Can't compete with the poetic reflections on our passion for bike collecting, so I'll return to a mundane detail of classic gear.
Anyone ever noticed an extreme variation in the actual diameter of Lyotard pedal axles? I just did a trade with Harvey Sachs in which I traded him a pair of English threaded Lyotard mod 23 Berthets for a French threaded pair. What I seem to have discovered is that with Lyotard, "French" and "English" are relative terms. Harvey's pedals were puzzling at first, as they were marked R & L on the wrench flats, which I thought always meant English thread, while D & G is always (I thought) French thread and no marks usually French. Yet Harvey had measured the actual spindle diameter at slightly under 14 mm, and I verified this with digital calipers, getting 13.98 mm versus 13.88 for the unmarked presumably French Lyotard mod 460Ds which I intended to replace with the Berthets on a recently acquired early 70's Gitane TdF.
I had three pairs of Berthets marked R & L, one of which was to go to Harvey. Just to be sure one wasn't French despite the markings, like Harvey's, which I thought to be an extreme rarity, I measured all the spindles with the digital calipers. Amazingly, The spindles varied from 13.96 mm to 14.15 mm. One pair was actually a bit smaller than Harvey's. In most cases the left and right spindle diameters varied measurably, in one case by 0.14 mm.
This leads me to believe that the R & L marked spindles are in fact intended to be English, which would nominally be 14.29 mm, but the manufacturing variance is so great that it isn't unusual to find a pair with actual diameter under 14 mm, the nominal French size.
Anyone else ever observed this variance in Lyotard spindles? I believe the mod 45A and 45D use the same spindle as most Berthets, so I would expect them to show the same sort of variance. What about Campy, Zeus and Japanese pedals? Somehow I would expect those to be more consistent than Lyotard, but I could be wrong.
The moral of the story is that it is probably best to measure the actual diameter of Lyotard spindles before deciding where to use them, regardless what is marked on the flats.
This may also shed some light on the recent TA pedals, which come with a puzzling note in the box (in French of course) that they are BSC but also work with metric (or is it the other way round?) It would appear that while an ideal spindle diameter is perhaps 0.10 to 0.15 mm smaller than nominal (presumably the crank threads are closer to nominal), a 14 mm actual spindle or something very close to that will work in both, just a bit looser than typical in English cranks, while snugger than usual in French, which it fact is my experience with these recent TA's. This probably works best with alloy cranks, where installing these pedals in French cranks in effect taps out the crank slightly, which would be more difficult with steel cranks. Another reason TA can "play the cracks" in the specs like this is that the French thread pitch of 1.25 mm is 20.3 TPI, damn close to the English 20 TPI. For all this to work for TA, they will have to have much closer manufacturing tolerances than Lyotard, although that probably isn't too difficult to do.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Houston, TX