Excessive cassette weight?

In the immortal words of
In the immortal words of Keith Bontrager:

“Light, Strong, Cheap. Pick any two.”

260g is not particularly heavy for a cassette, Shimano 9 speed 12-25 is only 230g.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s riders drilled everything they could (google ‘drillium’) then realised it didn’t make them any faster. A cassette is already full of holes, I’d save your energy for something more productive.

Phil H wrote:Thanks for the

Phil H wrote:

Thanks for the comments 2wheeled idiot & hoski
Really helpful to an honest query – very mature.
If you cant be helpful why bother?
I expect you are beanpoles with plenty of weight saved between the ears?
=D>

Well, you were kinda asking for it 😉 Since I’m 74-78kg riding a 18-19kg recumbent, saving 100g is rather amusing 😀

The thing is, once you’ve got past ally carriers and slimmed down steel cogs, the only way to go is ally/titanium. The cogs in the former makes more revolutions wrt chainrings so wear relatively faster, the latter’s more expensive to produce. As the expression goes, durable, light, cheap, pick any two. Cassettes are consumables, IMO for such a minimal weight difference there’s little point spending more than the kinda xt-level or even cheaper.. at some point it goes in the scrap metal bin and it’s a good way to chuck money away.

An xt cssette is of the order 260-300g depending on what you read,; and mebbe 35quid, deore is mebbe 400g and 18-20 quid..Sram kinda similar..I’d keep the change and invest it in beer !

presumably the cassette
presumably the cassette weighs the same as the cassette on your old wheels though? so you still get the wheel weight saving.

a 9-speed XT 11-32 is about 260g and you can have one for £35 or less. 9-speed road and mountain groupsets from shimano are fully compatible for rear shifting, they’re the last ones that are

http://www.merlincycles.com/s
http://www.merlincycles.com/shimano-xt-m770-9-speed-mtb-cassette-48282.html
merlin cycles 11-32 xt cassette 256g and only £32.50.
i fitted a 10 speed 11-32 xt to my giant defy works well .

I think the issue you’ll have
I think the issue you’ll have is that 11-32 road cassettes didn’t show up until fairly recently, so 9 speed dura-ace and Ultegra don’t have that range.

Then it occurred to me that 11-32 is an MTB gear range too… A Shimano XTR cassette is seriously light at 224g: http://www.merlincycles.com/shimano-xtr-m970-9-speed-mtb-cassette-48900.html. You’d probably want to check the individual gear spacings though, not sure if they would be different on an MTB cassette, might have some funny jumps between ratios?

If you want to spend even more, SRAM do a 175g one “hewn from single billet”: http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/components/sprocket-cluster-cassette/product/review-sram-x0-xg999-cassette-10-39586/

For reference, I just weighed an 11-32 Ultegra 6800 11 speed cassette and that comes in at around 290g