I’ve got Campy Chorus 10-speed on my main bike and need a new chain and rear cluster. With Campy parts in short supply (and freakin’ expensive when available) in my area my bike shop maven suggested putting a Shimano Dura-Ace 10-speed chain and Shimano 10-speed cluster on the bike. Said several customers of his have told him it works fine.
I’m leaning towards giving it a try, but hope to poll the ST crowd of riders and shop types to see if anyone else has tried this combination with success, now that Shimano has been producing 10-speed chains and cassettes for around a year. If workable, it would allow me to use wheels with Shimano hubs without a conversion cassette, too, so that would be the bee’s knees.
How will you mount a shimano cassette on a campy freewheel (I’m assuming the wheels for your main bike are campy)?
If your wheels are not campy splined, then you can’t use a campy cassette anyway - you must buy a conversion cassette (which costs $85, or about the same as an Ultegra 10sp cassette online).
Get a Wipperman (decidedly better than the DA chain) nickel plated chain (~$45 online) and you’re done for about $130.
For some gears it will shift fine but when you reach the outer gears on the cassette, the error starts to take effect and it will behave like a slightly miss-adjust system. Opinions vary on the subject.
Another option is to use a ShiftMate to change the cable pull of the system.
to get “good” shifting you’re going to need to re-space the cogs with different sized spacers. I think they-re in the $15-20 range, but fitting the Shimano cogs onto the Campy body is going to be a different story. I think American Classic has a “conversion” cassette for under $100 that allows you to use Shimano on Campy or vice-versa.
I last week played with a Record 10 (shifting system) and Dura Ace 10 rear wheel…about 35 miles later, no issues at all. There was a bit of chatter a time or two, nothing that my lever could not trim out. I would imagine that you would have the same result with a Shimano system and Campy wheel…
Campy is never in short supply. That is a myth - especially with cassetes and chains.
A $1,000,000 shop will do $50,000 in cassettes. Say 10% is campy… that’s still a ton of cassettes.
If your bike shop does not stock it, it is time to move on. If you’re stuck with it, drop the name “Sinclair” (a distributor) and your dealer will be able to help you for whatever you need
I went into my local shop on Tuesday…and said get me - Campy Der’s, Cogs, cables, chains, and shifters…shop ordered them from Quality…picked them up yeaterday. No wait on Campy at all.
Thanks for the suggestion, but perhaps you assume that since this is an English-language forum I’m in your English-speaking country (probably the US of A, right?), or wherever Sinclair is located. But I am not, and the short supply of Campy is real here, as the distributor does not like to import parts beyond full groupsets.
I know all about the conversion cassettes (didn’t I mention them in my post?) and have used the American Classic one with no troubles, but am hoping to use a Shimano cluster and chain as that way I can continue to use my Shimano wheelsets and also make my next wheel purchases Shimano-compatible as well. And I don’t have to mail order an 85-dollar item that costs 50 dollars for shipping.
I’m going to give it a try. If Record 10-ti (sorry, carbon) tried this combo I guess it’s not too blasphemous.
Yes, I was assuming that. Sorry. Typical american, eh?
In the sense that only Yanks post to borderless Internet forums and refer to “this country” all the time, yeah that’s true. But you’re forgiven, for everywhere else on earth “outside, it’s America.”
Anyway, back to the thread at hand. I’m going to go ahead and try this intermarriage of Campy and Shimano 10-speed. Hopefully I can report back soon with my findings.
Tried it last night for a short ride and spun pedals in a trainer…Campy 10 seemed to work with no issues on a Dura Ace 10 bike. This was with bar ends, not STI levers.