Silver Shimano Ltd Ed 10 Spd group

[Ben Miller]

Shimano releasing a silver-ish Cues groupset is exploding all over my bike media feed. Here is the Radavist's reporting on it

The only portion of interest to me is the 10 spd mechanical shifters and rear derailleur. (FYI, Radavist left out the mechanical option in their reporting, but it's on the Shimano website) I guess maybe the silver rear hub too? Though it's only in a centerlock disc version as far as I can tell. 

But overall I think it's pretty underwhelming. I would have jumped on this a decade ago, but in those intervening 10+ years I answered the question of "How do I do a 10 spd silver dropbar mechanical setup?" several different ways. But it's not even a completely silver RD (though they did do the harder to modify upper in silver, so that's a plus. It'd be fairly straight forward to modify the cage to be silver I suspect.) And only 10 spd mechanical? Would've been nice to see an 11 spd that could handle 11-50 cassette. 

Maybe I'll get one for my wive's Dropbar Platy. I do think the silver Cues shifters would look better on it than the black Microshift R9's that I put on there... But I also just put it on there so not keen on immediately replacing it. And I don't know much about the Cues system overall, does it have the same pull ratio as older 10 spd or less Shimano? I guess Russ probably has a video somewhere explaining it.... 

Anyways, would love to hear others thoughts. Might be perfect for new Roadini owners???

[Ben Miller]

I should've added "gravel/MTB-style" to "How do I do a 10 spd silver dropbar mechanical setup?" Obviously Shimano had silver road groupsets in 10 spd, but if you wanted a wide range cassette you were own your own making it work for dropbars...

Digging into Shimano's website a bit more, it appears that the mechanical special ed. silver will be limited only to 1x10. They're offering the left "dual-control" lever in silver, but do have the left lever as a brake only. Of course, you could make it a 2x10 with a Barcon or DT shifter. 

Also, although the marketing copy has the Cues group coming with a 11-48 cassette, both Shimano and the Radavist have the RD-U6000 being able to handle a 50T cassette. 

So I guess a silver 1x10 with a 11-50 cassette would be interesting, but not something I'd put on any of my Rivs. Though its pretty close to 1x11 11-51 setup I have on my Romancer. Again, maybe if this existed 10 years ago I would have gone that route, but seems underwhelming in 2025.