Carbon Drive

Gates Corporation

About this app

Gates Carbon Drive is the high-tech belt drive for bicycles, motorcycles, & scooters. This app measures belt tension sonically. Just pluck your belt like a guitar string and use the microphone on your phone to read the vibration frequency. Compare your bicycle belt’s frequency to the included chart to see if you need to adjust the tension. For scooter/motorcycle tension recommendations, compare to your vehicle owner’s manual.

Other available features for bicycles:

Interested in key parameters of your bicycle belt drive like speed ratio or center distance? Want to know what belt lengths or sprocket sizes will fit your bicycle? What about comparing one bike to another to tweak your ratio perfectly? With our calculator, you can stay on top of the perfect setup for your drive.

- Find key parameters of your drive such as speed ratio and center distance.
- Change belt length or sprocket sizes to better suit your riding needs.

Ratings and reviews

It seems like a decent app until you actually try to use it. It would not pick up most of my plucks, even when I tried using a smooth allen key to protect my finger and plucked hard enough to make the whole bike vibrate. I took in a bedroom to avoid even refrigerator compressor noise. Also tried with two different phone models. It would capture about one in six tries and the results were usually around 26 or in the high 70s.

Completely useless app. Frequencies are all over the place using the exact same position and finger and strength. Closing and opening the app and changing literally nothing about the bike and you can count on getting wildly different results. I wouldn't rely on this app to tune anything. Also whoever's idea it was to kill the app instantly in the background so you have to find and open it again and watch the dumb video that automatically should never develop another app again.

On a s10e, fully quiet garage, microphone next to the belt.. i got wildy different results to the point of being unusable. From 20hz to 110hz, it seemed to matter more how i pluck the belt than anything else. Not sure who this is useful for. Sometimes i got maybe the same results but for the same time i got varying consistent other sets of data. This doesn't help me at all to even find a ballpark figure for my belt tension.

What’s new

Bug Fixes