- SunTour VGT rear derailleur
- Shimano Titlist front derailleur
- Huret shift levers (similar to Simplex retrofriction )
- Stronglight 93 crankset and chainrings
- SunTour Pro Compe freewheel
- Sedis “sedicolor” chain (gold, to match the freewheel!)
- Huret Jubilee rear derailleur
- Campagnolo Super Record front derailleur
- Simplex retrofriction (“teardrop “) levers
- Campagnolo Super Record crankset and chainrings
- Maillard 700 freewheel
- Regina chain
So what do those two lists have in common? Each of them comprised the drivetrain on one of my bikes. The first ran on an iteration of my Peugeot PX-10 when I repurposed it as a touring bike. The second graced the Colnago Arabesque I rode for much of my inglorious racing career!
One thing you’ll notice is that neither set was composed entirely of parts from the same company. Until the mid 1980s, that was the norm, as no component manufacturer—not even Shimano or Campagnolo—offered a truly complete “gruppo”: Neither company’s lines included chains, and Campagnolo didn’t offer freewheels.
Another reason why most were casseroles , so to speak, rather than purées is that, for the most part, one firm’s derailleurs could be used with another’s shift levers, freewheels, chainrings and chains. It also didn’t matter if you switched from, say, a six- to a seven-speed freewheel: As long as your derailleurs could handle the range (smallest to largest cogs) and the total gear difference (the combined range of your front chainrings and rear sprockets), it didn’t matter that the other parts weren’t from the same maker.
That all changed 40 years ago, when Shimano introduced SIS: the system with shifters that “clicked.” It
worked extremely well—as long as your freewheel (or cassette) cogs, chain, derailleurs, shifters and cables were all Shimano SIS. (Many of us soon discovered that Sedisport chains worked as well as, and lasted longer than, Shimano’s offerings.) By the end of the decade, nearly all new bikes had SIS or its variants, two of which I’ll mention. “If it doesn’t click, it won’t sell,” became a bike industry mantra.
Seemingly in a panic, Campagnolo and SunTour offered their own “click shift” systems. (SunTour actually made one in 1969. It reportedly worked well, but the still-relatively-small derailleur-equipped bike market wasn’t ready for it.) Both failed—Campagnolo’s Syncro system was panned as “Stinkro”—for essentially the same reason. While Shimano designed an integrated system, it seemed that Campagnolo and SunTour simply made indexed levers. The “clicks” didn’t always mesh with the gear change because they were the calibrated to the distance between the cogs.
Campagnolo’s Syncro wasn’t produced for very long and seems to have found popularity mainly among collectors. “Campy” was able to redeem itself during the ‘90’s, when it made an integrated system (with Ergo levers) that worked well. SunTour, on the other hand, never recovered from its failed system (and, to be fair, other missteps). Its reputation was made worse because bike-makers like Schwinn used their old stocks of French cables and chains that didn’t play nice with SunTour’s click shift.
SunTour’s fate is a particularly sad irony when you consider that a generation of cyclists like me could replace a malfunctioning Huret Allvit, Simplex Prestige or Campagnolo Valentino or Gran Turismo—or an ailing Atom or Regina freewheel—with something from SunTour without re-doing the rest of the bike.
Part of the reason why that was possible was “friction “ shifting, as Eben Weiss points out in his latest Outside article. He cites that compatibility as the reason why, after decades of using indexed shifting and a brief fling with electronic changers, he’s converting all of his bikes to friction shifting.
I may do the same. It wouldn’t be difficult, really.Of my seven bikes, five have derailleurs. (The other two include a fixed-gear and single-speed.) Two of the five shift with Simplex retrofriction levers. The other three—Dee-Lilah (my Mercian Vincitore Special), La-Vande (King of Mercia) and Vera (Miss Mercian mixte) have Dura-Ace 9-speed downtube levers. I’m using them in indexed mode but they can be converted to friction levers simply with a turn of the adjuster ring. I would do that, of course, if I were to use 8- or 10-speed cassettes instead of the 9s I’m currently running.
Great article. I think Superbe Pro 5200/5300 was probably the greatest friction derailleur ever made, and it's sort of bittersweet that it was the culmination of two decades of SunTour's innovative engineering, but was immediately sidelined by Dura Ace 7400 one year later. I think what also led to Shimano's domination through SIS, was that Shimano had spent the previous decade before Dura Ace 7400 dropped on the world, working with a number of teams in the pro-peloton who they had wooed into using the earliest incarnations of Dura Ace components. Shimano's decision in 1974 that they would enter the world of European racing and go head to head with Campagnolo, I think is what really spelled the end for the rest of the tradition bike industry. Shimano waged a schmooze campaign that played everything right in its decade long game. Shimano decided that Dura Ace would be a race only group set that would not have a touring version, (no long cage derailleur or triple crank until 1997!), signaling to racers that they were serious and deferential to their sense of prestige, seriousness, and tradition in the cycling world. Also Shimano built a reputation with the racers by shadowing the teams that used Dura Ace components with field engineers who took direct feed back on every little thing from the racers and mechanics themselves after every race for ten seasons before 1984's launch of SIS. This gave Shimano credibility in Europe after awhile, and also allowed them the real world lab space to refine the integration of every single component in their evolving basic drive train system design.
