Russ Fitzgerald wrote:
>
> Okay, so I went and looked up that Marcel Berthet held the World Hour Record
> in 1907 and again in 1913. I note that the model number of the pedals in
> question is "23," and wonder if that could therefore indicate the year of
> introduction to the market.
>
> I'm curious about how many variants there are to these things. I know that
> there is a line drawing on Dale's site of what appears to be a VERY early
> version of these, the most wonderful pedals ever made.
>
> I know that I have two different variants. the ones I got a couple of years
> ago from a bike shop's junk pile have round hollow areas where they thread
> into the cranks and two wrench flats. The set I got this week, NOS but
> without box (alas!) have allen-key fittings and hexagonal areas for wrenches
> to fit.
>
> I seem to recall a discussion of these on the old list, but cannot find any
> of the material in my 'puter, so perhaps the discussion was prior to July 1,
> 1999. Among other things, one criticism is that the spindles were not as
> strong as one could wish, and would have been better had they been
> chrome-moly. At any rate, if anyone has any information they wish to
> contribute, lemme know. I'm thinking of writing something about them, and
> while I'll mostly focus on how well they work, it would be nice to have a
> tad more history to draw upon.
>
These were made from at least 1935 onwards* though I don't think there's any
evidence that they were made as early as 1923. The earlier ones had a
different style pedal cap with light knurling. Lyotard pedal models were all
numbered 460D were the double sided aluminium pedals so favoured by
cyclo-crossers for many years. The numbers don't have as far as I can see
anything to do with dates unlike some other French bits of kit. The allen
bolt/hexagon axles were a pretty late mod probably from the early 80s. The
earlier style of axle had two lengths of thread introduced sometime I think
in the 70s to be used with either steel cranks (short) or aluminium cranks
(long).
One problem that arose quite often in use was the top flat plate
becoming loose or detached from the rest of the body due to the riveting
being a bit duff.
* There was an ad in Cycling about this time which displayed the wide range
of Lyotard pedals available.
Hilary Stone