Embarassing admission time. My "good" bike is a Schwinn WorldSport of '88 or '89 vintage bought new and it came with suicide levers and stem shifters. Neither lasted long, mostly for reasons of "appearance".

I still have the original SunTour index stem shifters. Maybe I'll do a a comparo of all three systems, downtube, stem and barcon, on my Takara. Test would be in friction mode with the Suntour V-Luxe RD.

Trivial factoid. The SunTour 5000 series downtube levers seem to index fine with the X-3000 series RD on the WorldSport.

Hey Pogue! What am I missing not having Simplex retrofriction.