Does any one still love...
 

the simplistic Huret Svelta? I find it a facinating if obsolete relic from a gone by day..
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...lls/svelto.jpg

But I bet no one loves it this much!

http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-French-H...3A1%7C294%3A50

I like them a lot more than the common-as-dirt Allvit, though there's not all that much that separates the two on the Huret family tree...$89 is a joke even in pristine condition, and connecting it to the Jubilee is...a bit stretching it, IMHO.

If it was an Alvit I would assume they would be paying me $89.99 to take it away. Yeah, I hate the Allvit that bad. Can you tell?

I have only seen a couple of them in service. One was on the kids Gitane model, with 3 speed rear cluster, the other on a real piece of Francocrap I owned briefly, a Jaubert that sold for 49.95 in the late 60's at a local discount store. I think I paid $10 for it secondhand and flipped it almost immediately. This was back in about 1974.

My sister's Mercier campus bike had one of these. I would say it shifted as well as the Simplex Prestige derailleurs that came on Peugeot UO-8s. But her Mercier was far prettier.

My Raleigh Super Course came equipped with the Svelto's ******* spawn, the Luxe. The Luxe was just a Svelto with a longer and more flexible cage. That mousetrap with red pulleys was so proficient at missing shifts and hitting the spokes that I had to upgrade to a Simplex Prestige. Eventually, Raleigh followed my example.

Its very "Valentinoish"

The Valentino is "Svelto-ish" actually, since the Svelto pre-dates the Valentino by a few years.

Sveltos do work well; better than Valentinos, although that's not saying much. It's amazing what Huret could do with a few pieces of bent sheet metal riveted together.

FWIW, Andy Muzi at Yellow Jersey likes Sveltos.