masi61

As I often do in the spring, each training ride has me chasing down various clicks, clunks & rattles.

My Dura Ace 7800 2x10 road bike is almost completely sorted. My bottom bracket (DA9100) & my DA 7800 cranks are installed well. My chainrings are greased lightly where they contact the spider and the chainring bolts are greased.

The Dura Ace 7700 rear hub has no play, the freehub is tight and quiet and spins freely with next to no damage to the splines.

The rear hub is 28 hole and laced 3x to a Mavic Open Pro 28 hole rim with DT Swiss butted spokes and aluminum spoke nipples.

My rear cassette is a SRAM PG-1070 of unknown age. It came with my bike when I bought it used off of a guy who wanted to keep his fancier wheels so he put a functional set on to make the sale.

​​​​​​Here is today’s training ride noise: a tick, tick sound that occurs while pedaling, recurring in a group of two or 3 faint ticks at a time. This sound is markedly more prevalent at the beginning of the ride, only to become less frequent and more random as the ride progresses. If it occurs more during standing climbing, it is only to a slight extent - not the type of complaining that loose bb’s or chainrings do during out of the saddle climbing. I do weigh between 190 & 200# BTW. The ticking sound does not happen while coasting.

So, with all this background given, my current hypothesis or next thing to check is the cassette. I plan to swap in a new Ultegra 6600 (or 6700) 12/25 cassette and lockring to see if the old PG1070 is the noisy culprit.

Have you ever known a SRAM cassette (or any other brand) to start making mystery noises?

I did put a light coating of grease on my freehub splines and do torque my lockring to just shy of 40n/m with my Harbor Freight torque wrench.

The noise seems to emanate from the rear wheel BTW. I realize noises thought to be coming from one source often emanate from another source.

Juan el Boricua

Although it might sound dumb or odd, have you checked the quick release's tightness? Also, are your pedals one piece body or caged? The latter ones can sometimes make "noises". Have not much experience with cassettes, but I had a Shimano cs-hg51-8 that would "clunk" when powering on it; it had a smidget of play corrected with an aluminum shim between the gear cluster and lockring. Good luck!

masi61

Thanks for the reply. I will try tightening the quick releases tighter and see if that does the trick. My pedals are "cup and cone" design. The Dura Ace ones I suspect need more frequent adjustment than the equivalent Utlegra or 105 versions which use caged, sealed bearings from what I can tell.

masi61

Update: I did tighten up my quick releases but this was not the source of the sound. The sound appears to have originated from my Wipperman quick link installed upside down. I have made this mistake before. As I get older, I seem to have a short memory of installations that are done wrong. I tend to make the same mistake at least twice before I wise up.

Juan el Boricua

Glad that the "mistery" has been solved. Happy ridin'!