Mountain Bike Cassette Buying Guide

The ultimate guide to buying a mountain bike the bikeexchange team august 24 2016.

Mountain bike cassette buying guide. The range of gears on your cassette combined with the size and number of your front chainrings gives you your bike s gear ratio or gearing. Our guide will cover the best mountain bike cassettes on the market for 8 11 speed bikes. The frame influences a bike s weight strength longevity ride quality and price. Cassettes are sold in speeds so a shimano 11 speed cassette will have 11 sprockets with teeth.

But if you have a more compact crankset say 50 34 you ll be good having a 11 23 cassette. A bicycle cassette is the cluster of sprockets located on the rear hub of your bike slotting onto a freehub body and held firmly in place with a threaded cassette lockring. For example if your bike has a standard double 53 39 crankset you can have slightly low gearing 12 27t even if you ride in a hilly vicinity. Some more expensive models have lighter aluminum frames as a result of the manufacturer expending more dollars and effort in the selection of materials tubing design and the manufacturing process.

Buying a new cassette can be confusing. Bikes that will tackle a wide variety of terrain on and off road require a wide variety of gears while professional race time trial bikes require a narrower range and smoother jumps between gears. Find out everything you need to know in our cassette buying guide. So in this guide we ll give you some points that can help you choose the right mountain bike especially if you re doing it for the very first time.

It has an even larger cassette range on the 1x option with a 10 42 cassette while the downhill version has a 7 speed 11 25 cassette for faster and smoother gear transitions when riding at full speed. In the end you ll find it easy to pick the right model and you won t even spend a lot of time on it. Aluminum alloy is the most commonly used material for mountain bike frames.