rgvg

Possibly from here. I saw this on instagram today (Richard Sachs). I thought it was interesting. I'm just quoting straight from the post.

"In 1979, I was the mechanic for the Shimano International Team men’s squad for the Red Zinger Bicycle Classic. Twice after that, I helped the Shimano Women’s Team when the event was renamed the Coors International Bicycle Classic. These were good times and memories still linger. The experiences gave me insights into group dynamics, pecking orders, and of course, keep equipment prepared for the daily grind. It’s all very different than just working on a bicycle for an eager client.
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The original connection came through my pal, Jack Nash (RIP). We met in 1972 when he was working at Shaw’s Hike and Bike in Stowe and I was briefly at The Ski Rack in Burlington. Years later, he and Warren opened Onion River Sports, a Montpelier store that sold my frames. Jack and I raced with and against each for many years. It was he who tapped me for the Colorado trip. It wouldn’t be the first, or last, time he gifted me a golden opportunity.
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Early on in my relationship with the Japanese firm, head engineer Keizo Shimano ordered one of my bicycles. It was odd because I was asked to supply components that, in my estimation, were the best available for touring use. It was a hodgepodge of Huret Duopar derailleurs, TA triple cranks, Campagnolo 1037A pedals, Mafac cantilevers, an Eclipse rack and bag system, Phil hubs laced to who-knows-what wheel products, an Ideale saddle, etcetera. A no-holds-barred ordeal. But why? Actually, I never asked.
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A year later I found out that the bicycle was used for reasons other than to provide riding enjoyment for Mr. Shimano. His company wanted to make inroads into the burgeoning touring market here. The bicycle was the template for ideas and inspiration for the Deore group, introduced soon after."

52telecaster

Very cool.

USAZorro

Sooooo... almost, but not quite made by little elves in a hollow tree?

curbtender

So, Deore is Japanese for deer. Did the deer head derailleur come first or the deore stamped components?

nlerner

Huh? They could have simply sourced those components on their own? But they wanted to see what RS would choose? Wasn’t Rene Herse choosing similar components in the 1970s and was already an inspiration to Japanese mfgs? I don’t see how a RS frame would end up as an inspiration for a touring group.

Trakhak

Perhaps they were interested in what up-to-date choices a respected U.S. frame builder would make. The U.S. market would have been of great interest to Japanese component manufacturers.

clubman 

The custom frame was likely as interesting as his parts choices. I wonder who has it now?

Schweinhund

Without the internet as a assistant, I could see how RS's "finger on the pulse" and "unfettered knowledge" would be of interest, cheaper than consulting rates too. Just pay him to build what he considers best.

nlerner

Wait, the other thing that doesn’t make sense in RS’s version of history is that Shimano Crane, released at least five years before this story took place, was the precursor to Deore. My 1974 Norman Fay, a custom build from the UK, came stocked with Crane GS RD, Deore FD, TA pro-vis-5 crankset, MAFAC cantilever brakes.

repechage

Shimano knew how their gear worked, a USA domestic market opinion that did not use a Crane would be of use for evaluation.
‘Maybe easier than a focus group as it gave a physical example to evaluate.

Repack Rider

In 1980 the company that sold tires to Gary Fisher and me in our two-man company "MountainBikes," bought four of our bikes, "for the guys at the HQ."

Six months later the reverse engineered Specialized Stumpjumper appeared on the market (simultaneous with the equally reverse engineered Univega Alpine Sport).

The Golden Boy 

To my way of thinking the RS component list was among the best or the very best of its time. Or at least viewed to be the best... But touring/ATB stuff really got leagues better within 5-7 years

Realistically- the Deore group doesn't have a whole lot to do with the component list- aside from it being really good stuff for its time:

the best available for touring use. It was a hodgepodge of Huret Duopar derailleurs: Neither the original Deore nor the XT have anything resembling the Duopar RD- which looked more like a long cage Arabesque than Duopar, the Crane or even Suntour V-GT Luxe.

TA triple cranks, Campagnolo 1037A pedals, There were other triples around by the time Deore came out- and the big holed pedal things was a hallmark of neither TA nor Campagnolo. The Sugino AT and the Shimano FC-6206 became THE gold standard of the 80s triples.

Mafac cantilevers, The original Deore group didn't have cantilevers. The closest were a part of the 600 group.

an Eclipse rack and bag system, Not a part of any Shimano group.

Phil hubs laced to who-knows-what wheel products, Deore, XT, 600 or even DA weren't similar to Phil hubs.

an Ideale saddle, etcetera. A no-holds-barred ordeal. But why? Actually, I never asked. Again- not a part of any Deore/XT/600 touring/ATB group.

The Golden Boy 

Sorry about that Charlie... did you ever get *anything* out of that?

On top of having your design work stolen--then you have such a saturation that your company name becomes synonymous with the product that you lose the trademark/IP of your name...

Repack Rider

I had the greatest bicycle adventure of the 20th Century. My friends and I changed the world.
A lot of people have money. Very few have that.

Trakhak

Amen. That's got to be the greatest and most deserved mic drop moment I've ever seen.

dddd

I think it would be normal business practice for a company to need to be familiar with competing companies and their products before nailing down their final design on it's way to production, and that their marketing people also would need to be fully up to date on what products are coming to market.

So how better than to evaluate competing products than to order one?

