Man, those really look like the very pinnacle of centerpull brake design. The more I look at late '70s-early '80s French parts, the more impressed I get. There was some very thoughtful engineering going on there.

It's easy for us to forget, but for much of the Industrial Age, France and England (including Scotland) were world leaders in technology. They were forward-thinking innovators who were not afraid to take risks. They gave us the Sud-Ouest Trident airplane, the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine; Maudslay invented the first real metal lathe, cutting a more-or-less perfect screw some 4 feet long by hand. Jacques-Yves Cousteau invented the Aqualung.Jean Foucault invented the gyroscope. We would all be dead if not for Pasteur, and of course we have all become familiar with the derivations of Lucien Juy's mechanisms.