Shimano Consolidates Entry- to Mid-Level Groupsets With New CUES Drivetrains
There will still be a Deore 12-speed Hyperglide+ group, and everything beneath it will be part of the CUES family. That means you can expect to see Alivio, Altus, and Acera start to fade out in new builds, although Shimano does say inventory will still be available. All CUES parts fall under the Linkglide family.
What is it?
9-speed 11-46 cassettes could prove a hit on entry-level bikes.
So, what is CUES? Well, rather disappointingly it stands for Creating Unique Experiences. The irony of this groupset supposedly aiming and trying to reduce the number of unique groupsets being somehow lost. Anyhow, it will come in several series. There will be the 11-speed U8000, which will most likely be found on high-end city and urban bikes, the 10-speed or 11-speed U6000 which will be the utilitarian mountain bike group, and the 9-speed U4000 which will be for entry-level equipment.
There will be non-series cassettes coming in relatively wide ranges - there will be nine, ten, and eleven-speed options with ranges of 11-46t, 11-48t, and 11-50 respectively. All chains across the system use 11-speed spacing, as Shimano says this actually gives a greater amount of surface area for the teeth to engage on, and trying to implement an 11-speed system on something like an 8-speed chain width would run into issues in regards to wheel spacing.
There will be non-series cassettes coming in relatively wide ranges - there will be nine, ten, and eleven-speed options with ranges of 11-46t, 11-48t, and 11-50 respectively. All chains across the system use 11-speed spacing, as Shimano says this actually gives a greater amount of surface area for the teeth to engage on, and trying to implement an 11-speed system on something like an 8-speed chain width would run into issues in regards to wheel spacing.
Shimano says that the Linkglide is the smoothest shift that can be made when compared to Hyperglide+ of the same tier. The cogs are thicker and taller with a different ramp that's claimed to make them 300% more durable. This also means that the larger jumps you'll find on the 9-speed, 11-46 tooth system won't damage or wear the cassette prematurely. Shimano also claims that thanks to the features of Linkglide this should still be smooth. If Shimano's claims hold water, this will give learners more longevity, easier shifting, and a system less prone to being damaged when being treated with little to no mechanical sympathy.
The U6000 series could be the long-lasting and relatively affordable option many riders have been looking for.
The riveted U4000 crankset and chainring...
...and the U6000 model. Both use 11 speed chains.
Does it actually make things simpler?
All the shifters use the same pull ratio, meaning that you could theoretically run an 11-speed shifter on a 9-speed cassette and just turn in the limit screw. In this instance, you'd be better off tensioning the cable in the largest gear with the ratchet two clicks into its range - not that Shimano is directly endorsing this, but it should make bike mechanics' lives a little easier.
The cassettes are non-series and house all the Linkglide-specific technology. That means that any 11-speed chain will still reap most of the same benefits. Naturally, Shimano claim that their chains will perform even better, but I think they should get some credit for being pragmatic and acknowledging the limitations of specing entry-level bikes, as well as the same problems many mountain bikers have irrespective of where they are on the food chain - getting parts in a pinch at the last minute.
These non-series cassettes feature some weight reductions compared to the 780 grams juggernaut CS-LG600 Shimano gave details on when first releasing Linkglide. They have now replaced that model with two lighter options. The CS-LG700 sheds 170 grams and the CS-LG400 which will be roughly 70 grams lighter and also cheaper than the original.
Because the Linkglide technology is in the cassette, and all the tiers use 11-speed chains, the chainrings, and cranks are all interchangeable, irrespective of what speed your cassette is. You could theoretically run the non-series 9-speed drivetrain and upgrade each piece to a higher level as you fancy should the mood take you, however with Shimano's durability claims the eventuality may not arise.
The U4000 does without the clutch you'll associate with Shimano, but they say that chain retention won't be a problem.
New Tech in Entry Level Rear Derailleur
The U8000 and U6000 systems use the clutch derailleur that you'll be familiar with. However, the U4000 9-speed system does without. It uses a stiffer spring, and Shimano claims the chain retention is on par with their 11-speed XT and SLX groupsets from several years ago. There will also be a double crankset available, shifter, and mech available, although this will be more likely to be found on commuter bikes.
Pricing
Affordability is very much at the heart of CUES, especially in the U4000 and U6000 groups.
The highest tier groupset, the U8000 is priced at under $290 USD for a shifter, chain, cassette, and rear derailleur. With a crankset, chainring and BB it will increase the price to $451. The lower groups are where the value really begins to shine through though. For a U6000 group, again without the crank, you'll be paying $213 for the 11-speed system or just $186 for the 10. Which is very reasonable for a clutch-equipped wide range, and supposedly very hard-wearing group. Even if it most likely comes at the cost of extra weight.
