By all means take the piss out of brifters not including Ergos fellers, butI've gotta back up and amplify this:
Originally Posted by
Road Fan
My point here is, BF seems to be the biggest bike forum. As such we should try to do things in a way which favors inclusion, even if we don't know who or what we're including. You can't guarantee inclusion based on enumeration of all the options...
Damn straight. It behoves us to get to the crux of what separates C&V from this era we're trying to define with 7-9s brifters. It's not a bad first approximation, but
Road Fan is right that we can do better.
C&V is almost by definition, relatively primitive gear - we're talking old-school tech if we say classic and vintage. Indexing has been identified as a milestone, and I'd say that's getting close, but for my money C&V is pre-HyperGlide. That's a pretty good line in the sand, isn't it? HG enabled indexing to work properly, which paved the way for brifters. It was a quantum leap in refinement, pretty sure it was CAD; it's relatively modern stuff compared to what you think of as C&V.
So how about just
post-HyperGlide road, or maybe,
early modern road - 89-04?
Something like that.
BTW, this thread should probably be tacked onto
What are brifters?, since that's the sticky talking about what this category is.