivetrain the expected savings were likely at least 1W, but probably less than 2. Just plain ceramic pulleys, even the slightly oversized ones, have to be less than that. I bet you could measure the difference in the lab, if you had a lab. So, in one sense of "real life," it's a real life difference. If you meant is it a meaningful difference for an amateur athlete, no. It's going to help you better your own distribution of possible times by a small amount.

Objectively, when those Shimano pulleys wear out, you could buy the Dura Ace pulleys, which I think are something like $35. Ultegra has one bushing and one bearing, DA is both bearings. Or sometimes you can find a decent price on used Kogels on eBay. I got one nearly new pair for $70, and another more worn one for $40. The latter has one bearing that's definitely a bit worn, but it still turns better than the stock Ultegra pulley with the ball bearing.

I've used Ceramic Speed OSPW on a number of bikes. The improvement is not something you can feel even though they say that it's helps by 3 to 5 watts. A friend used the cheap OSPW you see online and they were a waste of time. Cheap for a reason.

I’m a big fan of Dan and PremierBike as well as SLF Motion, and Hawk Racing. My road bike current has Dan’s 12/14 pulleys and our TT bikes have SLF oversized cages and pulleys. When I was using Sram bits, I had Hawk Racing bearings and pulleys. You can’t go wrong with those.

I have aftermarket derailleur pulleys on my gravel bike. Off the bike there's a huge difference, with one flick of my finger the stock shimano xtr pulleys will spin about two or three rotations before stopping, the bearings in the after market are so nice that they'll spin for about 45 seconds to a minute before stopping. On the bike I don't really notice the difference. Maybe they make my ride easier by about --> <-- this much... My average moving speed hasn't gone up any... I really haven't noticed a huge difference other than they look cool as get out. So was it worth it? I may be a bit partial but my gravel bike is one of the coolest looking bikes I've ever seen. Any amount of money to make it look --> <-- that much cooler is worth it in my book. If you don't care about stuff like that though, probably not.

You can't brag about how cool it is then not show us

As it turns out, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to resizing pics and can't figure out how to get my pics below the 250KB size. If you're on instagram you can see it @TimAndPups

I’m a bit torn on the oversides pulley wheels. I mean, the ultegra ones aren’t very expensive, so it would probably be easy to make something better, But the ceramic speed ones are probably not worth it (look cool though). I guess in terms on friktion, you could probably save the same by hacking a 14-32 cassette together and some bigger chain rings and look even cooler.
You won’t “feel” at 5w saving, you be riding at the same watts anyway. And you probably won’t see the speed increase either - 5w is nothing, But combined with a few other 5-10-15w savnings, it starts adding up into something useful

My general rule of thumb is, what Brian says is usually a good idea with this stuff.

---

DFRU - Detta Family Racing Unit...the kids like it and we all get out and after it...gotta keep the fam involved!

What's really funny is the fact that you can buy CeramicSpeed headset bearings for $200-300

Who is buying these....and why....

I almost did because they do a great job of letting you easily buy the exact bearings you need for a bike.

I was replacing the bearings on my Cervelo S5, and *damn* it took me a long time to find the right bearings, including calling multiple Cervelo dealers. Because my old bearings were too rusted to see the specs. You think it'd be some super easy on Cervelo's website, or something. But nope. '

After an hour of frustration, I had my finger hovering over the CeramicSpeed buy button, before I slapped myself a few times and spent another hour to track down the right FSA bearings.

Hey that's 50W for a top bearing and 50W for a bottom bearing total 100W saved every time you turn a corner. Maybe pointless on a straight course but if there are a lot of turns the savings are huge!

Cyclocross pro that get is bike jetwashed every half lap?

Someone educate me here....where
do the claimed watts savings come from? Is it because the material is ceramic? Is it because the pulleys are oversized and purportedly create less friction based on that sizing?