Spaghetti Legs 

I have the above kit, came as a throw in with a groupset I bought. It is a set of spacers to convert a Shimano cassette for use with Campy shifters. My understanding is it works pretty well but not sure how to use it. It consists of 5 spacers, so I’m not sure how this works, even considering that the small cog has a spacer built in. Also, in my limited Shimano experience, every 8 speed cassette I’ve seen only has 2 loose cogs. Do you tap out the rivets on the carrier?

Campy 8 speed, as awesome as it is, is pretty much limited to a max 26 tooth cog, so this would be a nice way to modify with one of those 11-30 cassettes. Any advice appreciated.

jamesdak 

Hmmmm...I've come across info on these while looking for spacers to redo Campy 8 speed cassettes on modern Campy wheels.

If I remember correctly you do need cogs that are not on carriers and have to drill out the rivets.

Another option could be SRAM 8 Speed cassettes. A lot of those have threaded "screw's" holding them together. An allen wrench fits to unscrew them. I've easily taken those apart to build custom cogsets.

jamesdak 

Sheldon's spacing chart

This should help figure out how to sort it all out if needed.

Spaghetti Legs 

Thanks. I'd wondered if there was variable spacing, like on Campy 10, but the chart confirms, as best as I can see, that there isn't.

dddd

Campy 10 doesn't have variable cog spacing any more than Shimano's, where perhaps the smallest cog is set out a few thousandths for a more-reliable last shift.

The spacers themselves (as part of an upscale cassette using several individual carriers) have wildly-varying thickness, but this is only a function of the carrier's machined dimensions (does not reflect cog spacing differences directly).

I've seen it in writing, online, that Campagnolo has "variable cog spacing", but which does not make this true.
An oft-read page that has existed for years at Art's Cyclery site/blog mentions this as such, claiming that cable travel varies wildly from 2.5mm to 3.5mm ("For example, a Campagnolo 10-speed shifter pulls 2.5mm of cable five times, 3mm twice and 3.5mm twice."), but the same page also contains a few typos about SRAM's Exact Actuation cable travel, so beware of the source of any such info!

The Sheldonbrown.com site also mentions that Campy 10s and 11s cassettes have variable cog spacing, but with no actual dimensions referred to other than cog thickness and total width. Again I don't know where this idea came from, especially since numerous anecdotal reports claim that Campagnolo and Shimano 11s cog spacing are in fact compatible with one another.

If there is variable cog spacing hiding in Campag's cassettes, it must be extremely subtle!

Where you WILL find variable cog spacing is with Shimano's SIS-7, where the spacer between 2nd and 3rd smallest cogs is a thicker 3.3mm, and with even older Suntour 7s and Ultra-6 (where the largest cogs are spaced visibly more closely than the smaller ones).

The quoted page at Art's Cyclery is getting harder to read (as the text has been "backgrounded" so you can no longer copy any of it), but is today still largely visible at https://blog.artscyclery.com/science-...compatibility/

SJX426 

Spaghetti Legs Bought one of these kits here and installed it. Works great!
P1010339, on Flickr

dddd

Looks cool, too!

dddd

On my Wheels Mfg 8s conversion kit, one of the two included steel Shimano cogs shows machining on it's built-on spacer, suggesting that it may have originated from 7s cassette pieces.

jamesdak 

Yeah the first couple of times I cleaned Campy 10 cassettes I had to go online to find out which spacer went where since they were different.

Spaghetti Legs 

Thats great! I found the sales thread when you bought it doing a search for info. Was your cassette single cogs or did you have to take it apart?

Spaghetti Legs 

Here’s a nice summary.

https://branfordbike.com/new-page-1

I don’t know about 11s, but I’ve also heard the spacing is the same and Campy /Shimano are interchangeable.

