The plastic spoke protector next to the cassette on my road bike broke and is spinning independently and making a clicking noise. Do I need it? I'm thinking of cutting it off and going without one. Is that recommended?

It actually saves 5 watts at 25 mph. I'd leave it.

edit: Take it off when you take pictures of your bike.

Take a pair of utility scissors to it and never look back.

Yeah, don't do that.

Take it to a bike shop and have them pull the cassette to remove the disk. They'll probably only charge you $10, maybe $0 if you buy something.

It's never a good idea to take a pair of shears to any part of your bike.

There very easy to take off, you just need a cassette wrench and nut.

These are good tools to own and knowing how to remove and replace your cassette is a very worthwhile skill. This is a good intro project into cycling mechanics 101.

in my experience, once you hit infinite watts it should disintegrate off.

Don't you guys mean a chain whip?

Already broken, use pliers and rip it apart and off. There's no need to involve a shop mechanic. But the cassette tool is still good to have for when you really need it.

Chain whip, freewheel wrench, there's a few ways to skin this cat:

https://www.parktool.com/blog/repair-...ewheel-removal

I might replace it unless you are supremely confident in your ability to maintain a derailleur and hanger. I thought I knew better but then one day I was pedaling uphill and heard the crunch of the chain ripping through my spokes.

These days, I'd rather put up with some taunting...

Buy a cassette lockring tool and a chainwhip, they're good things to own anyways

They say that if you can't take it off without breaking it, you should just leave it on. The premise is that if you have the mechanical knowledge to remove the cassette, you probably also have the knowledge to maintain the RD well enough to keep it out of the spokes; and if you don't, you don't.

^ This and then do the job correctly. /thread

truth

It's horrible I've always taken them off even before I know what they were for or how to maintain rd. I've has them get old and brake and jam up the rd and cassette so I just always removed them after that. I've never broken any spokes so no worries.
Never could figure out how people broke spokes beyond the idiot I saw stick a stick in a wheel that was spinning.

Burn, baby. Burn.

Disco inferno?

Take that Dork Disk off. It was pretty close to the first thing I did when I got my CAAD. Never missed it. It just looks stupid on there.

Sorry I forgot that to "some", Dork Disc is an integral part of a very delicate apparatus and if you don't take the hardest way out to remove it your bike might explode right in front of a church when kids are getting off Sunday school.

if you hit infinite watts while on a trainer that is facing backwards on a moving horizontal escalator the spoke protector turns into a golden chalice.

I removed mine and saved 2g for free.

This.

While I'm sure your original suggestion may work for you and many others, the problem with it, as written, is that it assumes a person: 1. Has shears strong enough to cut through thick plastic; 2. Has the dexterity to manipulate such heavy shears without nicking his cassette or snipping a spoke.

There's also the risk that someone like the OP could take your advice literally and actually try to use a pair of scissors to haphazardly have a go at accomplishing this task.

To the OP: I'm not suggesting that you're incapable, or that UCIMBZ wasn't genuinely trying to be helpful. I'm just trying to make the point that this kind of advice strikes me as ill-conceived, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Our team bikes this year came with the disks installed. The Cat 1s and 2s were the last guys to take them off. And that was when they changed gearing for racing. The simply didn't really give a rat's ass about them. They're really not a big deal one way or the other honestly. But there's some odd stigma about them.