by John Cane

Created on: July 19, 2009   Last Updated: July 20, 2009

Ceramic bearings have been gaining popularity in the cycling world over the last few years. On the plus side, they are lighter and faster than standard steel bearings, and the good news it that converting most bearing sets to ceramic is relatively easy from a mechanical standpoint. On the downside they are amazingly expensive, so you may wish to pick and choose not only which bearings you convert to ceramic but also how you do the conversion.

You can change any bearing on your bike to ceramic, but the cost benefit is different for each bearing set. For instance, you can change your headset over but remember that under normal riding conditions your handlebars never make a complete rotation, and because the rotation in not involved in driving the bike, this smoothness of the bearing will generally speaking not make you any faster. So while switching to ceramic here is a nice touch, it is probably the last thing you should consider. When you do get there, Sinz does make a very economical ceramic headset.

On the other end of the spectrum the bearings in your rear derailleur pulley wheels are great ones to consider replacing. Because these pulley wheels are constantly turning at a rate of speed higher than most of the other bearings, they are a great place to consider converting to ceramic. FSA and SRAM both make high quality pulley wheels with ceramic bearings, but I actually like the Wheels Manufacturing ones better and they are a little less expensive. Replacing just the bearing in a pulley wheel is possible, but because the expensive part is the bearing itself not the resin pulley wheel itself, it is generally better to replace the whole pulley wheel rather than just the bearing. This is an easy swap as there is a single bolt that holds each pulley wheel to the derailleur. So all you will need to do is remove the old pulley wheels and replace them with the new one. For you rookies, do one at a time so you don't forget how the chain passes through.

Another good place to switch to ceramic is in the Bottom bracket. At the moment there are no cartridge style ceramic replacements that I know of, but external bottom brackets can either be converted to ceramic or replaced with a new bottom bracket with ceramic bearings. It is much easier to replace the whole bottom bracket and Wheels Manufacturing makes some complete bottom brackets with ceramic that work very well. If you are up for a little more of a project and don't mind purchasing a bearing press, you can take

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