Kuromori

Campagnolo cassettes had an effective 2.55mm around the 6th cog in addition to mostly 2.4mm spacers. It is subtle, but it also does exist. The biggest and smallest cog might also be spacers differently. Most index shifters also vary cable pull for each gear too simply because derailers, noninclusive of SRAM with the pulley arm compensator, are not linear. If you look at a Shimano indexing ring for a bar end/DT shifter even on higher numbers of speeds the spacing is noticeably not even.

dddd

Once again, cog-to-cog spacing is very different than cog spacer thicknesses, but you are correct that the cable pull is not exactly linear across the range of the shifter's detents.

I was however challenging what the Art's Cyclery page stated as to supposed, large, step-function changes in cable pull distance, as these do not exist.

And, as 10 and 11-speed cassettes relied on the development of narrower chains, any inconsistency in actual center-to-center cog spacing distance is highly problematic in terms of achieving a narrow-enough cassette. They find a minimum acceptable cog spacing for their new chain, and are then of course loathe to add spacing distance to any pair of adjacent cogs.

Campagnolo seemed to want to be first to market with 10-speed, so their first effort used a wider version of chain, the best they could yet achieve, and of course thus relying on uniformly minimal cog spacing distances to achieve fitting the new 10s cassette on existing hubs. A later version chain (just a few tenths of a mm narower) was substituted as soon as it was ready, but the existing cog spacing did not change at this time and all Campag 10s cassettes used and still use the same original 10s spacing.

Kuromori

I'm talking about spacers between flat cogs. This is easily checked referencing late-00's Campagnolo parts catalogs when 10s had trickled down to Centaur/Veloce.

dddd

Interesting that Campagnolo would use thicker (apparently by .006", less than even an eighth of a turn of the barrel adjuster) cogs in the middle of the cassette, when the only previous examples of asymmetric cog spacing only seemed to emphasize a small degree of difference between the extremes of the cog stack, i.e thicker spacers at the small end and thinner ones between the largest cogs.
Were these different spacers color-coded in some way, to facilitate (re-)assembly?
When Suntour was doing asymmetric freewheel cog spacing, there were charts that a freewheel-builder had to refer to, and when Shimano made/makes 7s cassettes with asymmetric spacing the one thicker spacer is identified by it's darker color. What sort of spacer identification was Campag using on these loose-cog 10s cassettes?

I've always been frustrated with the difficulty of obtaining technical document info on non-current Italian parts, as the internet seems somehow scrubbed of any such data! Like trying to link a brand of handlebar to a clamping diameter, just try figuring out which Italian brand was 25.8mm vs. 26mm or trying to ID certain Campagnolo parts and date of manufacture, good luck!

Kuromori

The thicker spacer is yellow. It could be that they found they just needed a touch extra chain clearance around there for some reason, I don't really know. Just pointing out that although very subtle, the variable spacing is a thing and didn't come from nowhere. There is a bit more variable spacing on 11+ speeds supposedly and that different cassettes are actually spaced slightly differently towards the small end of the cassette if I remember correctly (per Graeme, head Campy UK tech-rep, who is a very technical person with access to all the parts and info, not just a sales rep or PR person).

Dfrost 

Shimano and SRAM 7- and 8-speed cassettes are generally pretty easy to disassemble. Some use an external hex bolt that connects the bigger five or six cogs, some use a very small Allen wrench. Shimano’s black TL-FC20 tool, generally used to hold chainring nuts, includes the correct hex wrench for the former. Cheaper cassettes might need to have the bolts drilled out, but that’s been rare IME. Note that the cogs themselves from 7 or 8-speeds including SRAM are the same thickness.

I've been using these Wheels Mfg kits for years with great results. Probably the most important component is the taller lock ring with more thread length, since the resulting cassette is slightly taller than a Shimano-spaced 8-speed. I’ve always thought, but never verified, that Shimano 7-speed (brown) spacers might work instead of the red ones. Miche cassettes often have a taller lock ring.

Matched cassette cogs don’t seem to make any shifting difference, except when using single tooth steps, but even that isn’t all that significant, at least with my Sachs New Success setups with the Shimano-like floating upper pulley.

BTW, the built-in spacing for the outer/smallest cog doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve even used a 9-speed outer if I needed the 8-speed (as all mine are) cassette to be a tiny bit thinner for dropout clearance.

