The Man Who Made--And Broke-- SunTour

Writing about SunTour yesterday got me, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions, "woozy with deja vu".  (How can you not love that phrase?)

You see, I started to take long rides as the '70's Bike Boom was gaining force.  That was also almost the exact time that American cyclists began to glom onto SunTour derailleurs.  

Although SunTour's wares would have dominated the North American (and other) cycling markets on their own merits, the fact that, around 1980, more bikes were equipped with the Japanese company's derailleurs, shifters and freewheels--and more of those parts were sold as replacements--than all of the other component manufacturers combined, is the result, at least in part, of the work of one person.

 


I'm talking about Frank Berto.  If you're a bit younger than I am, you probably think of him as the author of The Dancing Chain, a book for gear geeks if there ever was one. (It's an engaging read nonetheless.)  But for those of us who were around in the prehistoric days of cycling, when all bike manuals were written in Latin (OK, Italian and sometimes French and English), he will be forever known as the technical editor of Bicycling magazine.

Now, I know some of you (again, who weren't around in those times) might be scratching your heads and saying, "Bicycling had a technical editor"?  Those of you who are a bit younger might not believe that magazines had technical editors.  And, if you're younger still, you might not believe that magazines existed.

Trust me, they did.  And Bicycling--as much as I and others complained about it--was actually something more than the advertising vehicle or lifestyle tab it's been for at least two decades. 

As he tells it on his website,  Frank Berto bought a secondhand Schwinn Varsity in 1971, when he became involved with his sons' Boy Scout troop.  He was then a 42-year-old mechanical engineer who, until that time, hadn't been on a bike in more than two decades.  On his first ride with his son's troop, all of the young whippersnappers blew past him on a long and winding hill that would be his Road to Damascus."If I had a bigger sprocket in the back, I could pedal up this lousy hill," he thought.  Shortly thereafter, he rode to his local bike shop and bought a SunTour 14-34 freewheel (Varsities came with 14-28) and a SunTour VGT rear derailleur.  

He tried to install them himself, but realized he had no clue as to what to do.  Nor, as it turned out, did the shop that sold him the parts.  None of the bicycle-related books (remember those?) in his local library were of any help.

His yearlong odyssey to lower the gears on that tank called the Varsity ended with him writing, first for Bike World and, not long afterward, for Bicycling.  After mining his own experiences, he conducted a series of tests and published his ratings of derailleurs that were available at the time.  The message of much of his work from that time can be more or less summed up with this sentence: "If you are unhappy with your shifting, the SunTour VGT is your best prescription".

The thing is, he was right.  The VGT, which cost about $10 at the time, could handle the freewheel he installed on the Varsity--and more.  And, because of its design, it shifted more easily and accurately on smaller racing freewheels than even the derailleurs supposedly designed for them.  Those derailleurs from Campagnolo and Huret cost four times as much.  Even the SunTour Cyclone, which came out a year or two after Berto made his pronouncement, cost less than half as much as those European derailleurs--and was lighter (and prettier) than any except the Huret Jubilee.

Ironically, for all that he did to build SunTour's reputation, he may have unwittingly contributed to its undoing.  When Huret came out with the Duopar touring derailleur in the late 1970's, he enthused about it. Up to that time, SunTour's shifting--especially on wide-range touring gears--was light-years ahead of everyone else's.  That anyone could make something better, even if only marginally so, seemed inconceivable.   And for Frank Berto to say so was like the CEO of the Bank of America endorsing socialism.

By that time, the folks working for SunTour were paying as much attention to Berto's articles as Anna Wintour does to fashion shows.  They panicked and made some ill-advised changes to some of their products.  

A few years after that, Berto praised one of the results of SunTour's changes:  the Superbe Tech derailleur.  He praised it even more lavishly than he did any previous SunTour product--or the Duopar.  It shifted as well as he said, and was beautiful.  But it also had some fatal design flaws--as did the Duopar--that truncated its lifespan to about 3000 km.  By that time, SunTour's patents had expired, and Shimano had adopted SunTour's most salient feature--the slant parallelogram--even faster than President Bush signed the Patriot Act after 9/11.  

Oh, how I miss SunTour.  And Bicycling magazine, when it had a technical editor.

50 Years Ago This Month: The Dawn Of SunTour

What is the most influential and important development in the history of the bicycle?

Some would say, well, duh, it's the invention of the bicycle. I might agree, except that it's hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the bicycle was "invented".  Is Leonardo da Vinci responsible for it?   Or, do you consider the "celerifere" the first in the line of two-wheeled vehicles we love to ride to day?  Some might say Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun, who attached a steering device to his two-wheeler, is the progenitor of our pleasures.  Then again, others would have us believe that it wasn't really a bicycle until Kirkpatrick MacMillan attached foot pedals to it.

After the invention of the bicycle, however you define it, probably the most important development--and certainly the one most influential beyond the world of cycling--is that of the pneumatic tire.  Without it, not only bicycles, but also motor vehicles, would give slower and bumpier rides than wooden- or metal-wheeled horse-drawn carriages.  And modern passenger aircraft could not take off or land.

