degan

When I got the wheelset there was a little play from a loose nut on the rear wheel so I removed the cassette to examine it and found this. A gouge on every spindle edge and the tops of every spindle are gouged to the point of not being square anymore. I don't think the play in the hub had much to do with it, I think it was mostly the steel Shimano cassette on the soft aluminum cassette hub. I'm thinking about filing down any high spots and giving it a go with a less destructive cassette. Should I just replace it? It's one of those hub bodies that sort of just pop out so replacing would be easy, but if I want a steel cassette hub to prevent this from happening in the future I may be out of luck. Also it's going on a bike that is most likely going to be sold. If it were staying with me I would use it as is and just keep the cassette hub issue in mind, but it's not. Writing this out has just about guilted me into just replacing it. What are your thoughts/what would you do?

am8117

It's not a problem until it becomes hard to take the next cassette off or put it on. It might be good to check availability of that freehub nowadays because few years later it might become more economical to relace the whole rim with new hub just because there's no freehub to order and not even the same hub made anymore.

rccardr 

I would not bother to replace that. Perfectly serviceable.
Clearly not as issued, but it will work just fine for another 10K miles.

CliffordK

Make sure you get your cassette tight!!! There isn't some slop, like needing a spacer is there?

The high-end cassettes (Ultegra, Dura Ace, and I think some SRAM) use a common carrier on the larger sprockets. That will cause less wear for those sprockets. But, it won't do anything for the smaller sprockets.

Shimano put a deep spline on their 7800 aluminum freehubs, but that concept never really took off, and it still wasn't damage proof. Shimano mainly went to either steel or titanium freehubs.

cxwrench

File it down and use it til it's a huge pain to get the cogs off.

TPL

Not 'spindles' ....they are called 'splines'

degan

More info: it's a matching DT Swiss wheelset so I'd prefer not to just toss the whole wheel, though I hadn't thought of cassette hub availability as an issue until now. The cassette itself was tight, but the locknuts that holds the cassette hub in place was loose, so the whole cassette hub was able to move a little. Also I'm not sure why I kept saying spindles, especially since I've gone through a bunch of threads and just read the word spines like 100 times. I think I'm leaning towards finding the right cassette and moving on, though I might stop by the co-op and see what they have just in case I can grab one cheap.

jgwilliams

My experience with Mavic and Fulcrum is that the same freehub tends to be used across a lot of different wheels so parts remain easily available. Never had a DT Swiss wheel, more's the shame, but I think the same is likely to apply there.

sweeks

They're not "spines" either! >>>> SPLINES

degan

Oof, autocorrect. Let me make sure: spines. PHEW. Yep, I definitely types the L and it took it out for me. I guess my phone assumes this is just another of my many spine conversations.

sweeks

I suspected as much! The cause of 99% of recent misunderstandings, to say nothing of humorous typos, on this pale blue dot.
Your avatar is admirable.