Originally Posted by
Grand Bois
I just love the way they look. I don't think Campy made a decent shifting derailer until they swallowed their pride and adopted Suntour's slant parallelogram design.
Simplex bar end shifters are as bad as or even worse than Campy bar end shifters unless they are the retrofrictions and those are very rare.
The slant pantograph wasn't a Shimano design - it came from SunTour, who held the patent for it until it expired in 1984. This SunTour exclusive is why their pre-1984 RD's shift better than everyone else's pre-1984 RDs. When the patent expired, Shimano jumped all over it and, in one of the earliest exercises in computer modeling in the bike industry, figured out the ideal dimensions for short- and long-cage RDs. Eventually, everyone, even that operation in Vincenza, came around. Well, some didn't, but they died quickly. (Can you say "Simplex"?) As a practical matter, the key dimensions on virtually every road RD made today and for the last 20 or so years have been identical. The springs and cosmetics vary, but the relative positioning of the jockey wheels and the cage pivot, not to mention the angling of the body, are all he same as the way Shimano optimized SunTour's breakthrough design back in the 80s.
Frank Berto's great book, "The Dancing Chain," tells all about this.