On a recent trip to Germany we bumped into the guys from Ceradure, a Benelux based engineering company with a great reputation in pro motocross and motorsport for making lightweight sprockets and disc rotors proven in such races as the Paris-Dakar rally.
They’ve been busy engineering an all-new road cassette, with a mountain bike version on the horizon. We’ve got a sample of the road cassette being tested over on Cycling Plus. The 10-speed Shimano compatible cassette is machined from an aluminium billet. It's processed to create a hard wearing ceramic surface which is then treated with a PTFE (Teflon) coating for smooth slick shifting and increased resistance to wear.
Ceradure claim the cassette should last in excess of 5,000km in any weather. The real story though is the weight, at a frankly incredible 84g for the cassette and a further 4g for the lockring, that’s 71g lighter than SRAM Red and 78g lighter than Shimano Dura-Ace.
That makes for the lightest 10-speed cassette in the world. We were also shown the prototype mountain bike version with a weight of just 145g (pre-finishing and coating). The expected price of the Ceradure cassette is around €350.
