Morning folks,
I’ve probably gone a bit far in without fully researching and now in need of a bit of help.
Wife bought me an Elite Zumo for my birthday and I’m stuck on what cassette to get.
The bike I have and want to use only has a 6 speed cassette on it.
Would a 6 speed cassette work on the Zumo and possibly need spacers or would I need to look at a different bike.
Much appreciated any guidance that can be given!
Danny
reading the specs on the Elite website it seems 9 speed is the minimum it would take.
Honestly should have checked there first!
Mind not completely functioning! House move chaos!
That’s what I’m here for 
There can also be a problem with the rear hub width, 6-speed road bikes mostly had 126 mm whereas at least everything 8-speed and above as well as all direct drive trainers are 130 mm or more.
If you want to experiment, you could get a 9-speed cassette, throw away the three largest cogs and add extra spacers of about 1 mm each, or get some plastic tubing big enough to fit snugly around the freehub and cut some wider spacers from it, or something.
On the other hand, if you have downtube shifters without indexing, you could just get a 9-speed chain to go with the 9-speed cassette and see if you can get that to work just like that. (Shifting a 9-speed cassette without indexing is rather finicky, though.) You may have to replace the front chainrings with thinner ones as well.
Thank you for the response Anna, very informative!
I think experimentation is going to be needed!
As long as I can get something going for the meantime to get myself properly going again then I’ll upgrade the bike itself to get the full usage of the gears
nah, perfect excuse for a new bike
Dont think I’d get that pass the wife just yet with what I’ve spent on the house!
…and if you just want to get started, use ERG mode and all you need is a single cog in the back that works. The main issue with the wider 6-speed chain is that it rubs against or even hangs on to the neighboring cogs that are closer to each other in a 9-speed cassette, and you can get around that easily by swapping the cogs right next to the target cog with the spacers behind them to create more space. So say you pick the 15T cog, you would have (S for spacer) 12-S-13-14-S-S-15-S-S-16-17- instead of 12-S-13-S-14-S-15-S-16-S-17-.
Do remember that you need an extra ~2 mm spacer behind the 9sp cassette in any case, one of those should have been supplied with your trainer.
Bit of an update on this… Also just realised I have managed to set up 2 accounts on Zwift - Go Me! lol
Set everything up on Saturday and had a quick blast… Way I went was a SRAM PG950 9 Speed… Something cheap and cheerful to have a test with… Works reasonably well… I don’t have access to all gears… But I’ve been able to get a fair range easy enough.
Had a semi proper ride this evening… Well technically a pathetic ride… but being massively unfit and overweight it wasn’t the worst… Had to up the Terrain Realism / Difficulty slider to full as it seemed the effort I was putting in wasn’t really coming across in the stats on screen.
I think an actual roadbike on it will happen once I get the fitness levels up and the weight down… but certainly something I’m gonna stick with…