Hey everyone. What is the maximum number of cogs on a cassette for Exage mountain hubs?

My '88 Exage mtn hubs came with a uniglide 6 cassette. I swapped in a hyperglide body and mounted a 7 cassette. Not sure how you can finagle 8 though.

Swapping to 7 is easy, just get a donor hub and take the axle set, except the nondrive side cone, and pop the 7spd cassette body and axle into your hub shell.

I think you can do 8 the same way but I’m not positive

I thought Exage was quintessentially seven speed cassette, I didn’t even know there were six speed versions

There were more than a few Exage groups from different years. Shimano dug the name.

1988-1989 Shimano Exage Mountain employed a 6 speed, Uniglide freehub.
1989 Shimano Exage Mountain LX employed a 7 speed, Hyperglide freehub..

You can even put a ten-speed cassette on any pre-compact-drive 7s Hyperglide hubs. A Hyperglide freehub body will have internal threads at it's right end.

The trick is to use a smaller 11t lockring, which nests into the recess on a 12, 13 or 14t small cog (in order to achieve sufficient ~2 turns of threaded lockring engagement).

Thanks all! It has a six, but there are significant threads showing. Wondering what’s off there..

What doe you mean by "signifcant threads"? The Uniglide version of Shimano freehubs had external threads at the outboard end, to accommodate the thread-on outer cog. When they went to Hyperglide, all the cogs were splined and held on by a threaded lockring that engaged internal threads on the freehub body. During the transition era some had both the internal and external threads, with the ability to use either Uniglide or Hyperglide cassette sprockets.

Thats the one. It is thread-splined at the end. I think someone was running 6 speed, and missing a cog and the lock ring.

It could also be a 7 speed Uniglide. Pics?

There were indeed. Velobase lists 11 different Exage groupsets: 300EX, 400EX, 500EX, 300LX, 500LX, Sport, Sport LX, Action, Motion, Mountain, and Trail. And their listing is incomplete - they don't list 400LX.

Nor Exage ES and I'm sure there's another

Dang, I knew there were "a few" different versions of Exage, but 11 or 12 or more? 😲 That's mighty pee-quliar, ain't it? 🤔😉

Deore and 600 would like to have a word with you.

i think you are right. So just missing the seventh cog...

Limit must be 7 speed then?

Yup, that's a Uni hub. As [MENTION=185430]dddd[/MENTION] notes, a hyperglide hub body can be customized to take more.

I might have to move it (the full group) on to another home. Just no bike at the moment for it.

Uniglide cassettes go for silly high money. I've sold my share of them. Most but not all Uniglide freehubs can be swapped with a hyperglide free hub. I get my replacement HG free hubs from trashed MTB wheels.

Agreed that's a Uniglide freehub.There doesn't appear to be enough space left for the another sprocket. Well, maybe the sprocket but not the associated spacer. The spacing between the two smallest sprockets appears narrower than between the others. I suspect that it's missing the narrow spacer behind the small sprocket.

7speed casettes build up slightly wider than 6 speed cassettes. A 6 speed Uniglide cassette is about 2mm narrower than a 7 speed Uniglide cassette. So, you may get a bit of overhang which could cause some spacing issues to the drive side stays. This is easily solved with a drive side axle spacer and re-centring the the axle. It may also mean that thread engagement is reduced, which could result in stripping the sprocket or freehub threads, though this shouldn't be an issue unless you're a strong rider.

A better solution is to mount 7 speed Hyperglide sprochets and a Uniglide outer sprocket. The wide Hyperglide spline can be narrowed to fit the Uniglide freehub body. The Hyperglide sprockets provide improved shifting. particularly under heavy load and low rpm.

The final solution is to just replace the Uniglide body with a 7 speed Hyperglide body. Still, you'll likely need a axle spacer.

Yes, it gets much more complicated than that. First, there's the argument whether Sport LX and Mountain LX should even be considered as Exage groups. Sport LX and Mountain LX do not actually state "Exage" on the components or in the literature, unlike the other Exage groups. However, they belong to the same number series as the Exage groups. It appears that they were intended as low mid-range goups, intended to bridge the price gap between the entry level Exage groups and their existing mid-range raod and ATB groups.



Circa 1990 there were also two Exage groups for city bicycles, Exage Active City and Exage Comfortable City.
Member clubman mentioned Exage ES, which was a circa 1993 group intended for city/hybrid bicycles. The other Exage hybrid group that slipped his mind was the lower Exage LT group.


Finally, there's the possibility of foreign market Exage groups that were never marketed in North America. For instance, I was recently surprised to find that Positron survived into at least the very late 1980s in foreign markets, in the form of Light Action Positron. One questions why Shimano continued with Positron after they released SIS. Regardless, Positron appears to have been much more successful in some foreign markets, with more variants that we saw in North America. The same could be true of Exage.

Another dose of wonderful bike history as usual, T-Mar. Thanks for the education.

Great suggestions. Might have to think on whether to keep the full group.

These are labeled Exage Mountain so likely an earlier group?




Weinmann concave 26” rims

The main group...

The great cantis and the useless Ubrake for most frames.

That freehub body is Hyperglide only, It post dates the Exage Mountain group. Either the previous owner replaced the wheels or the freehub body to get more sprockets and Hyperglide.. Based on the rims, I suspect the latter but we should be able tell which case is correct via the hub date codes, Shimano use to stamp the date code onto the barrel of the hub shell but around this time had transitioned to one of the hub flanges.

Besides the many Exage groups, there's also some overlap with some models. My Exage 500 CX rear derailleur is nearly identical to my Deore LX long cage RD. Even the model numbers differ only by a minor increment. And there are small cosmetic differences. Both are 7-speed for index systems, but with Deore 8-speed bar-end shifters set to friction mode both rear derailleurs will cover the 8-speed cassette I used to replace the original 7-speed on my early 1990s Univega.