Last night, in preparation for some bigger hillier rides (that’s not hard seeing as I live in Leicestershire), I swapped the chain and cassette on the hardtail for one of those new enormo cassettes.

Took off a “normal” 10 speed XT cassette and chain and put on a Sunrace 42T cassette and a new XT chain.

Chain length is right, defo not too short.
I screwed the B adjustment screw in on my long cage XT mech so it more than clears the cassette.
Absolute Black Oval Chainring is used but has no visible wear.

All goes together nicely, shifting is fine and feels fine in the work stand but pedaling under load it does feel and sound a bit rough.
Swapped the chainring to a Blackspire 30T NW round ring (which is a bit more worn) and it does feel less rough.

Anyone had this?

I reckon it’ll probably wear in together and get quieter but I have a new chainring on the way just in case.

Excepting that I’ve found generally narrow wide rings to be slightly noisier than a conventional ring, especially when new, I have one comment to make.

Chain line.

On my FS with standard 73mm BB shell and 135mm rear axle spacing, I’ve just pushed my chainring inboard by 3.8mm to get something approaching normality.

Obviously, once it’s seen a few miles and started wearing in, it should all feel a bit nicer.

If it doesn’t improve, I found the One Up Rad R replacement mech cage made a colossal difference with a Sunrace 11-40 and a Zee rear mech, screwing the B-screw right in gives you more clearance on the bigger cogs, but also, I think reduces chain wrap. Bt anyway, the Rad R worked really well for me, albeit with a shorter caged rear mech as a start point.

Yes…just had same issue after my regular chain replacement. 18 month old Blackspire NW – great on stand but real noisy under load. Replaced with new Superstar NW and all good again.

Had a good innings from the Blackspire snaggletooth running 1×10 and then 1×11 and would buy again.