cudak888 

SOLD

Do you like clear anodizing?

Do you like beautiful things?

Do you pray at an alter to Tullio every day?

Do you like swearing at the alter of Tullio every day?

If so, look no further than these first-generation Synchro shifters, the shifters that made it known around the globe that Campagnolo was still the king of ambiguous shifting and that asymmetry was the way of the future...until Shimano showed up and scuppered Campagnolo's master plan to dominate the world with gorgeous, clear-anodized mediocrity. Think about it - had the revolution continued, Campagnolo themselves would have ushered in had a second golden age of professional bike racing, featuring nothing less than Real MAN ® equipment like Cambio Corsa II and saddles made of solid rock (clear anodized, of course). Those wimps on New Nivex would have had their Heines handed back to them.

So what do you get in this prize package? Well, you get a left-hand, front derailer lever...which is normal, and normal is boring. All you really have to know is that it should always be in the up position, because real professionals only make their watts on the 54t chainring (53t is for wimps). Oh, and it has all the nylon doo-dads and it actually works as it should. What a letdown.

Then there's the right hand Synchro lever, lithe and elegant, the very silhouette of a tailored Armani chesterfield coat...with an elephant inside the right pocket. And the elephant's head is sticking out too (at least, we think that's what it is) to reveal the timelessly questionable indexing lever, so named because every time you use it, you consider flipping through your index of cards in your Rolodex to find the number for Mel Pinto Imports to ask how on earth they managed to import such a fine piece of broke-a-brac. "Call back" they said, ergo piss off until Ergo.

This fine representation carries a yellow indexing ring, so colored to represent Campagnolo's approach to besting Shimano at the time and is missing the all-important threaded thrust washer stud and thrust washer shown as #7 and #8 in the diagram below, rendering it absolutely useless at the moment. But that's not really too important, given that this is its normal state when new.

You too can become a member of the fine Italian cognoscenti by buying these levers. If you don't, I'll send the mafia after you.

Send $20 of your fine American dollars, plus another $10 for Tony to load these into your very own hijacked private 767 freighter, and they will be on your doorstep, minus severed horses heads, in about three to four days.

tmnguuyen 

I'll buy that just for the poetry alone. PM sent.

cocoabeachcrab 

i was thinking about buying it just to have something worse to deal with than giving my grand daughter driving lessons!

tmnguuyen 

Good luck with the driving lesson. I don't have plans on putting this into use, just $30 paper weight that's i'm after and my curiosity on seeing this physically and not just reading about it.

jdawginsc 

Do they actually ever work?

oneclick 

I have them on this bike, it rides and shifts just fine, thankyou.

It does have all the right bits for this to work, including the Regina freewheel, and all I had to do was connect all the bits and adjust the cable.
It hits every gear just like it's supposed to. Maybey I was lucky...

jdawginsc 

I think the issue was when the right bits were not available and combined.

The rear derailleurs has to play nicely with the correct freewheel for it to work I have so heard.

Its not like SunTour indexing was much better.

shoota 

Ok i'm dumb, what does the extra little lever do?

cudak888 

Disengages and engages indexing. Same as turning Shimano's SIS D-ring.

-Kurt

tmnguuyen 

I don’t know either and that the reason I bought it. Waiting for education on the crapagnolo part

shoota 

Having had a syncro set (later gen than this one), you're gonna be using friction mode lol!

shoota 

I swear I've read this like five times and I have no idea what you said lol

cudak888 

"It's shaped like a coat that has a hatbox in it's pocket, and the thingus that changes from indexing to friction is vaguely phallic. It works so lousy that you feel like calling one of the best known importers of Campagnolo parts in the US and asking them why they carry this garbage. They respond by telling you your SOL...at least, until Campagnolo Ergo brifters hit the scene and the company can copy SunTour rear derailers."

-Kurt

shoota 

Thanks for the translation! Now I get it!

mountaindave 

Had to see what a Syncro lever was and boy am I glad I did!

sbarner 

Concern about indexing going south and ruining a ride or race prompted manufacturers of early systems to hedge their bets and design in an override to revert to friction shifting. The most "advanced" of these allowed you to make the change without stopping, and Campy's was the easiest as all you had to do was to pull the secondary lever up to go into friction mode. One concern with racers was that you never knew what freewheel might be on a replacement wheel and it might not even have the same number of cogs. Sadly, another of Campy's design goals--to make the shifters compatible with their earlier non-indexed rear derailleurs, doomed them to a finicky system that was difficult to get working right. Not impossible, as proven by the above example of gen-1 Syncro with the non-indexed Victory mech, but certainly a bigger challenge than Shimano's system, which a scrawny teenager who had just smoked a bowl in back of the shop could get working like a charm. Really--I saw this very thing happen.

Syncro II changed the internals, ditching the lever for a ring that you would turn, more like Shimano's lock-out, while also introducing the famous "G-springs", which improved the feel. It also changed the diameter of the barrel which increased the amount of cable pull, breaking backwards compatibility and requiring a new series of derailleurs. The last versions of Syncro got rid of the lock-out entirely. Ergoshifters were introduced after the switch to Syncro II, so none of them are compatible with derailleurs made before the early 1990s.

Unlike Shimano, Campy tried to build in compatibility with multiple manufacturer's chains and freewheels, as well as different numbers of cogs, so you had to get the right insert for your setup and make sure that everything was perfect. To the rider who just wanted to shift their bicycle as if it was any other vehicle, Campy was poop and Shimano was king, with Suntour flailing around somewhere in between.