The entry-level 9-speed U4000 package is just $150, which is competitive and could represent a near full overhaul of a drivetrain, save for the cranks and chainring.
For comparison, an XT Linkglide system currently retails for just over $360.
There are CUES brakes but they're directed at the on-road commuter and touring sectors.
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Or e-bike builds (not giving brand names here) for 6000 EUR or CHF with SX derailleurs. I think I've sent back to Sram about 25 of them
make them 8sp 12-32 with a 36t chainring and be done with it
I feel that their low spoke count wheels from the era of Rolf hoops were also a miss. Airlines was just freakish. And I think Rapid Rise mechs are still stuck in my old shop manager’s craw.
Linked together some old chains from some Huffey bikes; took my old 3x8 and tore off two of the chain rings; my cog has teeth on it generally; and I just heavily spray WD-40 before I go and power wash off the grime when I come back. Rock solid performance and easy to find replacement parts since anything fits with enough pressure/force
I always thought Rapid rise was brilliant but the issue was they didn’t design a shifter to match that kept the up and down shifts with the standard fingers.
Dual control was basically what gave SRAM the opportunity to become a big player. So in that sense, dual control was successful.
I'm waiting for a Chinese cassette to try the sale setup with a Shimano M5100 and Sram X9 shifter.
Personally I've never found mating a SRAM shifter to a Shimano derailleur works though, so good luck with that
-Sram X5 shifter pulls 4mm of cable each click;
-M5100 rd has a 1,1:1 pull ratio, meaning 4,4mm of cage movement each click;
-9v cassette cogs are 4,35 mm apart.
The error of 0,05 x 8 = 0,4mm along the cassette *should be* negligible.
There are thousands of otherwise decent bikes out there with NX and SX drivetrains using HG free hubs.
Linkglide seems like a more appealing upgrade than buying a new driver body (or wheel) and a 12 speed setup.
The "unexciting to 'real' (and that is very tongue-in-cheek) mtbrs" comment is more a dig at the people who scoff at this release because it's not top-of-the-line cutting-edge.
People in every stage of biking, from commuters to hardcore enduro bros, will benefit from this. I'm all for it
I had a shifter fail completely (replaced under warranty)
The limit screws were hand tight on mine and required loctite I have had multiple challenges with dropped chains at the cassette and top gear "hunting".
The derailleur cannot keep up with chain growth on my pivot switchblade (per the instructions) and requires a very loose chain at top gear which is where I need chain tension the most.
All in all I think its worth the money and it doesn't self destruct like my Zee components, but its not quite where I need it to be.
All in all I would say its great for all mountain riders and I'm probably asking too much from it as I like rocky downs. In the context of this article I think the advent x is a great option and you can have confidence vs these options
I can say that the shifter cable gets shredded easily, so it's a good idea to keep an extra one handy.
I put the 8sp Advent for 20”/kids bikes on my neighbor’s daughter’s bike and it works really nicely, the shifting is super light action, better than the Shimano stuff that came on my daughter’s bike and the price is right.
Road/touring/gravel/hybrid/mnt - yes!
Adios Dynasis!
I am glad you are having a good experience, I would say overall mine is positive its just far from perfect.
I purchased direct from microshift, set up exactly to the instructions, measured chaingrowth and worked with the US mircoshift tech team to try and improve.
I will try trp next.
Surprised I am getting downvoted for providing this context. I am a big fan of Mircoshifts model, less gears, more range etc. wish the cage was a bit longer to accommodate chain growth and provide more chain tension in top gear.
Sounds like you need that wacky 3-pulley RD shimano patented this year!
Generally speaking its a great setup for the price and for mircoshifts first venture into this range.
TRP is in the box and I cannot compare it, technically it should not be considered for comparison because they are not like products in a remotely similar range. Pricing is vastly different
I am rooting for the underdog and these non shimano sram drivetrains, I particularly love the less gears more range.
Getting past Dynasis makes things easier to get creative on running STI w/ mnt derailleurs.
I have MTB rent bussines in Portugal and the problem is to maintain 12speed drivetrain in top condition... Little hit to derailleur, little rust on cable and shifting sucks...
was even thinking to swap all rear wheels because of MS hubs and to mount regular Shimano 11 speed.
This looks even better.
Less money for drivetrain more money for shred
Smallest chainring I can run is 28t without throwing off anti-squat but I would love to have a high pivot bike so I could run a ridiculously small chainring + a smaller/lighter cassette and still have good climbing gears.
