Originally Posted by
merziac
Tx, it was setup with the upright bars when it came to me, cleaned up well and rides good, ms. merziac loves it.
Well maybe I did miss your point and I did learn all this back in the good ol days so maybe I've found all the hammered LeTours over the years or I'm not that rider, never liked em and have never gotten the performance out of them that a fraction of the effort gets from a Rally or SunTour.
Glad they do the trick for you and you are not alone.
There were, of course, two versions of the Rally, the original drop-knuckle one and the later one that was essentially a Gran Sport with a long cage. I understand that the later one was due to pushback Campy received from customers who objected to the obvious way the first version copied Japanese designs. Suntour, of course, held worldwide patents on their "Slant Pantograph" design, so Shimano copied the drop-knuckle feature, but waited for the patents to expire before twisting the parallelogram as well. Campy did the sane with the first version of the Rally, as did Simplex and others. This helped reduce the amount that the upper jockey wheel drifts up into the larger cogs, but doesn't track the actual cog profile as well as the Suntour or Huret, though the latter had its own fatal flaws. There is no functional reason why a Rally should shift better than a LeTour, other than that it was better made. The first version of the Rally was infamous for having the drop knuckle snap off, as were all of the similar Simplex units.
I always thought Suntour derailleurs in the bottom end of the spectrum were over-hyped. Yes, they usually worked better than most of the European derailleurs in their price range, and we installed cases of them in place of plastic Simplex mechs, but the parallelogram pivots were nothing to write home about and they got sloppy pretty quickly, especially when they got into the grit. This didn't affect the shifting all that much, but many of them also had a poorly designed and executed anchor bolt that would snap off if overtightened or worked too many times. Long cage Suntour units typically had the upper jockey wheel concentric with the lower pivot. Offset jockey cages can often be setup to keep the upper jockey wheel closer to the cogs, with a similar effect as achieved by the Slant Pantograph designs. There's not much any derailleur can do to overcome the crude link and tooth profiles of the pre-UG era. Uniglide started us down the path of better shifting and today's ramps and pins and shaped sideplates are truly wonderful things.