CeramicSpeed, best known for its low-friction components and OSPW system, has launched an app to help you plan and manage your bike maintenance. Rather like a car’s service schedule, this tells you how long it is until your key components need maintenance, based on best practice guidance. It’s not just for CeramicSpeed’s ceramic bearings and other parts and you can use it for any brand’s drivetrain components.
The CeramicSpeed app links to your Strava account to keep tabs on your riding, taking data on the distance you’ve ridden since your last service to estimate the number of days until your chain and bottom bracket bearings need servicing work. You also get a value for the number of kilometres until a service is needed. The app caters for riders with multiple bikes as well.
It’s not clear how these numbers are calculated. In our experience, some bottom brackets and their bearings seem to be much more fragile than others. Wear will also depend on factors like weather conditions and where you’re riding. A PressFit bottom bracket bearing on a gravel bike ridden through axle-deep water has a potentially much shorter lifespan than a threaded road bike BB ridden on dry roads – trust us, we know.
Chains are the same story and a muddy cyclocross race will do for yours a lot more quickly than a summer road ride. For example, CeramicSpeed’s own UFO low friction chain is rated for 650km before needing a re-lube with the brand's UFO lube. We recently included it in our best bike chain lube guide, and though CeramicSpeed specifically says that the chain is not optimised for wet and muddy conditions, they did recently release a wet-specific version.
As well as helping you to keep your bottom bracket happy, the CeramicSpeed app also includes a handlebar alignment tool. If it’s one of those things that, once you’ve adjusted it, never seems to look quite right, the tool helps you ensure that your bars will point you straight ahead.
It works by analysing an image of the bars and your front wheel and calculating how far out of alignment they are in degrees. You can then fine-tune your bars’ position while you’ve got the stem bolts loose so that it’s perfect – or at least close enough – before you retighten them.
CeramicSpeed promises more functionality in future, but for now, you can download the app for iPhone and Android and start to work out when you’ll need that clapped-out bearing replaced with a shiny, go-faster CeramicSpeed number.