In the business world, competing companies go after their competition all of the time, whether it's a completely new kind of vacuum cleaner or a new kind of bicycle.
Patents need to be respected, but it's full-steam-ahead on copying products as much as needed, and (often patented) improvements may go along with that.

Common too for the new competitor to outsource production to Asia in order to perhaps under-cut the existing market leader's pricing.

The entire process of acquiring, copying and sourcing can happen over a surprisingly short time these days.

Around 1990, I designed a charging/power/multiplex circuit board for a mass-produced batch of self-powered, LED EXIT signs while working for a lighting company in NY, and when the boxes of boards came in I was alerted by the shipping/receiving department.
When I arrived in the shipping department, the guy was looking at one of the boards and noticed that a competing company's name logo had literally been tin-printed onto the exact board that I had designed. The logo-modified "black market" boards had hilariously been shipped to us by accident.
As surprised as I was by this discovery, I was perhaps more surprised to find that business seemed to continue on as normal between our company's management and the board supplier that we had contracted to build the boards for us, as apparently the "unauthorized use" problem simply got negotiated away.

JohnDThompson 

The so-called "deer head" components were the original Deore components.

RCMoeur 

Having personally been involved in a lot of behind-the-scenes activity involving US cycling infrastructure for the past quarter-century, I can certainly respect and admire your experiences. No fame or fortune here, but a satisfaction that much was accomplished, even if it didn't always turn out exactly as expected.

ramzilla

Deore derailleurs are my "go to" part for fixing bikes. Don't matter if it's a road bike, mountain bike or, hybrid. Deore derailleurs rock!

cudak888 

There's an interesting comparison here:

Charlie and Gary's story is collaborated beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor do they have anything to prove at this point by saying so; the story of history itself proved their place.

On the other hand, Dickie Sachs - who still has a business to market - has pulled yet another historical nugget out of his bottom bracket that isn't easily collaborated and reads more like correlation as causation if you start to examine the claim a bit more.


P.S.: Shimano wouldn't have been so incompetent to have made component decisions entirely on the opinion of a single framebuilder from a single country. However, Sachs' quote can be read two ways:

"I was asked to supply components that, in my estimation, were the best available for touring use."

You can either read that as Sachs making the decision for the components, or Sachs commenting upon Keizo Shimano's component requests for the bike to be built around. Why should it be the former? If anything, Shimano would gain insight from what a framebuilder would design in a touring bike, not in that person's choice of components. The only exception to this would be - perhaps - to figure out how many of their components might be selected by a US framebuilder, if Sachs was the one making the component choices.

Remember, Shimano was already kicking everyone around the moon with the Crane GS in 1973. They were way too far ahead of everyone in 1979 - at least, in terms of technology if not market share - to even bother giving the Duopar a second glance. They had probably dissected it every way past Sunday by then.

P.P.S.: dmarkun recently cited a particular paragraph of Frank Berto's Sunset of Suntour which really puts Shimano's approach during this time into perspective: A major survey of the US market in the early 1980's - long before the internet - on a scale large enough that their conclusions perfectly predicted where they could take the market. And they did.

https://www.mechanischehirngespinnst...of_suntour.pdf

Put simply, Shimano weren't twiddling their thumbs like a bunch of independent fanboys hanging on the thoughts and ideas of whoever held the I'm Confente and Just as Overhyped title of the era. I'm sure that the Sachs was one of many test mules. I wouldn't be surprised if Toei might have a similar story from 1979.

-Kurt

RCMoeur 

With all respect to those who have poured their lives into their work, I think very few major innovations are the sole result of one person's work. Even Messrs. Kelly and Fisher were part of a group of other innovators that collectively revolutionized bicycling individually and as a group, and the record reflects this. And Messrs. Sinyard and Lawee having the resources to stea, er, adapt and mass market a concept whose time had come helped to advance the state of the art and bring many innovations not only to the trail but to the road to a much wider audience.

Pardon me for a personal digression: in my career, there have been several standard US traffic signs where I was the person fortunate enough to do much of the final design and layout work, even if it was FHWA that published the final official designs. I'm happy to look at my role influencing and designing devices that have been and will be used across the country for decades. But in every one of these situations, I was and am simply building on the work of others who had identified the need, developed the concept, and who would perform the evaluations. Even the signs I feel the strongest "sense of ownership" on were still a collaborative effort, and I can't claim any super-special role in their creation.

Partially because of this, I have a tendency to view any one person claiming a crucial role in the development of large-scale innovations with a bit of "that's great, but who else was involved?" And in this case, we're fortunate that the history of mountain biking was so thoroughly documented and many of the initial innovators are still around and participating in forums such as BF.

Oh, wait - this is about Deore, isn't it? Yes, they've been great components for 40+ years, even if they've slid a bit down the Shimano pecking order. And I do have a near-complete deer-head group I salvaged off a doomed frame that is awaiting the right build, and a Deore rear deraillerur has reliably served our tandem's tough needs for 28 years.

RCMoeur 

Looking in Berto's "The Dancing Chain", the original Deore (big pedal thread similar to Dura-Ace AX, unique crank) came out in 1981, whereas deer-head (conventional touring / early MTB group) came out in 1983. This agrees with my long-ago recollections. I could dig out the deer-head parts I have somewhere to check date codes, but not tonight.