A personal view on old (and not so old) derailleurs

by Arnfried Schmitz

The very first time in my life that I saw derailleurs was as a boy of 10 or 12 years. That was during World War 2, in pictures from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I wondered what they were, those chains running round a roller almost onto the ground? Also, drop handlebars looked very strange.

I lived in a town of 20,000 inhabitants near Solingen, Remscheid, Germany - an industrial area with a fine reputation for tool making. Not only did you never see a racing bike, nobody could even explain how a derailleur worked. Sure, there were two- or three-speed Torpedo coasters around, but the proud owners pushed their bikes uphill like the rest of us. Cycling uphill was considered by the locals to be "very unhealthy", whereas vigorous cycling was merely "rather unhealthy".

Later, I lived in a city with 600,000 inhabitants and three cycle racing clubs. There I got into racing bikes, first via touring, then through racing. Racing components were mostly French or English, with the splendid Italian ones just beginning to appear. German parts were so rare that I only learned about them later, when I became a collector. That is, with the exception of the sturdy Fichtel & Sachs derailleur.

Simplex was the biggest maker for decades. The early items in the collection I found at auto jumbles, where now and then these parts are offered and nobody knows what they are.

During one of the very few jumbles at the Pont du Gard museum, Nimes (which came and went like a meteor) there were very few stalls and nothing much of interest. But then a small van turned up, full of components, a real "barn discovery". As it unloaded, three of us crowded round the van, using our elbows to keep the Japanese Shiro Yagani away from our grabbing hands. This Japanese edits "wants" lists with qualifications such as "awaiting despatch of item with invoice" or "only new condition, therefore competitive price only". At the Muenster cycle conference I said to him, "You are the man who empties France of her bicycle heritage." He laughed and replied, "I'm paying in Yen!"

At the jumble, a friend grabbed the only interesting item and after the jumble gave it to me as a treat.

These two early Simplex are different from the later ones, being very well made pieces, much less flimsy than later examples (apart from the 543 and alloy ones). And interestingly, you can use a Sturmey-Archer toggle chain with them!

The Super Champion copy was found on a tatty scrap ladies' bike. The chain tensioner is an exact copy of Super Champion but with a Simplex inscription. The bronze lever is nicely improved, with three indexed positions and the option of "overshifting", if necessary. The changer itself is a genuine Super Champion and was probably original equipment. Raymond Henry has seen in a catalogue that the Simplex changer was parallelogram-style: it would be interesting to see a good picture.

Simplex Champion du Monde was often found on utility bikes. It is unlikely that it would have worked properly for long. A batch of more than 30 new ones in their original carton appeared at a car jumble. I estimate that they were made immediately after the war. The jockey wheel had a rubber-coated surface for smooth running.

The piston-type twin jockey road model was original equipment on low-end French tourist and utility bikes until the 1950s. It looked a bit like a Cyclo and the alloy model was quite nicely made. The lever washers included a friction one.

The 1948-60 race model was a hybrid of the road and Champion du Monde types. The upper jockey pressed the chain against the sprocket, providing very prompt and supple shifting - when the derailleur was new. If the bike ever fell on the derailleur, the mechanism got bent and truing it made the arm weak. The derailleur could be stripped down but I could never reassemble it correctly. Frankly, my own experience with this bicycle component was disastrous. But Fausto Coppi won the Tour de France with it in 1949.

The high end 543 of 1954 was used by Anquetil in the Tour de France and by the World Champion Stablinski.

Juyexport 61 parallelogram in steel is the forerunner of all the different variations in plastic.

Prestige 62 plastic variations. A neighbour of Georges Mochet told me that, as a boy, he was a neighbour of Lucien Juy, next to the Simplex factory at Dijon. Lucien Juy had made an arrangement with his father whereby the boy had a modified mech free of charge more or less every week. The boy was therefore a sort of test rider.

Jean Pierre Danguillame was a pro-racer for 20 years and long-time team captain for Peugeot, the last team to use "all French" bikes. He said: "The first thing I did when I stopped pro-racing was to buy an Italian bike with Campag components, because I was fed up with looking enviously at the other guys in the pack with their superior equipment."

When racing, my endless breakdowns with the Simplexes caused my bike dealer to say, "You should try Huret. It's simpler and Bobet won the Tour de France and the world championship with it." This was not quite true: the genuine Bobet bike shows the difference.

