Thursday, October 30, 2014

New Pulleys Now Available!

We've been offering our ceramic pulleys for close to 10 years now.  We've tweaked the design of the pulley bodies several times using alloy, Delrin (plastic), Titanium and virtually every year we make slight tweaks to the bearings to improve them.

Our newest offering uses a completely different method of production.  In the past we used injection molding to make our Delrin pulley bodies.  This is a reliable way to get a perfect body every time.  But issues can pop up if the temperature of humidity changes at all during the molding.  Not too big a problem but if this happens, the pulley body could wear out a little too quickly.

Our newest pulley switches to machined Delrin.  The process is much more complicated and expensive but by machining the Delrin, the material is much stronger and durable.  In order to get the shape and tolerances perfect, it takes a skilled person to machine them.  Hence the expensive part.

Here is the final pulley, available now at our website:




Thursday, October 16, 2014

Reminder, cross seals are a good option for this time of year.

We posted about our cross seals a few years ago but I wanted to re-visit that posting.  Below is the original post:

We get this question quite a bit.  I thought a blog post would clear it up.  First, our cyclocross seals are not just for cyclocross.  They are for anyone who rides in bad weather, races a lot or just wants to protect their bearings a little better.

Our cyclocross seal is a unique seal that while initially more "draggy" will break in and perform the same as our regular seals, while maintaining better sealing performance.  When chosen, we install these on the outside of the bearing so that they protect against the elements.  For some extreme cases, we'll also install them on the inside seal as well, but most of the time our normal seal is fine there.

They are really a great seal and we find more and more customers choosing this option.  The key is to ignore how the BB performs at first, because there will be a lot of drag.  After riding it for a few hundred miles, things get really good and the performance starts to shine.

These are only available for our BBs.

These are still a great option for our BBs.  As more and more people start racing cyclocross or just want to ride year round, the extra sealing protection of our cross seals is a great benefit.  With these installed, except for some extreme cases, the only maintenance needed is to periodically pull your cranks, remove the plastic dustcaps and wipe away any grit that has worked it's way in between the dustcap and seal.  That's it!  You could always add more grease at this time to, just remove the seal, apply some of our grease and then re-install the seal.

And whether you greased the bearing or just removed the dustcap and wiped away any grit, be sure to add a bead of our grease to the outside of the seal BEFORE pressing the plastic dustcap back on.  This is to help with protection and keep things quiet down there.