KCNC 11-23 Sc/Al/Ti 10-speed cassette – £131.99

For some people, no price is too high for the lightest weight components. Let’s face it; if you’ve bulked at the price tag up above, you’ve probably headed straight into the forum to vent your frustration. But now you’ve gone, we can focus on just how special this cassette is.

Let’s rewind a bit. KCNC is the name for some of the highest performance and lightest weight components available aftermarket. Products range from headsets, skewers, hubs, cranks, brake callipers, in fact, just about any component that will fit in KCNC’s CNC machine. It’s a family run business and their attention to detail and lust for meticulous engineering and high level of finishing is evident to see. It’s all impressive stuff.

The cassette is the most interesting of all its products though. Take a stock 10-speed cassette and you’ll realise there’s quite a heft of weight tied up in those sprockets attached to the wheel, and so it’s a prime candidate for sticking on a low fat diet. But we demand a lot from the humble cassette, for it should provide exemplary shifting performance under even the highest of loads.

Tackling the weight front, KCNC have used a combination of exotic materials to drive down the weight. The cassette in the picture, a Shimano/SRAM compatible 11-23 weighs 103g which, when compared to a Dura-Ace of same ratio, is some 60g less. It even compares well to SRAM’s Red cassette, which gets under 160g and costs about the same as the KCNC. This has been achieved with machining the 11 and 12 sprockets from 6/4 titanium, Scandium alloy for the 13, 14, 15 and 16, and 7075 hard anodised alloy for the remaining 17, 19, 21 and 23 cogs. The lockring itself, made from aluminium, saves a good few grammes.

On the scales then, the KCNC cassette is just about the lightest available. In use, it’s similarly impressive. A selection of the teeth are ‘shaped’ so as to encourage the chain to move swiftly on its short journey between gears, but I’d hesitate in describing the shifting to be quite as precise or slick as the Shimano Ultegra cassette it replaced on the test bike. Not disappointing, but just ever so slightly less crisp on some gear changes. In the end though, the weight savings far outweigh any discernible lack of performance.