...cassettes.

I know poshbikes sells nitrided titanium cassettes for campy hubs but not Shimano. Cycle Dynamics makes a nice all titanium cassette for Shimano but no nitriding. Nitriding for those who don't know is a surface treatment that increases the surface hardness to that approaching diamond. It's expensive though. I've found a place in So Cal that will do a bunch of cassettes for $600. It's basically a setup charge, the vacuum chamber they use for the process (plasma nitriding) is large enough to hold many cassettes.

I figure if we got six people to go in on the setup charge it would be worth it.

interesting !
How about Ti-nitride on chain and chain ring?

_________________
Buy it, If you like it.
Your money.
Your decission.

As I understand it, nitriding cannot be applied to Aluminum, only titanium and steel. So it could be done on chains and chainrings as long as they are titanium or steel.

I'm not sure if the nitriding would penetrade through to the inner parts of the chain without dissassembling every link. Not sure if the plasma acts like a spray or an immersion type of thing like a soak.

The drill bits you see in hardware stores that are "titanium" I believe use this same coating process.

Sounds interesting. Do we have any idea of how much better the wear is with the Nitride.

[quote="chart
As I understand it, nitriding cannot be applied to Aluminum, only titanium and steel. So it could be done on chains and chainrings as long as they are titanium or steel.

quote]

i think its possible to do it on aluminum.
For example an upper tubes of rock-shox SID race Titanium(2002) are Ti-nitride coat.

_________________
Buy it, If you like it.
Your money.
Your decission.

well I'll be... I was told by the guys at poshbikes that the reason they couldn't nitride Shimano cassettes was that the aluminum spider gets pitted. Hmmm, maybe they use a different process.

Well, that's another issue worth investigating. But right now I'm thinking only of titanium cassette cogs.

Quantifying how much extra life you'll get is difficult. Maybe someone with a poshbikes titanium cassette can chime in.

"I've found a place in So Cal that will do a bunch of cassettes for $600."

How many is a bunch? If the number is high enough you could get the cost down to where it might pay to just invest some money in cassettes and sell them. Put together a business plan and get some venture capital and then.....

Eh, not really interested in going into business, judging by the response to this post there isn't much enthusiasm for the idea.

check out kocmo from germany. Don't know who has them in the states

their site is http://www.kocmo.de

or english translation on cassettes

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... 8%26sa%3DG

im intrested in it. no we need 4 or 5 more people to bring cost down. how many can be done at a time?

I would be interested too IF anyone could report how much difference it makes in component life. Without knowing that it's too much money just to have a cool looking cassette.