ReplyDeleteSunTour had no desire to be a part of European cycling lore or to be Campagnolo of the east, deciding its identity was the company that delivered quality engineering, durability, dependability and superior functionality for value prices to the customer. Ironically, SunTour's decision to not shadow Shimano on getting into pro European racing may have been the seed for where it would eventually go wrong and SunTour would eventual find itself no longer the innovator and playing catch up for the rest of its existence as a company. I don't think 7400 would've been the revolution that it was, if Shimano and SunTour in its own way, hadn't paced the cycling world for years before hand. If Shimano had just dropped 7400 without the years of involvement in pro-racing, and building relationships/reputation through field development of its parts, SIS would've died on the vine just like the earlier attempts at indexed systems, no matter how well it worked.
Danny—Tnank you for yoiur very insightful comment. It’s interesting that you mention the relationships Shimano developed with European pro teams as it developed the 7400 series. The company did essentially the same thing with the then-nascent mountain bike scene in Northern California and New England during the early and mid-80s. Given what you have described, I can see how that relationship led to the development of the first Deore ensemble.
ReplyDeleteI think the SunTour Superbe parts you mentioned may be the finest ever produced I definitely miss SunTour!
Thanks! I think both Shimano and SunTour were very astute in jumping into developing touring and mountain bike components early. Both companies recognized a gap from traditional European companies, who thought ATBs were going to be a fad. SunTour and Shimano recognized an opening in the American market, that Campagnolo disdained with getting into the California mountain bike scene in the late 70s and early 80s.
DeleteI miss SunTour too. Though, I think MicroShift may be the modern SunTour. They make amazing drive train components and shifters that work as good, in some cases even better than Ultegra and Dura-Ace for a fourth of the price.
Interesting piece - but it's possibly worth saying that Campagnolo Synchro (no "s" on the end - that was an entirely different brand) was in some ways a glorious failure in that they attempted something that Shimano didn't feel the need to - the "insert" system built into Campagnolo Synchro was designed to try and unify lever movement to derailleur movement across all of the then existent Campagnolo rear deraillers, as many as possible of the available freewheels and as many as possible of the available chains in the market.
ReplyDeleteIn theory, of course, this should have been possible ... freewheel spacing could be measured, chain flexibility could be measured and Campagnolo knew how much a derailleur would move, axially, compared to the amount of cable recovered in the lever - but consistency of manufacture just wasn't there, from any of the parties ...
I was a team mechanic back in those days and we did get some combinations to work tolerably well but it wasn't until Campagnolo bit the bullet and adopted the slant-drop parallelogram that the top jockey would track the (by then, cassette) well enough to closely enough to allow the (quite variable) chain flexibility to be, if not engineered out, then coped-with to some extent.
Factors like outer cable compression, smoothness of cable transmissions, consistency in return springing in the derailleur, as well as the need for more exact sprocket spacings and eventually, sprocket ramping were all in their infancy then & by taking the simple, system approach, Shimano stole a march. Ironic, in a way, given that it was Campagnolo who years before, had first introduced the idea of the "groupset", a matched collection of components, that worked together as a unified whole ...
I think also, Campagnolo was still using a longer pull with synchro levers, so they still had to European trait of late shifting, whereas Japanese shifters all had shorter cable pull on their shifters since the 70s for earlier shifting, to make the shifts as fast as possible with engagement. Although you didn't have to over shift and trim a C-Record or Super Record derailleur as much as a Simplex, there was still a big predictable lag that could cost a racer valuable seconds.
DeleteHi! Thank you for the comment and correction (which I’ve made). WhentI hear any variation of the word “synchro,” I think of those handlebar stems with the “hammer and cycle” logo that were popular about 30 years ago.
ReplyDeleteYou might be the first team mechanic to comment on this blog, so your perspective is interesting. It also underscores a reason why Shimano succeeded where SunTour and Campagnolo (at least with Synchro) failed: Shimano took into account all of the necessary factors to make their system work. As Danny points out, they spent a lot of time with European pro teams and hired engineers to research what would make a viable system. Shimano had the means to do what they did: Unlike Campagnolo, SunTour and the French component manufacturers they are a large industrial company and bicycle components are just one part of their business. (Aside from bike parts, they’re probably best known in the US for fishing reels.)