Your cassette runs …24…28…32 – so you lose 2.5 low gears not 6?

At the top end you lose a gear too.

guess the question is how often do you use those gears? I’ve run 1×9 for 5 years and occasionally find myself missing a lower (on long climbs) gear and a higher one (on road descents, very rarely otherwise), but not very often.

By going to 1×10, with an 11-36 cassette and a 32t front ring, from a 9-speed 11-34t cassette with 22/36 up front, you effectively loose the the ratios given by the 26/30/34 rear with 22t front and the 11 rear with 36 front.

So you’d be loosing four ratios in total – one from the top of the range and the three smallest gears.

I can’t believe anyone reading STW would miss a gear larger than 32t front by 11t rear (75.6 inches).

Technically the industry is not playing catch up with Hope they are actually having a race into the past.

That Hope integrated cassette and freehub is called a – wait for it – freewheel. Yes, that’s right, Hope have invested something that we all stopped using 20 years ago!

There must be a differnece between this design and the old freewheel design right? The flaw with the old design was that the axle bearings were not placed at the end of the axle making the axles weaker. How does this design get around that or is Hope just playing it’s ‘our products are shite but everyone loves us as we can do no wrong’ card?

stilltortoise – nothing personal!

Hope and most cassette freehubs (bar Shitmano [(c)-TJ] and anything using their freehubs) work in the same way as screw-on hubs in respect of bearing placement – the axle is supported at the NDS and just under the DS flange or thereabouts*. Difference being they use muckle thick alu axles…which still break, only less.

*campag put the NDS bearing as close to the axle end as possible, which, must increase stress on the DS bearing, presumably not to any meaterial extent.

I’m on 36 front and 11 to 34 9spd rear. That gives me a dead straight chain line in the gear I use most, 36/17, which is the same as I run on my singlespeed.

Has no one yet pointed out that 11-34 9spd (and 8spd) cassettes have been available for ages so this 11/36 ten speed malarky is hardly revolutionary, just more expensive to replace when it wears out.