Very unusual derailleur setup
 

Saw this setup at a swap meet the other day. The derailleur is attached to a braze on fitting on the chainstay, so looks to have come from the factory like this. The bike is a 90's era Schwinn Criss-Cross. I'm presuming the odd setup is in order to handle that mega-range cog. If anyone knows anything about this odd setup, I'm just curious. Thanks.
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=346173

Yea I remember those :50: kind of a Homage to even older RD Designs.

But, note, they used a standard dropout, so you can fit something else..

Chainstay mounted RDs predate dropout mounted ones by a few decades. It should also be noted that forward opening dropouts are also a fairly modern design. Earlier bikes had mostly rear opening dropouts of the type now used almost exclusively for single speed bikes.

Schwinn probably went the chainstay route to accommodate wider gearing than the rear mount RDs of the time could handle. Or, in typical Schwinn fashion, just to be different and have something to market.

BTW - if you're interested in derailleur history, read Frank Berto's "the Dancing Chain". It's a great illustrated history of bicycle gearing.

Gotta love SunTour. I believe the main driver for this design was to tuck in the RD so it wouldn't get snagged on things as easily off-road.

http://velobase.com/ViewComponent.as...0-21414ed52e2f

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA srsly, I laughed kinda hard on this.

That was used for one year and model only, the 1993 crisscross.

And in fact the 1993 Suntour S-1 is covered in The Dancing Chain. In that time period Suntour was getting its #&% handed to it by Shimano and was trying - anything - to gain some sort of marketing advantage.

I've owned a '93 Crisscross since new. It shifts great. Indexing is built into the derailleur. Getting the rear wheel off is a royal pain.

There's already a perfectly good thread on this topic: http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...eur-Suntour-S1

Interesting that in the Suntour brochure in that thread the indexing is shown to be at the RD instead of the shifter. This I a pretty good idea actually, as cable wear/stretch or whatever doesn't affect the indexing.