Shimano CASSETTE HG400 9 speed 11-32

Product Information

You may sometimes see brands refer to their cassettes as having a certain range in the form of a percentage. For mountain bikes, 12-speed cassettes are largely the default for higher-spec groupsets, paired with a single-ring chainset. For example, at the lower end of the cassette, you can have as little as a one-tooth jump between the early cogs, and still have the range at the easier end. If you were running a 7- or 8-speed system, for example, in the same range, the jumps would be bigger. You will need a long-cage derailleur if you want to use an 11-34t cassette on a road bike. Simon Bromley / Immediate Media Some people may wish to use a road bike cassette on a mountain bike or vice versa. Here, we’ll go over why you may (or may not) choose to do so, and look at the compatibility issues both options may present.

If you are specifically using a Shimano HG freehub, you need to consider how wide the cassette you are buying is. Road wheels have slightly wider freehubs than MTB ones – by 1.85mm – and 11-speed Shimano HG road cassettes are slightly wider than 8- or 9-speed ones, again by 1.85mm. SRAM introduced its XD freehub standard when it started rolling out cassettes with a 10-tooth smallest cog. It recently ported this design over to the road with XDR, which also allows the use of 10-tooth cogs, but is slightly wider than the road bike standard.If you are still using a triple crankset, you may have sufficient overall range with a road cassette, but this is a fairly specialist application these days. Although it might seem straightforward, there’s a lot of engineering that goes into a bike cassette. Shimano, for example, uses a system it calls Hyperglide, which is engineered to provide smooth shifting. Its latest cassettes have a newer system called Hyperglide+, which Shimano says reduces shifting time by up to a third relative to Hyperglide, and improves shifting performance under power, up and down the cassette. It would have been uncommon to find a cassette as large as SRAM’s Eagle 10-50 a few years ago. Alex Evans Where an 11-28 would have been considered an ‘easy’ training cassette a few short years ago, the smallest cassette available for a Shimano Dura-Ace R9200 is an 11-28. That might not sound like much but, when you consider pro riders would typically ride on 11-23 or 11-25 cassettes, it’s a sizeable difference.

On the mountain bike side, Shimano uses its Microspline freehub standard for its 12-speed Deore, SLX, XT and XTR groupsets. Unless you’re running a triple crankset, it’s unlikely you’ll want to use a road bike cassette on a mountain bike. Dave Caudery / Immediate Media Shimano’s HG freehub design was the most common option for many years. Felix Smith / Immediate Media Now that 12-speed road bike groupsets exist, cassettes can have a larger range and the jumps between each gear can be relatively small.Well, the smallest cog is a 10-tooth, and the largest cog is 52-tooth, which is 520 per cent larger than the 10-tooth cog, thus giving a 520 per cent range.

If you wanted to use an 11-34 cassette, as well as buying the relevant cassette, you would need to buy a compatible rear derailleur. In this example, it would be an Ultegra R8050-GS or 105 R7000-GS rear derailleur. The GS denotes that these are ‘medium cage’ derailleurs. The same rule applies to Shimano Di2 derailleurs.It’s important to note that this figure is only indicative of the range of gears you have on your cassette, and is not the same as working out how far you will travel with your chosen gear ratio.