01/13/2026
For the past year we had accepted cord damage by the metal beads as inevitable. No matter how smooth we ground the bead it would occur.
We tried different tools for grinding the beads smooth and the best was the pink dremel abrasive stones. First step was removing the inner burr and the second step was creating a new fillet (curved section) at each side of the hole. It was time consuming and difficult to get consistent results by hand. And it would still fray the cord with perfectly smooth beads, the higher the tension the faster it happened.
I chalked it up to soft cord on hard metal, I couldn't change the bead material as it was needed for balance. So I tried changing the cord material to kevlar and dyneema, effectively the strongest cord material available. It cut them even faster than nylon. It seems the nylon was more resistant to abrasion.
The insert idea hit me but the thought of gluing inserts in didn't sit well. Eventually we realized what if we left the inner burr and made the insert TPU. The cord would ride on soft rubber-like TPU and once the TPU squeezed past the burr it would be held in place without glue. A captured bushing like on your cars control arms. Took a bit of tuning to get the size right and it's been working perfectly!
Your cord should now be just as durable as the chetki beads 🥳🤓
All newly assembled Krivos will have the bead inserts and a few separate bead sets will be available this Friday in case you'd like to update your current sets.
