smontanaro 

Here's a SunTour derailleur I'd not heard of before:

https://chicago.craigslist.org/nwc/bop/d/richmond-suntour-hero-shifter/7019369725.html

It's amazing how many variations on a theme SunTour produced considering how small the company was.

non-fixie 

It wasn't that small: SunTour

crank_addict

So true. Certainly fun to browse the Disraeli gear site.

These days its become an obsession to acquire and sample the older offerings from Suntour. Once you have them dialed in and or mildly improve (pulleys, cables, etc ) they all get the job done fairly well.

I've been tossing most of the older Shimano for older Suntour. The Viscount with Vx and Comp V is neato. Honor on another.

I still grin when shifting the lowly 4050 Edge group with oval rings on the Zunow. Flawless and never needs tweak adjustments. All the ballyhooey about Accushift just doesn't add up.

SurferRosa

SunTour derailleurs

BFisher

Great stuff up and down the lineup!

Anyone else running a Spirt up front?



Barcon operated - works like a champ.

smontanaro 

Compared to Shimano it was practically a garage shop. I recall reading a report of their halcyon days (while the slant parallelogram patent was still active) saying they had something on the order of just a few dozen engineers. Considering the breadth of their product line I think that's a very small staff, even though manufacturing of many products was done under contract.

Unca_Sam

The wife's Fuji uses a Fuji branded Spirt up front and something in the rear, I'd have to look it up.

When I rebuilt my Kona Cinder Cone, I restored the complete XCD drivetrain, since a previous owner pitched the rear hub and cassette for an available Shimano FH-HG50 and 7 speed cassette. The rear shifting with the powercontrol thumbies was pretty sloppy. I agree, Accushift (with the right housing) works as well as I expect.

smontanaro 

Here we go. From Frank Berto's Sunset for SunTour:

Darth Lefty 

Try not to think about how many different models and versions of RD Shimano must have in production RIGHT NOW. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a hundred

OTS 

Have a Suntour Cyclone 7000 RD with new Sunrace 7 speed freewheel and Suntour Accushift Barcons on my 80's Schwinn Premis and it shifts like butta !

seedsbelize 

I have Spirts on two bikes. And a couple more in reserve. I also have a collection of Symmetric shifters, both clamp on and braze on. The Spirt is my all time favorite fd.

jeirvine 

The amazing thing to me, having worked on dozens of different model Suntour RDs, is how very similar many of them are, yet how few parts they actually share in common. Mounting bolts and return springs in particular. They are so close, but no cigar between models like Vx, BL, Cyclone, VGT-Luxe, etc. Even between different years of the same model. Kind of nuts.

Miele Man

IIRC it was a Mountech Sealed rear derailleur that I'd put on my bicycle just the day before that busted the internal parts of the derailleur when I started out on it not totally in gear. the chain jumped to the next smallest cog and that was the end of that rear derailleur. The shop wouldn't replace it and I was considerably miffed because it was a pretty expensive rear derailleur at that time. that taught me to wait a year or so before buying new technology.

That being said, I have Suntour Cyclone II derailleurs, crankset, pedals and brake levers on my Red Bianchi and I love them.

I also like Suntour's reverse-pull front derailleurs that pulled the chain onto the smaller chainring. Those are fantastic for those sudden hill or for when you run out of steam on a hill and want to shift to a smaller chainring.

Cheers

T-Mar

The Hero is scarce for several reasons. First, it is a bottom of the barrel derailleur, even below the Honor. Second, it was introduced just when SunTour's fortunes were falling. Third, and most importantly, it was a friction derailleur in the era of indexing.

By 1986, which is the earliest year that I have seen Hero, Shimano had trickled down indexed shifting to the $250.00 price range, via their Light Action series. People who normally might not spend this much were enticed to spend a little more, just to get indexing. However, even friction equipped models in the lower ranges were more likely be outfitted with Shimano derailleurs, as the manufacturers wanted the leverage of higher volumes to get slightly better pricing on Shimano's trending indexed derailleurs.

Miele Man

Just curious. Did the 1980s Shimano and Suntour rear derailleurs have the same cable pull?

Cheers

thumpism 

You need to find the steel SunTour rear derailleur that is normal large, meaning you pull the cable to move it from the larger cogs to the smaller ones, the reverse of normal RD action. The name escapes me now and I've only seen a couple in the metal. Skitter?

clubman 

They shared cable pull for the standard 6 speed indexing but not the 7's (or 8's?).

Let me add that there's a plethora of anecdotes about successfully mixing 7 speed shifters but I don't think they were designed to be compatible. @pcb perhaps?

SurferRosa

Yeah, disraeli gears shows two suntour rear derailleur models with low-normal function, the New Skitter (and subsequent Skitter versions) and the Gran Prix.

T-Mar

This derailleur convention is called low normal. It was used on both the Skitter and Grand Prix rear derailleurs. Previously Suntour had offered pull chain derailleurs which were also low normal. I assume that Maeda stuck with low normal on their early parallelogram models so that loyal users would not have to re-calibrate their shifting logic but that they soon converted to top normal, starting with Competition, when it became apparent that top normal was the industry standard and market preference.

Shimano re-introduced low normal rear derailleurs in 1999 and called the technology Rapid Rise. It was first introduced as an option on XTR but eventually spread to other ATB groups. It was not employed on road derailleurs as it was of considered to be beneficial primarily on wider range cassettes.

Miele Man

Thanks. Much appreciated.

Cheers

dddd

Sprocket spacing was always the same between 6s Suntour Accushift and 6s Shimano Accushift, but the derailer's actuation ratios and thus cable-pull were different, with Shimano SIS having the greater cable travel for each shift.

One exception is Shimano's pre-1997 (pre-9s) Dura-Ace derailers, whose actuation ratio was extremely similar (was considered compatible) to Suntour's 6s Accushift mech's.

Yet another exception would be Suntour's 6s, 3040 series shifters/derailers, which featured greater cable travel for each shift than other Accushift derailers (thus being more similar to Shimano's non-Dura-Ace derailers).

Perhaps Suntour's 3040 series parts are fully compatible with Shimano's 6s parts, I haven't actually tried this however!

Greater cable travel reduces the movement error (hysteresis) that is caused by the combined friction and elasticity along any given length of cable and housing.

So the trend toward derailers having lower cage-to-cable actuation ratio's was led initially around 1985 by the first Shimano 600 SIS gruppo, and later (and further) by various off-road component groups/derailers (beginning around 1998 with SRAM's so-called "1:1" or "ESP" derailers), where dirtier operating conditions had made the change toward narrower sprocket spacing problematic in terms of indexing accuracy.
The road gruppos have more recently followed suit with derailers having lower actuation ratios, beginning with SRAM's 10s "Exact Actuation" models, later followed by Shimano's 11s (and also 10s Tiagra) gruppos.