Cleaning the cassette of a bicycle is an essential maintenance task that helps improve the performance and lifespan of your bike's drivetrain components.
By doing regular maintenance you will save money and keep your bicycle running smoothly.

I do regular maintenance of my road bicycle. I clean the chain, the cassette and the sprockets. The interval depends on the weather conditions and the number of kilometers I made.

I have been quite busy lately, so I didn't take the time to clean my bicycle properly. And you could clearly tell that by the state of my rear cassette.

The rear gears collect quite a bit of grease over time which makes the gears sticky and causes mud and sand to stick to them. This makes both your gears as your chain wear out faster.

The small sprockets of my derailler even look worse...

With regular cleaning I use an old dishwashing brush and some degreaser to clean my gears, but every now and then I completely take the gears apart to do some deep cleaning. And since I have an extra long weekend because it's easter, I decided to do so.

Tools

You do need some tools to remove your cassette. At first you need to remove your wheel. I have a quick lock, so this is very easily done without any tools. But for removing the casette you need two tools;
A cassette lockring tool and a chain whip. First you put the lockring into the cassette and then you apply the chain whip over one of the gears. You need to do this because else the gears will keep on turning.

When the cassette comes off be sure to remove it as a whole. The cassette exists of multiple blades and spacers in between.
After removing the cassette I cleaned the freehub which was all sandy.

I've put the cassette on an old cloth and started cleaning them one by one. I started with the largest. This way I could place them back on the freehub in the right order.

As you can see in the photo below the grease clutters up in between the gears. You don't notice this when you keep the cassette on your bicycle.
I scrape the excessive grease off and use a regular dishwashing brush with some degreaser to make it shiny again.

It's quite a labour intensive job, but the results are great. Here you can see the result when I have cleaned a few of the gears.

It took me about an hour, but the result is worth it. It looks almost brand new!

Don't forget to clean your chain as well when you're finished or else your cassette will be greasy again soon.

I hope you enjoyed this bicycle maintenance blog.

FriendlyMoose

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Cleaning the cassette of my road bicycle thoroughly