My 73' International has the braze ons. Judging from mine, I could imagine it being possible they forgot to weld them on.

Yeah, the Delta Brake was a huge mistake. In fact, it was several mistakes!

You crash to much

Not visually, they're beautiful! You gonna insist they work too?

+1 but they sure do look great! Just don't ask them to stop you during a downhill.

I bought one of the first Suntour derailler sets in the early 70s. Ok, I admit, it worked well.

I have a set of Deltas...they work VERY well when set up properly, they're just a pain to set up properly. They also are a truly unique and beautiful piece. Actually, they are stronger than my one pivot side pulls and have terrific modulation.

A few TDF's & GdI's won riding deltas. I suspect they worked well enough.

With a team of trained mechanics backing them up. Thankful I have yet to have the $$ to drop on a set and find out just how hard they are to set up. I'll admit to using dual pivot / aero Tektro levers over campy period parts on my Gazelle A-Frame for a long while. I recently swapped them out for the period campy parts... for how long I don't know...

I personally think it all as to do with what you grew up on. I grew up in the time when Shimano was a distant 3rd/4th compared to Suntour and Campy, and I remember the indexing crap they came out with back then. I am a Campy person. Those now a days that have grown up with Shimano as the dominant supplier tend to like them more than Campy. Campy has also distanced itself from riders that could bring it back by limiting component choices and different gearings. But for workability, old and new, I don't have problems with my campy. I adjust them once when setting them up and don't touch them again unless the parts come off the bike for a different build. I like things I don't have to worry about.

Speaking as an absolute newbie, I've found that you can take apart Campy with a screwdriver if you are very very careful. With Shimano, the only way to dissasemble is to bang it again and again with a good-sized hammer, and then all these little springs and nuts and trolls go flying out all over the room and, inevitably, one of those little trolls rolls onto my bikeforum page and starts growing, sometimes six, ten pages...

Mine work unbelievably well. Its all in the setup.

People should not get confused and put me in the non impressed camp... I just haven't chugged the whole bottle of kool aid.

Dont think you could do that screwdriver thing with a Delta brake caliper though.....
After having such a hard time cleaning and servicing my Delta calipers, I now just have them on display on my stash box staring at me, all beautiful like Cinderalla without a coach to take her to the ball, nicely cleaned up and lubed but with no matching levers and an Italian (preferably) bike frame to mount on. They're too much of a hassle and expense for me at this time build up into a full system. In the meantime, I got French CLB and Mavic brakesets built up since getting the Deltas and they are in front of the line for any coming buildups. Much easier on the wallet and hands to put together the two.

Chombi

Heh. Thanks. Neither have I, otherwise my fleet would look very different. I'm not a purist in many things.

Tom

Somehow, I find it oddly comforting that I can
find here on BF guys who will defend the Delta
brake.

My question to you would probably be along the
lines of: "From a purely practical design standpoint,
do they work so much better than what was available
in contemporaneous brake hardware as to justify their
production? Alternately, I can understand designing
and prototyping something like this, but don't you
have to justify the astronomical costs of production
and problems with setup and maintenance before
you actually foist these off on an impressionable
buying public?"

Which is pretty much rhetorical at this point, because
I can hear the echoing no, no, no ... from here.

With much love,
Mike Larmer

i can afford most mistakes, i can't afford a NOS set of deltas

i would suspect that a backyard mechanic would have trouble tuning a Ferrari GTO, yet properly tuned they will perform excellent. GTOs were not marketed to Impala owners and Deltas were not marketed to the casual cyclist.

They almost didn't.

What I miss most is the plethora of French component manufacturers that fell beneath the Shimano juggernaut.

That's largely a result of the restructuring Campy made back in the 90s when Shimano was eating their lunch. Instead of trying to offer a full range of component price points, Campy cut way back and focused on their forte, the high-end and professional competitor. Over the years they've started to ease back into the mid range price points.

Back in the early 80s we did some hardness testing on various chainrings. Surprisingly, Stronglight rings were the hardest, followed closely by Campy. Sugino, SR and Shimano were in the middle. TA was the softest.

Interesting though that Stronglight specifically noted that they designed their 80's 106 and 107 model cranksets with "softer" alloys in their crank arms/spiders to avoid cracking that was being experienced by some with Campagnolo cranksets.

Chombi

My uncle who lives abroad, is a classic car collector with a collection that includes a 1955 Mercedes Benz 300 Gullwing, A 70's Ferrari BB365 Boxer, Lamborghini Miura and a 1965 457 Cobra roadster. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun to be in his shoes, but I don't know if just anyone can take the headaches and the monetary costs to keep those cars preserved and in running condition. He literally spends thousands of dollars on the cars each year for just maintenance and replacement parts that we ship to him regularly. How one might relate that to a bike with Campagnolo Delta brakes and C-Record components doesn't make sense in many levels...........and yes, he does have a live-in mechanic and usually drives those cars with a "support vehicle" with the mechanic in it behind him. I suspect a lot of Ferrari GTO owners do the same with their exotic car.
As I think most of us consider cycling a more "grounded" sport compared to exotic car collecting.
Thanks, but the Impala or Honda world of cycling is fine with me!
JMOs



Chombi

Wow, Mercedes Gullwing! Now that's a car!

If I spent the coin for Campagnolo it would be difficult for me to say that I didn't like it. It would mean admitting to a costly mistake, which I am loathe to do.

The French did not know the peril they were in until it was too late. The Spidel group and the STC association was an attempt, but they were too weak and not ready to spend the cash on design and manufacturing technology to compete. TA and Stronglight continued, but were bit players in the OEM spec world. Shimano did its part by pushing complete ensembles on the OEM's, a US restraint of trade lawsuit eventually curtailed that, but the damage had been done. Shimano was ruthless, and for that I stay clear of them.

Unfortunately for Campagnolo, the changing of the top management came at the wrong time, they almost went the same way as the French. They were prior to the sunset of the Suntour slant parallelogram patent almost desperate to find an alternative derailleur design that was patentable. This can be seen form patent applications from the time. Campagnolo was a proud company and in the past was the company to collect royalties, not pay them. If they had lees ego they would have bought the Suntour design, not bothered with the SGR pedal and paid Look for the right to make a Look compatible clipless pedal. Shimano did when they had to early on, even going so far as having Look manufacture the early Shimano clipless pedals for them.