For it's day (somewhere along the line of just before we all discovered Sun Tour), the Simplex line of derailleurs were THE low buck alternative to everything else out there. Considering the alternatives were things like the Huret Allvit (in my estimation the worst derailleur ever made) and Campagnolo Record (priced beyond what most any of us could afford at that time), the Simplex was a very credible alternative. And they were light, which was a major reason why they were made out of Delrin plastic.

The downside, of course, is that if you rode daily you didn't expect more than two years service out of one. Then again, they sold for something like $5.00 new, so it wasn't that bad a deal to go buy another one.

Would I ride one today? Definitely. In fact, my last trip down to the local used bicycle shop, I picked up a late (guessing early 80's) model which was Delrin on the pivot points, but the parallelogram is metal. I'm keeping it for a future project, when I'd like to do something heavily French.

Of the early ones, the red labeled jobs are the Prestige: Virtually all plastic. These were the common ones, and are still worth riding - after you've given it a good inspection to make sure it's not too worn. There was an upscale model which I believe was called the Criterium (please correct me if my memory is faulty) which had a plastic coated silver nameplate, and a bit of metal in the parallelogram for strength.

By the mid-80's Simplex had gone to the Japanese style horizontal parallelogram, by which point it was too late - most European manufacturers were using Japanese derailleurs, and no Japanese manufacturer would use European (which in itself killed off the European component industry, Campagnolo being the sole exception).

Just the same, for the 60's and early 70's, Simplex made a damned good product.

Syke
Deranged Few M/C