Well will you look at that...

I am a hugely enthusiastic amateur weight weenie. Of the many tiers of weight weeniedom (outlined at some point), I'd say I'm around Tier 3. So obviously when it comes time to put gears on, I won't settle for any old Saint shiiiet. Let's take a look at the rear wheel.

I own a Hope Pro II SingleSpeed/Trials. Great little hub, equally spaced flanges for a dishless build (unless you own a Specialized, but that's another story altogether), double the engagement points of the Standard Pro II, and a steel freehub body. Very low weight too, if you care, which I definitely do. You can even cram up to six 9-speed cogs on, should you want to run gears, which I definitely do. So..

Hope Pro II weight: 295g
Hope Pro II weight with steel freehub body: ~370g
Hope Pro II SingleSpeed/Trials weight: 375g, confirmed
SRAM PG-950 cassette weight: 450g, confirmed

Now a pound clean for a cassette is quite a fucking bit, needless to say. And I still need to circumcize it, since it won't fit. So let's circumcize...


So I knock THREE gears off of a NINE-speed cassette, and I lose more than half of the weight right there. I mean that's reason enough to do this modification. 290g is 290g, no matter what hub. As a side note, if I had gotten the normal Pro II hub and not done this modification, the supposed 75g saving would have translated to a 225g gain, a clean half-pound. Another way of looking at that is realizing that the normal Pro 2 weighs 290g. I just dropped the weight of a complete hub.

So now I have a 11-23 spread (mated to a 33t up front) that weighs 160g, on a singlespeed hub. Any questions?