I was able source the 899 cassette on sale for UNDER $200 and the shifter and rear mech were around $200 for both.
Will say the clutch on the EX derailleur seems a bit weaker than other eagle or X stuff. Dropped a chain which almost never happens. added a guide and was G2G.
HACK: you can still run 11 & 12spd chains with it since its designed around 10spd spacing
Full Linkglide cassette specs are here.
@ElijahVan: I am not the faster rider but I live in SoCal where it's pretty much grind up and coast down. I'm only in the tallest gears when riding to the trailhead.
Also, I live in a place where riding-to-the-ride largely isn’t feasible.
Hybrids, however, are absolutely not somewhere where this belongs. I don't care if it harmonizes the look of them with the rest of the design language Trek employs, it's another barrier to letting average riders inexpensively maintain their bikes, and that sucks. Hopefully other brands can sell conventional routing as an economic alternative and put this silly trend to bed.
Both MS and Shimano 10spd have clutches, are cheap, and work really well.
The gear ratios on the 11-46 Shimano cassettes had a stupid big gap at the top, and 12speed required new hubs; no thanks!
Looking good, Shimano!
"All chains across the system use 11-speed spacing..."
What is spacing when talking about a chain? Pitch? No, has to be talking about inner and outer width.
"...as Shimano says this actually gives a greater amount of surface area for the teeth to engage on,"
Okay he must be talking about inner width..
"and trying to implement an 11-speed system on something like an 8-speed chain width would run into issues in regards to wheel spacing."
Wait what? Chain width can't have anything to do with "wheel spacing", that's not even a dimension. Do you mean cassette width? Because chain width also doesn't directly affect that across 9, 10, 11... Do you mean cassette spacing (sprocket width and distance between sprockets), in that the sprockets are going to be the same distance apart regardless of speeds? That makes sense. So the cassette spacing stays the same as the number of sprockets changes, so that the shifter and derailleurs all have the same pull and conversion ratios, which means the cassette widths are different? So I guess the 9S and 10S cassettes require spacers?
Oh wait do you mean that they didn't design it around an 8 speed chain, because then you'd need 8S cassette spacing, which means you wouldn't be able to squeeze in more than 8 sprockets with an 11S mountain HG freehub body, necessitating a new hub standard? I mean, sure, but why are we even talking about this? Tesla didn't design the Model S around a diesel engine, because there's no room for a diesel fuel tank when you have to carry batteries for the electric engine...
"Shimano says that the Linkglide is the smoothest shift that can be made when compared to Hyperglide+ of the same tier."
Smoothest when compared to.. ..Wait so it's the smoothest, in comparison, so that means it's smoother than Hyperglide+? So HG+ shifts worse than Linkglide? "Linkglide is the smoothest shift that can be made"........you mean the shifting on Linkglide cassettes is the smoothest?
Okay, be honest....did you use ChatGPT?
All of CUES will be compatible with standard Shimano HG freehub that you already have.
> if you know how to properly set it up.
Any 12 speed setup is much more sensitive to btension, limits, and cable tension. This is why 11 10 or 9 speed will always be better for mountain bikes (sans XC racing) where the derailleur is subjected to a whole bunch of forces. With SRAM you get the bottom of the barrel 11 speed components that don't last. With Shimano, their 11 speed stuff is way higher quality.
If your argument is that CUES is a better system for people who don't want to take a deep dive into bike maintanence, due to the simplicity of less gears, then I completely agree. I sense that your argument more so seems to imply that 12 speed systems as a whole are tempermental compared to lesser geared systems, which makes them better.
For what it's worth, I know a lot of people who can easily set up their 12 speed systems (SRAM and Shimano) and keep them running just fine, my household included.
No, CUES with 11/10 speed is better for mountain bikes in general, not just entry level. Sram X01/XX1 is well made with higher tolerances in derailleur and better machining on the cassette, leading it to function as well as 10/11 speed, but you obviously pay the price for it.
youtu.be/LlDVpl6m7Hk
And here’s a video of the end result, you can clearly see the sram system shifts so much smoother and more importantly faster which great when you’ve only got half a crank to shift gears.
youtu.be/OR6lRHCFWhM
With that said, CUES 10/11 speed is likely better than 12 speed SRAM SX/NX, where 12 speeds and cheap production do not mix well.
Once you acheive GX/XT level 12 speed drivetrains you get a quality product that will likely perform better than a cheaply made 10/11 speed product.
