When the joys of owning a lightweight wheel set go sour because you can not remove your cassette from your aluminum free hub body, it isn’t a pretty sight. Many a mechanic has “lost his/her religion” dealing with a cassette that has dug into an aluminum cassette body. Finally, short of always using a Shimano cassette with aluminum cog carriers, somebody has done something about this issue.

Editors Note: The image is distorted because it is a photograph of a catalog page. It serves to illustrate the subject at hand.

American Classic’s designer, Bill Shook figured out how to graft in a piece of steel onto an aluminum cassette body to prevent the dreaded “digging in” of individual steel cassette cogs. This feature is found on all aluminum American Classic freehub bodies for 2009. The steel is “dovetailed” into the load bearing edge of the spline and should make removal of cassettes as easy as it is on steel freehub bodies, only without the added weight of a traditional steel freehub.

We like the idea and it strikes us as one of those, “Why didn’t somebody think of this before” type of innovations.