Yes you read that right. I am buying an 11 speed bike but am riding 10 speed on my road bike and all of my wheel sets are 10 speed. I was wondering what I have to do to make my 11 speed bike a 10 speed? For refrence the bike I am purchasing is the 2015 Felt B14. It comes with 11 speed Ultegra front and rear deraliers and 11 speed microshift shifters. I want to move to either Sram 10 speed rival or force.
I had to read this post 3 times to understand it. To clarify:
A) You are buying an 11 speed bike equipped with Ultegra
B) You already have a 10 speed road bike.
C) You don’t like the 11 speed ultegra
D) Because of (D) you now want to get rid of the Ultegra and put on a 10S Rival or Force.
Why (C)? Ultegra 11S are MUCH BETTER than 10S Rival or Force.
Why don’t you just use both bikes independent of each other?
If you really insist of (C), then just buy a Felt B14 and get 10S components later on.
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Has the Felt been ordered yet? You could do like I did and get the 2014 B14 that comes with 10-speed Rival. The rear hub is 11-speed compatible if you ever upgrade.
This has been discussed a lot here, and user darkspeedworks has written all you need to know here:
I had to buy a 2015 b14 because I got a deal on it. I just bought 10 speed zipps and don’t want to cconvert all my wheels to 10 speed. So do I need to change my derailers? Crank? Shifters?
I had to buy a 2015 b14 because I got a deal on it. I just bought 10 speed zipps and don’t want to cconvert all my wheels to 10 speed. So do I need to change my derailers? Crank? Shifters?
Huh? Maybe I am just having a lot of brain farts this morning as I still could not understand what you are saying especially the “bought 10 speed zipps and don’t want to convert all my wheels to 10 speed.” Why are you converting your wheels to 10 speed?
Going back to what I said earlier. You now have two bikes - an 11S and a 10S. Use them independently. Nothing to convert.
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Only thing I can figure is he wants to use same race wheels on both bikes?
You’ll have to get new shifters and 10sp chain on the Felt and, most likely, a new front derailleur. The RD should work fine with 10sp shifters, however the FD is designed to work with the narrower 11sp chain so may not work well with 10sp. I am assuming you already have a 10sp cassette that you could use, so just swap that onto whichever wheelset you are going to ride and you should be good to go.
IMO - your best bet is to try and sell the 11sp Ultegra (Shifters, FD, RD, Cassette and chain) and purchase the 10sp.
You’ll have to get new shifters and 10sp chain on the Felt and, most likely, a new front derailleur. The RD should work fine with 10sp shifters, however the FD is designed to work with the narrower 11sp chain so may not work well with 10sp. I am assuming you already have a 10sp cassette that you could use, so just swap that onto whichever wheelset you are going to ride and you should be good to go.
IMO - your best bet is to try and sell the 11sp Ultegra (Shifters, FD, RD, Cassette and chain) and purchase the 10sp.
I’m not entirely sure if you are saying that an 11 speed Shimano RD will work with a 10 speed Shimano Shifter but I can tell you first-hand that it won’t.
jaretj
Yes you read that right. I am buying an 11 speed bike but am riding 10 speed on my road bike and all of my wheel sets are 10 speed. I was wondering what I have to do to make my 11 speed bike a 10 speed? For refrence the bike I am purchasing is the 2015 Felt B14. It comes with 11 speed Ultegra front and rear deraliers and 11 speed microshift shifters. I want to move to either Sram 10 speed rival or force.
Hmm, I just faced a sort-of-similar dilemma. I have a lot of ten speed everything and was buying a new bike. But I just bought a frame and built it up using blow-out deals of Shimano 10-speed DA and Ultegra. So not quite the same problem.
You should just decide which wheels you actually want to race on and convert them. They’ll still work on 10-speed bikes if you need them to, and the wheels that come with the new bike can be training wheels.
And don’t forget: pretty soon SRAM will be 11 speed too, and you may be kicking yourself for dropping some coin on switching from 11-to-10. Think long and hard about it.
Also, Ultegra 11-speed is better than SRAM. I know people get really worked up over that “debate” (a silly debate) but I really believe it’s true.
As far as I can tell from the information gathered here you have several options.
Plan 1: Pick a race set and training set of wheels and use the two bikes independently of each other. Set each up appropriately as 10s or 11s
Plan 2: Convert the 11s to 10s by replacing Cassette, Chain, FD, RD, Shifters (basically a new drivetrain)
Plan 3: Convert the training bike to 11S by replacing Cassette, Chain, FD, RD, Shifters (basically a new drivetrain)
Plan 4: Convert all Freehubs to 10/11s compatible and get spacers for your 10s cassettes. Swap out cassettes when moving wheels between bikes.
Rival has 11s now so up-converting should be the same price as downgrading on the 11s. If it’s a matter of SRAM over Shimano then sell off the Ultegra 11s and SRAM 10s Rival/Force and buy 2x Rival 11s for the bikes. I would bet that selling the two undesired sets would get you 70% of the way to the final cost of that.
Just went through this. Sell your 10 speed crap and get 11 speed stuff. 
My road bike is still 10 speed, so I just had to sell enough 10 speed wheels to finance the 11 speed upgrade. At the end of the day that’s cheaper and more logical than switching brand new components from your 111 speed.
Here’s what I would do. Leave both bikes the way they are. Upgrade the Zipps to 11 speed using a Campy 11 speed cassette and cassette body and use them on the new bike. You can easily switch the cassette body back and forth for either bike.
That should solve the problem.