How to Install a Mountain Bike Gear Cassette

Video Transcript

We've removed our rear cassette. You can see because it's in my hand. So, now I want you to take a look at the hub. So this bike's been ridden pretty hard, and you can see that there's some dust and everything on the cassette body. There's also some indentations from where the cogs were digging in--that's why it's a little bit more difficult for me to get it off. The first thing for me to do is just take my rag and wipe everything off. Just inspect it, make sure it's good. You can see sort of what the ratchet mechanism does. As I move this back and forth you can hear it click. And I also want you to notice that the spacing isn't consistent between all of these. For most of them there's a small gap, and then right here you can see there's a larger gap, and that's the only place on the entire cassette that we have that larger gap. So that's a keyway. That ensures that you put each cog on correctly. Because, as you can see, each one of these cogs has it's own keyway and everything like that, and on most cassettes, it's indicated by some sort of marking--where the large cog is. On this specific cassette--this is from a company called Shram, it's a model PG 970--the widest cog is where the tooth number is written. So, what I'll do is I'll find that widest keyway--I'll find my widest array of cogs, and it's as simple as pushing everything right back on. Couldn't be much more simple than that. Now I find the largest keyway on this final 12-tooth cog, which as you can see is serrated to mesh up with the lock ring. And, I place it on, make sure it's seated, I stick my lock ring on, grab my special lock ring tool, and torque it up by hand, and now I use my wrench on the lock ring to finally torque everything up. And this is one of those things where there's a proper torque specification, and if you go too hard you're going to break things, and if you don't torque it enough, your cassette's going to come loose and rattle and really harm you?re shifting performance. So, it's marked here--that's forty Newton meters, which basically means it's not that hard, but it's a real firm sort of setup. So, now you've removed and reinstalled a cassette. So, there you go.

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