TESTED: Shimano XT 11-46 cassette

By Lachlan McKillop

Is it just me or is all I keep hearing about with gear ranges? There is a war brewing between the red and blue camps and this war is ultimately going to make our lives easier which is nice. If there is one thing that I don’t mind a new standard coming in on it is cassettes. The public have been screaming for bigger ratios from Shimano, which is very apparent with many other componentry companies making upgrade cogs for Shimano XT. When the new XT groupset launched it came with the options of 11-40 and 11-42, hardly what everyone wanted. But this year they launched the new 11-46 cassette, giving riders a very solid range of years to choose from. I had the pleasure of testing out this new cluster and really see what it performed like.

The biggest battle for manufacturers when creating a large range cassette is the shifting quality. The bigger the gap between cogs the less smooth the cassette is going to shift and thus the more the rider will be annoyed when shifting through to make it up a climb. I had a solid two weeks on the cassette and in that time I went through everything from dry dust to mud and wet sand. At no point did the shifting feel impaired even at the higher end of the cassette. The shifting ramps designed by Shimano are really well place and allow the cassette to shift crisply the whole way through.

For the time of the test I had the cassette matched with a 32 front ring. I never ran out of gear options going up the climbs, though I did find the ratios for going down to be a a limit. Without anything smaller then a 11 tooth it was a little limiting on the longer descents you could go for a slightly larger front ring which would help.

Shimano have really put a lot of thought into this cassette, the shifting is excellent and was faultless all test. The only downside is that there isn’t the same range as some of the other options that are out there.

From: Shimano Australia

RRP: See your Shimano dealer