Possibly the next-most important development is the invention of the "safety" bicycle.  It's what we (well, most of us, anyway) ride today:  two wheels the same size (or close to it), foot pedals and a front chain that drives a rear cog via a chain.  This type of bicycle replaced the high-wheeler or "penny farthing" bikes, on which the pedals and cranks were attached to the front wheel axle.  The gear ratio was, therefore, dependent on the size of the front wheel:  Common diameters were 60 and 72 inches.  On the "safety" bicycle, variable gears were possible.

Variable gears led to inventors coming up with various ways to use them, the most common of which are variable-gear internal hubs (e.g., the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs found on classic English bikes) and derailleurs.

About the latter:  The patent for what is, arguably, the most important innovation in derailleur design was filed fifty years ago this month in Japan, and a month later in the US.

Here we can see it advertised in the December 1964 edition of New Cycling magazine:

It's the SunTour Gran-Prix derailleur, the progenitor of every single derailleur with even the slightest pretense of quality made during the past few decades.


This brainchild of Nobuo Ozaki, SunTour's chief engineer at the time, the SunTour Gran-Prix introduced the "slant parallelogram" design to the world.  The derailleur's main parallelogram is more or less parallel to the chainstay, in contrast to those of Campagnolo and Simplex derailleurs, which dropped straight down from the frame mount and were almost perpendicular to the ground--or those of Huret derailleurs, which consisted of flat steel plates that pivoted on the mounting plate.

Such a difference is not merely stylistic:  It allowed the top pulley of the Grand-Prix to run as close to the smallest cog as it did to the largest, or any in between.  Shifting thus became easier and more precise, especially on wide-range touring gears.  People were amazed at the difference when they replaced their malfunctioning or broken Huret Luxes,  Campagnolo Gran Turismos or Simplex Prestiges with something from SunTour.  I know I was.

Without a way of keeping a constant distance between the derailleur pulley and the rear cogs, it's all but impossible to make any sort of indexed derailleur system work reliably.  Ironically, this fact would lead  Shimano and Campagnolo (and, later, SRAM) to claim supremacy over the market SunTour would dominate from the mid-1970's until the mid-1980s--and, ultimately, to SunTour's demise.

Practically the second SunTour's patent expired in 1984, Campy and Shimano (and Sachs-Huret, which would become part of SRAM) seized upon it.  The following year, Shimano introduced SIS, the first commercially successful indexed derailleur shifting system.  The rear derailleur from that system combined SunTour's slant parallelogram with the spring-loaded top pivot Shimano (as well as Simplex) had already been using in their derailleurs.

Notice that I said SIS was the first commercially-successful indexed derailleur system.  It wasn't the first indexed system:  The idea was tried as far back as the 1930's (the "Funiculo" derailleur on Jacques Schulz bicycles), and in 1969 SunTour introduced an indexed system that, by all accounts, worked well. 

Had SunTour waited a couple more years to market that system, they might have dominated the bicycle components industry even more they did in the 1970s, and they still might be in business today.  However, the "Honor" and GT derailleurs-- refinements of the Grand-Prix--and the "V" series were introduced just as the '70's Bike Boom was starting in North America.  New cyclists (like yours truly) in the New World had no previous brand loyalty, if you will, to any of the established European derailleur makers and were more willing to try something that looked (and, more important, worked) differently.

Interestingly, this led to a reversal of an old dynamic:  A few years later, European cyclists (some, anyway) would take the lead of their American counterparts and start using SunTour (and, later, Shimano) derailleurs and other parts. 

Anyway...After Shimano introduced their indexed system in 1985, other companies--including SunTour and Campagnolo-- panicked and introduced their own systems. Some of us referred to Campy's "Syncros" system as "Stinkros".  SunTour's system shifted a little better, but not as well as Shimano's, which consisted of a more closely-integrated set of components.  Essentially, Shimano designed a whole new system, while SunTour and Campagnolo simply created new indexed shift levers that were supposed to work with derailleurs and freewheels those companies were already making.

What made matters worse was that bike manufacturers, like Schwinn, equipped some of their models with SunTour's indexed shifters but used them with freewheels, chains and cables--some of which weren't even made by SunTour--they already had on hand.  It almost goes without saying that the results ranged from underwhelming to disastrous.

(Also, the fact that Schwinn's reputation was already slipping didn't help to bolster confidence in the components they used on their bikes.  That's my opinion, anyway.)

SunTour finally redesigned their indexed systems, but it was too late.  The company managed to hang on until 1995.  By then, nearly all bikes of any quality had Shimano derailleurs--which had the same geometry as the SunTour derailleurs Nobuo Ozaki created three decades earlier!

(He was, apparently,  much better at industrial design and engineering than anyone in the company was at translating.  One of their early manuals, useful as it is, tells us "How To Use Honor Rightly".)

Sorry I Haven't Been Along For The Ride

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.