I’ve have some new to me Niner wheels which came with Shimano and XD freehubs – I specifically want to run a SRAM cassette. The XD one appears unused, and now I can see why. Although it says XD only on it, I can’t get my SRAM cassette to engage with the splines in order to tighten up and the driver has a shoulder on the outer face which looks very like pics of XDR drivers. The cassette fits fine on another XD driver – which doesn’t have the outer shoulder.

I can buy another cassette but the web seems to suggest I need a 1.85mm spacer behind it to fit. I can’t see how that will work because I can’t get the cassette far enough onto the driver to engage the splines in the first place.

Anyone any experience of this problem – and which 10-42 cassette I need that will fit?

I’m sure XDRis supposed to be identical to XD, just with that slightly longer splined section. Do you have a picture?

I’ll sort one out. I’ve been looking at other pics of XD and I think that’s what it is, but it’s definitely a different shape to my other XD driver – and seems to be about 1.85mm longer… Pics on the web seem to vary too. Think I might stick with Shimano!

XDR should be exactly the same as XD, but slightly wider to allow 12spd road cassettes, which are wider than MTB 12 speed cassettes, which then require a spacer on XDR.

Yeah, looked at that. Doesn’t really help me though. Think I just need to try again and look at the way the splines engage. I hadn’t realised it was like Shimano, with a narrow spline at one position.

I’ve recently put a sram xd Cassette on an xdr freehub using the 1.8m took a couple of mins to line up the splines correctly and didn’t really feel like it had engaged before I started tightening but actually went on fine.

I’ve just got some Onyx Vesper hubs. They come with the xdr freehub and a 1.85mm spacer. This spacer is held in place during shipping with an o-ring.

Seems some folks were struggling to fit cassettes because they hadn’t noticed the o-ring or realised it was just there to hold the spacer.

Check there isn’t something on the freehub that doesn’t need to be there.