How manly I am!

Armed with only a cassette lockring tool, an oil distributor remover chain bit for a car and a couple of parts from a socket set, I managed to remove an old Shimano cassette and replace it with a new one.

Although that may all sound terribly straightforward and simple to a normal person, I was sure it wouldn't be to me. Imagine my amazement when I discovered the physical act of changing over the actual cassettes is as easy as it should be (or was this time anyway). Thankfully, it seems impossible to get the sprockets in the wrong position as there is a kind of key groove on the freehub body and this means the sprockets can only go on one way. Super!

Something I didn't realise about Shimano cassettes is they do have some individual sprockets and spacers, rather than being one big solid block of cogs. I had been told Campagnolo cassettes (if that's the correct term for Campagnolo's version of the sprocket cluster at the rear) are made up of individual cogs ie. if you have a nine speed cassette, it's made up of nine cogs, eight spacers and a lockring. I had thought Shimano's cassettes consisted of a solid block with just one free cog and the lockring ie. a nine speed Shimano cassette would have had eight cogs all together in one block, no spacers, one little cog and a lockring. Well, I thought wrong! On the cassette I took off (and the cassette I put on) there seemed to be a block of five gears all together and then the other four were free cogs with their appropriate spacers. Oh, and there was a lockring of course. It's a fairly mundane thing to be mentioning but I'm nerdy enough to have been interested by it.

Now I've just to replace the chain (which should be easy enough as it's a SRAM chain with a Powerlink, so I don't even have to worry too much about rivets once I've got the old chain off) and get frustrated when I fiddle about with the derailleur, can't get it to work properly and end up taking it into a shop anyway.

Still, I'll continue feeling all macho and manly. I even had a bit of greasy oily dirt on my hands for about half a minute. I'll be smoking a pipe next. You don't get much more manly than that. Well, I guess it depends on the pipe but that's another matter altogether.

By the way, sorry about the crappy blurriness of my photo in this post. I'm a shaky nervous little man indeed. As you might guess, it's a photograph of my new cassette. Strangely, it looks a bit rusty in the photo but, thankfully, that's not the case in real life. It looks lovely and new and clean and must never ever be used.