HalfEmpty43

I recently purchased some Mavic Open Pro's with Campagnolo Record hubs on ebay to replace the stock wheels my 2010 Specialized Allez Steel came with. I thought a cheap upgrade to the wheels on this bike would be a good idea, as they stock ones seemed heavy and of a somewhat low quality.

My problem is that I'm not sure my Shimano cassette will fit onto the hub body of the Campagnolo hub. (Actually I'm fairly certain it won't based on other posts to these forums.) This is what I'm running on the Specialized now:

CASSETTE Shimano HG-50, 8-speed, 12-25t
CHAIN KMC Z-51
CRANKSET Shimano 2300

The wheels/hubs I bought are Mavic Open Pro's with 8 speed Campagnolo hubs. My question is this:

What is the cheapest and or best way to make this work? Buy an adapter? Buy a new hub body? Buy a new cassette?

Thanks in advance for your help!!!

Ryan

HillRider

Two problems:

1. Shimano and Campagnolo cassettes will not fit on each other's hubs and the freehub bodies don't interchange either. The work-around is to get an aftermarket cassette splined to fit one but spaced to fit the other.

2. Shimano 8-speed cassettes are obsolete but will fit on most 8/9/10-speed newer Shimano hubs. Campy 8-speed is both obsolete and an orphan. It is both hard to find and expensive. Campy 9 and 10-speed cassettes will not fit their own 8-speed hubs.

Recommendation: Put the wheels back on E-bay and get wheels with Shimano hubs or Shimano compatible hubs.

Al1943

They should be easy enough to re-sell. There are folks out there looking for Campy 8-speed equipment, since it has become rare.

Al

HalfEmpty43

Thanks for the info, sounds like a plan!

Kimmo 

Also, stay away from Campy hubs in the first place; their cassette body/hub design is simply awful.

(Unless they completely revised the principle with later ones, haven't sussed em out...)


Campag hub: pointlessly complex, doesn't really include main advantage of cassette hub...


Shimano hub: elegant, clever, strong. Drive-side axle bearing where it belongs. (It's inside the flange on Campag!)

If you need Campag gear spacing at some point, just make the bike work with Shimano spacing FTW.

Jeff Wills

The way I would do it would be to replace the rear hub with a Shimano 105. This is much cheaper than a Campy cassette body that accepts Shimano cassettes:
https://www.cambriabike.com/shopexd.asp?id=18146
but it requires you rebuild the rear wheel with the new hub. It might still end up cheaper if you had a shop rebuild the wheel.

operator

You ought to stop posting nonsense on this forum.

That exact campy freehub you depict has a catridge bearing on the driveside *precisely* where it is on a shimano freehub that you so helpfully point out. Those campy freehubs are simple to overhaul when the pawls are contaminated, replacement parts are readily available. Once a shimano FH starts going all you can do is flush it out with lubricant, otherwise it's a toss.



You've clearly never seen a campy rear wheel let alone worked on one.

mechBgon

I think Kimmo's point is that the bearing that actually supports the axle in the hub shell is waaaaay inboard (the ones in the cassette body just let the cassette body coast, serving the role of the zillions of tiny little balls in a Shimano cassette body). That said, I've never seen a Campy freehub with a broken axle, so hey, it does its job.

Getting back to the main issue, replacing the hub with a 105 sounds good, but Tiagra's an even better value at $45 (whereas 105 is $100), and is basically the same hub. That could be an idea.

HalfEmpty43

So there is an adapter... Do you have any experience with this? Is it reliable? Thanks.

HalfEmpty43

That sounds cheap, but then I'm dropping the wheel off to the LBS for a rebuild, and I live in San Francisco, and bike repairs aren't cheap. I'm wondering if the $100 out the door adapter isn't a better deal.

operator

1) The axle is oversized
2) There are 2 sets of bearings in the hub AND as depicted above

davidad

The bearings in the freehub body do not support the axle. The axle is oversized because of this. It's no more than a fancy freewheel.
https://draco.acs.uci.edu/rbfaq/FAQ/8f.4.html

HillRider

That's a pretty good summary of the current Campy design but, as noted, with it's oversize axle Campy hubs are very reliable and do not suffer the broken axles that plagued other wider freewheel hubs. So despite an "inferior" design, they do work well.

Shimano patented the integral, bolt-on freehub body with it's outboard drive-side bearings and effectively prevented Campy from using that design so they had to come up with a work-around. I'm sure Shimano's patent has expired by now but Campy is NEVER going to copy a Shimano design.

As an aside, Campy seem to be getting out of the hub business. The only hubs they sell as a separate component are Record and they have dropped all of their other individual hub lines.

DArthurBrown

+1

Homebrew01

If you rebuild the wheel, I'll buy the Campy rear hub so I can build up an extra rear wheel.

HalfEmpty43

I ended up asking him to relist, and he obliged. So I'll never actually receive the hub. It should be on ebay shortly though! Good luck.

Thanks to all for your help.

operator

Yes it does. Your own link says so. The axle is both supported at the exact same location as on a shimano hub. How old is that post anyways? And how is it that the there is a weak spot on the campy design where there is not on a shimano hub?

**** that ascii art ****.

DaveSSS 

While it is true that the bearings that support the bike's weight are far inboard on a Campy hub, the fact is that it works quite well. The majority (perhaps all) other brands have this type of design too. Brandt's analysis would be of significance if Campy hubs suffered from axle breakage, but they don't, so it's merely a fact that the design creates a bending moment where the bearing supports the axle. In the days when all axles were 10mm threaded steel, this was significant, but with oversized axles that are not threaded, it creates no problem. The axle is even made of aluminum and still does not suffer failures.

Campy redesigned their hub in 1999 and there has never been a need for revisions to this design since that time. I've never read of a broken axle or premature bearing failure in 10 years of reading several bike forums, daily. The new Campy hubs have always been lighter than Shimano and still are.

There is nothing more complex about a Campy hub. It's very simple to take apart and overhaul.

The downside to Shimano's design is it forces the use of a shallow spline pattern, only suitable to be made of steel or Ti. If those shallow splines are made of aluminum to reduce weight, early failure of the splines is just about guaranteed.

Someone has forgotten Shimano's failed attempt at a redesign of the DA hub that is similiar to Campy's 1999 design. That was done around 2005-6 and only lasted for two years. That 7800 hub had more inboard bearings and deeper splines (10 speed only) made of aluminum. That hub was still heavier than Campy's 1999 design. I've never read any explanation for abandoning the deep-splined aluminum cassette body, but it was dropped around 2007 in favor of the 7850 hub that returned to the original design with outboard bearings, but used Ti for the cassette body. That helped to reduce the weight and retain durability of the shallow splines.

https://techdocs.shimano.com/media/te...9830608915.pdf

https://techdocs.shimano.com/media/te...9830648615.pdf

Compare the price of a Record hub to a DA hub (apples to apples). Campy is a lot cheaper and still lighter.

Campy still makes lots of hubs, but they are now mostly in prebuilt wheels. There's undoubtedly a lot more money to be made selling fancy prebuilt wheels for 2-3 times the price of 32 hole handbuilt wheels.

HillRider

Yes, and when I wrote that; "......Campy seems to be getting out of the hub business", I qualified it by also saying they only sell a single hub model as a separate component. At least Shimano does still sell several model lines of hubs as individual components, not just as preassembled (and overpriced) wheel sets.

DaveSSS 

^^^^

I agree completely.