The main arm got just as weak as the Simplex! He should have tried to persuade me to buy the Campag, which was five times more expensive, worked so much better and was literally indestructible. You can see the good condition of the well used Campag mechs today!

Campag did not change significantly until the 1990s and a lot of copies appeared.

Back to the stone age: Wolfgang "Zwölfgang" (12-speed - a play on words!) Gronen told me repeatedly "In my first bike club in the 30s, when we had the club meet, nobody wanted to shake hands with me. No, no Wolfgang - black fingers, Vittoria Margherita! This was the first serious derailleur, but you had to change with your fingers and backpedalling." He was so keen to see such a mechanism again, and said, "There is a time gap between things being rubbish and collectors items. I always collected paper and had no interest in old iron. It's something I now regret, because I could have collected such beautiful things." When I had the job of fitting the Vittoria mech on a bike, I made good use of a rainy weekend to copy it for Wolfgang. Sadly, his illness was defeating him and he was no longer interested.

Gronen knew a lot of stories also about the excellent Altenburger device. "Altenburger promised a lot to everybody, not just the pros. He could not break into the market because he was willing to sell to everybody and therefore the wholesalers boycotted him." It seemed strange to me, because Altenburger's brakes and rims were quite common. His hubs and derailleurs, however, were very rare.

Another legendary derailleur was the Super Champion (Osgear). I bought one in a shop in Paris in the mid 80s! 'Bicloune' is known in the whole of France as the man who buys all the stuff out of bike shops that closed then sells the best things to Japan. He had a whole box of used Super Champion parts. They were quite expensive - £12 for the chain spanner alone. He told me, "For what it is, it's not expensive. Imagine all the stock I have, most of which I cannot sell! You people always want the same rare things."

I understood what he meant when I found at a scrap yard boxes of rare or unknown makes of derailleur, probably made by small factories during the German occupation when there was a bicycle boom in France. I took lots of them free of charge, just for the ball-bearing jockey wheels, which were very useful for chain guides on HPVs.

The one-off titanium derailleur, a sort of improved Huret Jubilee was made by Hans Christian Smolik as a gift for Walter Gronen, whose widow gave it to me. She said, "I cannot provide you with the Vector you would like but take some other things that you fancy." I sold the whole collection to Walter Ulreich who wanted only this item, and so I got the money to buy the Vector I had been after for so long.

Smolik had family problems when he made the mech. In the evening, after work, he did a 'second shift' making things which demanded enormous patience and skilful manipulation. He made perhaps four or five, all different. The main problem with the derailleurs at this time was the 12-tooth sprockets that gave rise to chain slack with the Campags. "Race after race was lost with the Campags because they don't have a high pivot spring," Smolik stated.

Back to the Campag copies. Best known is the Spanish Zeus. Wolfgang Gronen said that Zeus even copied the catalogues to the last millimetre! Every part was interchangeable with Campag but the quality was not the same!

The Czech Favorit looked nice and worked well. After I had asked a lot of people for these, John Pinkerton wrote to me, "My contact for the eastern countries is Dr Piolka(?) from Prague." This person responded a year later: "I cleared up my desk and found your letter. The first Czech derailleur was awful but the second worked quite well." He gave me an address from where I purchased, with Deutschmarks, one of the nice ones. The guy's English was dodgy, so I offered to correspond for further exchanges in German. This was too radical - I heard no further news from him!

The Russian copies I traded from a Caucasian HPV freak. I was impressed by his refusal to sell, as Russians are known to do. He seemed to be more interested in old bikes and parts. Over the years we have swapped lots of things to our mutual delight. To attend an event in Western Europe, he has to travel for seven days across Russia and seven days back again. He has a large trailer behind his Lada and I wish Sergej Dachewski many other good deals!

One story about Campag itself. The first Super Record I bought was a bargain because it was broken. My son told me, "Send it back to the factory. They have a 'lifetime' warranty." They wrote back that they had received the piece but with the titanium fixing screw missing. They had therefore put it into their research department for tests and refurbishing. But what I received months later was a brand new boxed derailleur, complete with a brand new titanium fixing screw - all free of charge.

Collecting derailleurs is fascinating because they are small, complex and have two wheels - like a bike! For me the most fascinating was the human contact I got when I bought each one - and when I sold them.

Arnfried Schmitz
Lioux, 22nd June 2003