-
what’s your opinion of that scenario?
I went through that some time ago, and concluded that the clamping force and the smaller clutch plate diameter meant that you couldn't rely on friction to resist every foreseeable torque loading.
Clearly the case, as we've all seen notched splines on freehub rotors 🙂
-
that scenario
Shimano designs a set of splines clearly meant for steel or at least titanium, and every joker with a CNC mill be like, 'Hey, I can sell you a lighter hub than Shimano, and what's more, it has a super loud freewheel, which is good, for mysterious reasons' and folks thought that was a great deal.
Come 7800, Shimano briefly had a go at abandoning their brilliant freehub design to try everyone else's half-arsed fully floating style with the DS axle bearing close to the centre of the hub, with an aluminium cassette body, they doubled the height of the splines - kind of necessary for using such a soft metal in that spot.
It was a terrible idea, and Shimano realised it. Breaking compatibility like that wasn't necessary, as a few mobs doing ally HG splines with steel strips have shown, and folks who like to have their bearings where they belong were relieved to see the FH-7800 was the lone departure from Shimano's stressed member cassette body design.
If you have any wheels with the chewable splines, you don't need to reach for the chewable antacid - a simple workaround is to use a billet cassette. A somewhat spendy workaround, but you can find Chinese ones relatively cheap.
I have a wheelset with an ally cassette body... I even went and bought a used pair of WH-9000 carbon tubulars just for the 21h hub, which I was going to swap out, until I saw how much worse the flange spacing was (is there a better term when your straight-pull hubs have no flanges?)...
Spoke to the bloke who designed the hubs (they are bloody lovely for cartridge bearing), and he was like, the splines should last better than most ally ones because the cassette body is 3D-forged. So maybe it's possible to make ally almost hard enough for the job... but I wouldn't know, because I threw a billet cassette on there before long.
You are reading a single comment by @M_V and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
gbj_tester
Kimmo
@M_V
Interesting!
Was it ‘on here’ that there was discussion of whether cassette/freehub bodies worked similarly, meaning that steel spline protectors on ali freehub bodies were redundant? If not, what’s your opinion of that scenario?