Nice Old Cranks

Some of my favorite vintage components are Stronglight cranksets.

You might thing I'm being sentimental about the days when I was young, carefree and riding my PX-10.  Well, there are some things I miss about those days, though I have no wish to repeat them.  But more to the point, I have good memories of the Stronglight 93 crankset that came with that bike because it really was very nice.

I loved the shape and mirror polish of it.  Even more important, though, was its practicality:  Chainrings from 37 to 58 teeth were available for it. In a way, it was a precursor to today's "compact" road double cranksets.  So, they were commonly ridden, not only by racers, but by tourists with relatively light loads or who simply didn't want to deal with the finicky shifting and other issues that came with triple cranksets.

What was probably an even nicer--and, to my eye, even prettier--crankset was the "99" model.

 


It wasn't readily found here in the US, and not many bikes came equipped with it.  But it offered an even wider range of chainrings than the 93:  from 28 to 54 teeth.  In the late '70's and early '80's, six was the maximum number of freewheel cogs; seven would be introduced in the middle of the '80's.  That meant the steps between cogs were wider than on today's 8, 9, 10, 11 or 13-cog cassettes.  Consequently, most in-the-know touring cyclists rode with a "half-step plus granny" chainring setup.  That meant, in brief, a relatively small gap between the two larger chainrings and using the smallest available chainring for the "granny" gear.

A common "half-step plus granny" setup included chainrings of 28, 45 and 50 teeth.  The Stronglight "99" was ideally suited for it.  It had a larger bolt circle (86BCD) than the company's "49" model. the Specialites TA Cyclotouriste or the Nervar touring cranksets, all of which used a 50.4 BCD.  Smaller bolt circles mean, at least in theory, more chainring flex.  The 49, Cyclotouriste and Nervar crankset compensated with an extra ring of bolts to hold the two outer chainrings together.  On the other hand, the "99" had only one set of five bolts holding the chainrings onto the crank.

No one seemed to notice any undue flexing on the "99"--or a near-copy of it made by Sakae Ringyo (SR) in Japan.  The SR model was, functionally, the same and a good deal less expensive.  But the Stronglight cranks seemed to be of higher quality and were more beautiful.

So what happened to the "93" and "99"?  Well, the former crankset became the "105" and "106"--the same cranset with an anodised finish and "drillium" chainrings.  There was also a "drillium" version of the "99".  But the real reason why we don't see more modern versions of those cranks is that they had proprietary bolt circles:  122 mm for the "93" and, as I mentioned, 86 mm for the "99".  In contrast, Campagnolo racing cranks, and their clones, had a 144 mm diameter, while Dura-Ace had the now-ubiquitous 130 mm.  Meanwhile, Sugino's touring cranksets came with the now-familiar 110 mm for the outer two chainrings and 74 mm for the "granny" gear.

That means replacement chainrings for the "93" and "99" can be found only on eBay and at swap meets.  The good news is those chainrings tended to be long-wearing, more so than TA's rings. 

Three Rings I'd Never Seen Before

While trolling eBay, I came across this:

You could be forgiven for thinking, "another French bike". From the style of the paint, decals and graphics, it looks similar to many Gallic velocipedes of the 1960's and 1970's.

From what I can see, it looks like the sort of bikes the British used to call "club racers".  Most of the components--like the Normandy hubs, Simplex derailleurs and shifters and Mafac brakes--are what one might find on many basic ten-speeds, like the Peugeot UO8, that were exported to the US during its "bike boom".  However,  it has a tighter wheelbase and angles than basic bike-boom ten-speeds like the Peugeot UO-8.   

On closer inspection (or, at least, as close as I can make from the photos), this one--from Beha, a name I'd never before seen--is a little better than most club racers.  For one thing, it's made from Vitus 172, a maganese molybdenum tubing of slightly thicker wall thickness (and, arguably, of somewhat lower quality) than Reynolds 531.  Most club racers were made of the same sort of carbon-steel tubing as what was found on the U-08 and other bikes like it.  Also, the Beha seems to have forged, rather than stamped, dropouts. 

Another thing this bike has in common with other club racers is its tubular tires and rims, the latter made by Mavic.  Racers often used wheels like the ones on this bike--basic hubs, nice rims--for training.  In the days before Michelin came out with its Elan tire (and, simultaneously, Mavic introduced its "E" rim), riding fast almost meant riding tubulars.

But the most interesting part of this bike--at least to me--is this:

When this bike was built, it seemed that every maker of cranksets made a cotterless model on which the chainring was attached with three bolts, rather than the four or five that are standards of nearly all modern cranksets.  It makes sense when you realize that nearly all cottered cranksets with double chainrings were of the three-bolt variety.  So, too, was the crankset many regard as the nicest ever made:  Rene Herse's own.

I don't know when Herse stopped making his. (Now the Colorado company calling itself "Rene Herse" offers a replica of it.)  But it seems that after Campagnolo turned its three-bolt Gran Sport into a five-bolt crank in the early 1980's or thereabouts, the three-bolt design disappeared until the Herse revival.

The crank on the Beha bike is from Specialtes TA, which also made the better-known "Cyclotouriste" crankset.  I always thought TA's three-bolt crank was the prettiest of the genre, which also included models from Stronglight, Nervar, Shimano (the original 600 crankset) and Sugino.  

The TA came as original equipment on a variety of bikes, including the Motobecane Grand Record (on which it was teamed with Campagnolo Nuovo Record derailleurs) and Raleigh Competition (with Huret Jubilee).  On those bikes, and others, the crank came with two chainrings.  I never saw it equipped with three rings--that is, until I came across the Beha. I'd really like to see it in person.

 

You Never Know Where You'll Find One

Here's another example of a bike that, as I rode by it, caught my eye for a reason I couldn't discern until I stopped to look:

It's a Motobecane mixte from the early 1980's--the "Nobly" model, I believe.  I assembled and sold a few of them back in the day. This one is a basic model, made from carbon steel tubing and with stamped dropouts that don't have a threaded "ear" to mount a derailleur.  If I recall correctly, it came with a Huret Eco derailleur, mounted with a "claw", as derailleurs often were on low- to mid-level ten- and twelve-speeds.

One thing I know, though, is that it didn't come with this component:

By the time this Motobecane was made, very few (if any) off-the-shelf bikes came equipped with the Specialtes TA Vis-5 (commonly called the "Cyclotouriste") crankset.  By the 1980's, even European touring bikes were coming with more modern triple cranksets from Stronglight, Sugino and Shimano, which didn't require as many mounting bolts--and, by which time, offered just about the same range of gears--as the TA. 

It's also incongruous to see the crank on this particular model because it was intended as a "sport" or "ville" bike.  While a few Rene Herse city bikes were equipped with TA Cyclotouriste cranksets (particularly if the owner lived in a hilly city), a bike like the one in the photo was more likely to have a double or single chainwheel in front.  

(For the record, I'm almost entirely sure that the bike in the photo originally had a Japanese-made Sakae Ringyo (SR) crankset.)

What I find really incongruous, though, is the fact that the TA crankset, which is intended for triple and wide-range double chainwheels, used as a single-speed.  It's a bit like using a Swiss Army knife to open a candy bar wrapper.

I wonder whether the bike's owner, or whoever installed the crankset (the same person?), realizes that he or she could sell the crankset on eBay for more than what he or she could get for the rest of the bike.