Ah, I mispoke; Huret indeed. Peter knows much more about such pre-Campy parallelogram derailleur esoterica, and I for one am glad I haven't had to get such a rd to work since my 2-speed SA days, but I recall an old-timer on the CR list saying that they worked pretty well if they were properly set up, but that setup was very hard to do right.
Peter, insofar as "low-normal" is the thread here and pullchain rds are low-normal, have you set one of these up, and can we see photos? Maybe it will give Grant some ideas. It has been years since I read Dancing Chain; was he really so dismissive? I don't recall, but I'll have to borrow the book back from my brother. Also recall someone -- CR lister? -- describing how in the late '40s and '50s in Australia race gearing was sparse (4 or 5 speeds), low (49 t sing ring, 14-20 4-speed), and cadences high; and, shifted with pull chain rds, the drivetrain often sounded like a coffee grinder -- I guess because it was hard to adjust these things well. I'm tempted to hunt one down and install it on that Libertas that (yes, Bill) I have plans to build up as a outside-lockable errand bike that is fun to ride. With wingnuts. On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 11:57 AM Peter Adler <divisi....@gmail.com> wrote: > And another nitpicky point: The two-lever derailleur is connected not to a > Simplex pullchain derailleur, but to the mid-50s fancy-bikeshorts pullchain > derailleur from their rival, Huret: the Huret Louison Bobet, so named for > the three-time Tour de France winner (1953-55) whose Stella team rode with > that derailleur. Simplex had a competing design - the Juy 543 named for the > company president/designer Lucien Juy and the fact that the derailleur > could be set with a slide mechanism to work with 3-speed, 4-speed and > 5-speed freewheels, at a time when all were current in the marketplace. > > Like the Huret Louison Bobet, the Simplex Juy 543 had two cables. But > instead of having a separate control lever for chain tension adjustment, > the Simplex mechanism had a junction block which was clamped along the > shift cable between the bottom bracket and the chainstay cable stop. The > main pulley adjustment cable ran full from shift lever to derailleur, while > a second cable stub was clamped to the first cable. The two adjustments > this worked in parallel, which the chain tension automatically > tightened/loosened as one shifted between bigger/smaller cogs. > > The Simplex was an early example of black-boxing tech; the pullchain and > slide mechanism were concealed from view (and from road scuzz, which I'm > sure was Simplex's excuse) with a chrome cover plate. It's a sleeker, more > modern-looking derailleur than most pullchain models. > > All this engineering chozzerai must have been expensive to design and > manufacture, and the price obviously discouraged mass appeal. My hunch is > that the 1950s fixation on chain friction must also have been revealed to > be silly. By the end of the decade, as Campagnolo was driving all the > pullchain companies into irrelevancy in the racer market with a durable > rear derailleur that as Frank Berto said, "didn't shift very well, but it > would do it forever", and that didn't cater to the friction fixation at > all. The ne plus ultra of Simplex's high-end pullchain derailleurs was the > Juy 60, cosmetically a clone of the earlier 543 with the chrome cover > plate, but with no freewheel selector (5-speed was assumed) and with no > tension adjustment. After 1960, Simplex accepted that they'd lost the > design war against Campagnolo's parallelogram derailleurs by building the > excellent and beautiful Juy 61 Export (a design that clearly drove the > designers at Suntour), and the technically similar/cosmetically uglier Raid > 35, before going down the drain building derailleurs out of plastic. > > =============== > > Frank Berto's discussion of the history of the companies in the 1950s in > The Dancing Chain is, IMHO, far better than his discussion of the > derailleurs themselves. Hs take on all the 50s derailleurs other than > Campy's Gran Sport is mostly to call the design stupid, which they sort of > are. They're fiddly to get working; placing the pulley cage under the big > cog is a real balancing act, because the placement is done by adjusting the > tension on that coil spring inside the ribbon spring, which I only > discovered a few days ago by accident. > > Berto's big objection is mostly to Simplex, who put the dual-spring cage > in/cage out mechanism at the centerpoint of the pulley cage. Many of > Huret's derailleurs put it close to the end, which means that one could > route the chain like a modern derailleur for more chainwrap, with the > pulley cage near the spring and the tension cage below. The Simplex ones > work pretty much the same regardless of which way the cage is oriented, > with no additional takeup. Berto's belief is/was that Simplex had made a > nice livelihood for themselves making single-pulley derailleurs, and didn't > want to alienate their racing customers by making derailleurs that worked > wildly differently. So they made single-pulley derailleurs with two pulleys. > > Unfortunately for the hobbyist, Berto's contempt for the design means that > he doesn't speak at all about making them work. 60+ years after they > vanished from the marketplace, it's almost impossible to find any > documentation on configuration, other than the original instructions > included in the packages written in midcentury flowery French or English > that's hard for most people (well, for me at least) to translate to > instructions I can use. Most of the technicians who learned how to do it > the official way BITD are now dead. Those of us who get them sorta-working > mostly do so through dumb luck; my addition of a couple of extra links > beyond the Shimano big-big +1 parallelogram measurement suddenly gained me > the ability to reach 7 out of 10 gears, where I had only been able to do a > single speed beforehand. A datapoint for the the tricks file. > > Peter "wall of text!" Adler > Berkeley, California/USA > > On Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 8:25:00 AM UTC-7 Patrick Moore wrote: > > BTW, Grant is wrong in the March 2022 blog about the second lever for the > Simplex pullchain rd. It is indeed meant to take up or relax chain tension, > but not because the derailleur didn't do that. The Simplex, like the > Benelux, has a coil spring under that spiral ribbon spring -- both springs > encircle a shaft over which the derailleur cage is pulled -- and the coil > spring provides both in and out tension and cage tension (to put tension on > the chain): you have to wind up the cage clockwise by not quite 360* when > installing the chain, which is a real pain. > > The chain tension lever allowed you to fine tune this chain tension; in > fact, to minimize it while still keeping enough so that the chain stayed on > the chosen cog; this because, back then, at least some people thought that > a tensioned chain caused a great deal of friction in the drivetrain. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "RBW Owners Bunch" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/396a9cad-43ea-4d7d-affe-d323292a6931n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/396a9cad-43ea-4d7d-affe-d323292a6931n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Patrick Moore Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executive resumes, LinkedIn profiles, bios, letters, and other writing services ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *When thou didst not, savage, k**now thine own meaning,* *But wouldst gabble like a** thing most brutish,* *I endowed thy purposes w**ith words that made them known.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. 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