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Bear with me please...treated my son to a new bike as his old voodoo was falling apart.. got him a cube analog with sram 12 speed gearing.. 32 chain ring.. and 11-51 T cassette.
However for the riding he does, mainly road and a bit of gravel that he rides around Cardiff he claims that he's only using the smallest 3 rings on the cassette, everything else is far too "spinning like a hamster wheel" for his liking.
The cassette is the lowest in the sram range so its hyperglidesplined.. so would a 12 speed road shimano cassette, 11- 34 / 11- 36 work? I've been trawling the web but cant find anything about the actual spacing between cassette rings to confirm this.. I know the 11 speed cassettes were inter changeable... plus he's 130 miles away so cant exactly pop over to check.
Cheers in advance..
He’ll still only use the 3 smallest sprockets. Will the bike take a bigger chain ring?
Alternative approach, get him some more draggy tyres.
Why does he need more gears/gearing ? As long as it's not an issue, even 1 is fine as long as it does the job.
MTB mechs are very much designed around wide ratio cassettes these days, fitting a smaller cassette will likely lead to fairly poor shifting as the upper jockey wheel will sit a long way from the cassette in the larger sprockets. Bigger chain ring is definitely the best bet!
only worry about it if he is actually spinning out the hardest gear... in all honesty keeping an MTB 15-20mph on the road (where i find these start to spin out) is bloody hard work.. if he can spin out regularly, buy a cheap chainring (ebay/amazon)
let him wear the cassette out