2 things
1. Learn to read, because I specifically say XX1/X01 is fine, since its well made. GX and lower with cheaper materials and more flexy derailleur is subpar to Shimano 11/10 speed.
2. No, the system doesn't shift smoother. If anything it shifts just like SRAM, WITH a frayed cable nonetheless (which he has setup wrong, I can't tell what it is but the small black part is not supposed to be there).
The clutch on Shimano is adjustable in pressure, on SRAM its not. You can use a lighter setting that allows for faster shifts, or a heavier setting that has slower shifts but way better chain retention. Since he didn't even mention or tested adjusting the clutch, its pretty clear that the person making the video is non technical and is a SRAM fanboy.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the road cycling teams are on Shimano, where drivetrain actually matters quite a bit.
The key is the available margin in the indexing error of the derailleur cage side-to-side movement. Generally there will be a little play in the system from how its put together, including things like bending of metal parts. For a 12 speed system, where the margin for accurate shifting and chain not snagging is small, you need high quality manufacturing at the XX1/X01 level to minimize this for accurate shifting. When you have more margin with 11/10 speed, you don't have to build the system with as tight tolerances, but still have reliable shifting.
That being said, the derailleur will get pelted with rocks, branches, dirt, e.t.c as you ride your bike, and you will get slight misalignment stack-up over time. The common response to this is "maintain your drivetrain" which is good advice, however the 11-10 speed systems are more tolerant to this.
The other thing to mention is price. Often times you can get 2-3 10 speed cassettes for the price of one GX cassette, so per dollar, you get way better shifting quality.
Road cyclists are a joke it took them over 20 years to start using disk brakes, they’re fully stuck in the past so I’m completely no surprised that they’re still running shimano and in all fairness Shimano is a lot more invested in road cycling than they are in mid to high end mountain bikes for all I know there road components could still be great but the instagram page @thanksshimano might say differently.
>where you can clearly see the sram system shifts better
Yes...because its XX1. Which I said specifically said is fine. Man, Brexit really f*cked with your guys mental states.
Does Shimano anticipate releasing additional trickle-down CUES parts to replace the $20 derailleurs of the world (or other spares for older 3x setups) in order to overhaul their entire lineup, or is the "everything beneath it" more market-speak than definitive statement?
...and for what it's worth, I know most of those dirt-cheap components are garbage quality compared to a modern deore setup - I'm just curious about the even-lower-than-$150-price-class and aforementioned spares for my own older bikes.
And the weight! what about the weight?!
a Shimano hollowtech II SLX crank, so simple and cost effective, no pre load spacers etc and the choice of
chainrings out there, cost under £25 to keep this 10yr plus setup going some more,
10 spd chain and cassette on top of that but still.......
Farm kid careless, what ever. My girls don’t ever shift the front rings ever. Middle ring and mash! I like the wide range 9 speed idea but never tried it myself. The micro shift seems great but it’s nice to have Shimano making it too.
Actually this looks really promising in severe ways, and definitely a step forward from Shimano
I hope bike companies take such route.
Well, yeah, because narrow-wide rings do way more for retention than clutches. Clutches are for quiet. Just turn off the clutch on a modern 1x drivetrain and see if you get annoyed at the noise before you get annoyed by a dropped chain.
- Rivetted chainring? Yet another fully garbaged crank when that single ring wears out.
- Still with that 4-bolt asymetric spider? I think they could adapt Centrelock as their direct-mount chainring standard as well, and then life is easy for everyone...one crank, standard rings in almost any size you want.
- Never have been a fan of one-piece shifter/brake units. I know it'll be awhile before the shifter bonks, but it may not be awhile before any of the levers on that gets bent or broken. It's unbelievable how some people (new owners, family types, some just don't care) manage to break things just by hanging the bike wrong, moving it around the garage, running it over in the garage, or dribbling it down the highway as the new owner of a new Thule rack they've never used before. Run them separate or with Ispec-something so you can replace one without the other and have a brake lever available as a repair item.
- Not wrapping my head around the advice to leave a more-speed shifter 1 or 2 clicks into it's travel. I see new-rider issues more than I see easier wrenching.
- Name, graphics and font....c'mon Shimano.
Really need them to step up and put some pressure on SRAM.
Shimano is the only thing that can slow the arrival of 12k XO/GX bikes and 6k SX bikes.
You know what works? Numbers, like things we can count. Like an Audi A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6.
Shoutout Daily MTB Rider YouTube: youtu.be/R6dr7aDBVPQ
This news about the 21% sales drop is relevant for anyone tracking the bike market for purchases/sales or expecting big product launches this year from Shimano that will drive their sales number.