One great thing about being middle-aged is that you can be excused, for a moment anyway, of un-hipness. (Is that a word?)
One symptom of un-hipness is not knowing about some band or another. Back in the day, one could be excommunicated from some of the circles in which I traveled for such a "crime".
(Back in the day, one also could have been excommunicated from said circles for using the third person and passive tense as I used them in this sentence and the previous one!)
So...Ring your loudest bell as you blow by me as I am pushing my aging bones along the bike path. I am now going to confess that I didn't know about The Bicycles, a Toronto-based "indie" rock group.
Then again, I have a really good excuse for not knowing: "Indie" rock is like, you know, soooo '90's.
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.
Is this what awaits me this Fall
if, indeed, the Fall comes? It was 29C (85F) this afternoon!