Spaghetti Legs 

That’s great info, thanks Dfrost . Only thing is those kits aren’t made any more (at least not on the wheels mfg website.

dddd

Shimano's 8s cogs were made slightly thinner vs. their 7s cogs, but I've mixed them without problems in a few cases, using appropriate spacers of course.

The small end cog of the cassette is indexed by the hi-limit screw, not by the cable, so this spacer can be whatever thickness as long as the chain isn't too wide and as long as the cable feed can reach it (this last shift lets out extra cable vs. all of the other position's incremental movements).

SRAM 7 and 8s cogs are I believe the same thickness, only the spacers change when going from 7s to 8s. This was a practical consideration made long after Shimano's earlier series of cassette developments were long in the past!
SRAM's inexpensive loose-cog 7 and 8s cassettes also weigh much less than Shimano's, since the sprocket design appears to be more of a copy of Shimano's 9s-era lighter-weight designs.

I still have a new Wheels Mfg 8s Campy conversion kits, a very early version that I bought at the dealer show. These weren't cheap!
American Classic followed up by offering their Giang-produced "Accelerator" conversion cassettes some time later.

Quoting from above: "...Matched cassette cogs don’t seem to make any shifting difference, except when using single tooth steps, but even that isn’t all that significant, at least with my Sachs New Success setups with the Shimano-like floating upper pulley..."
--The matching of cogs within a specific cassette is crucial to maintaining non-slip drive while shifting, and is a crucial safety element on any bike using handlebar-mounted shift levers intended to be operated while pedaling hard from off of the saddle. For shifting while seated, it is not as crucial, since slippage won't likely cause a potential loss of control.

Today's 11s derailers do not use floating pulleys, as the chain and cassette developments preclude the need for it it seems. I sometimes replaced 10s-era floating top pulleys with non-floating pulleys so as to correct sluggish shifting conditions just past the middle of the cassette. Mostly the floating pulley does two things, 1) it allows the chain to gently find it's way to the gates along the HG-style cog's teeth without being forced into engagement with the wrong tooth, and 2) it allows a degree of cable misadjustment without steady-state clattering noise eminating from the chain/sprocket.

dddd

It does make sense that the cogs could be spaced slightly "tighter" at the big end of the cassette, Suntour did this and I believe it's because the top pulley runs closer to the larger cogs (and so allows more precise control of the chain there).
And, at the other end of the cassette, some narrowing of the spacing there might be permitted by the concave profile of today's racing cassettes, as the pulley also reaches closer to the smallest cogs.

The non-linear swing of the parallelogram is traditionally almost entirely countered by the sort of "opposite" swing of the actuating arm about the cable-exit point. But with increased cassette widths, no doubt the actuation ratio goes further out of the linear range near the extremities of the cassette, though it's nothing that can't be compensated for by the shifter's indexing points and/or by SRAM's ramp/cam.

Interesting about those different-colored spacers. I don't recall seeing them, maybe because most of the 10s Campag cassettes on bikes that I've worked on seem to have carriers of some sort.

SJX426 

Took it apart. DA block.
Although the lock ring worked, it was only able to grab about one thread. I didn't feel comfortable with that so bought one that was a little deeper, getting more than three threads of engagement.

RobbieTunes

2 questions:
1-Are those 8sp Campy on Shimano spacer kits still available?
2-Do they work? I had one, and it worked great, but it could have been an accident.

easyupbug 

I have kept an eye out for a couple years now, ebay, forums, etc., for Wheels Mfg CAMP-SH8 Conversion Spacer Kits as in my experience they work flawlessly, unfortunately others must agree as they are now getting to be hens teeth. There is a shop on ebay selling them NOS for at a little premium over the original $30, https://www.ebay.com/itm/283714404905. I am not a "bling" type guy but the red looks OK on my red CIOCC.

edit-I should add his listing says "last one"!

RobbieTunes

Got it. Thanks 😊

RobbieTunes

Does anyone know how the American Classic 10sp Campagnolo to Shimano cassettes worked?