Dale wrote:
I believe C-Record is sort of aesthetically "pretty" in a heavy handed and clunky way but I feel it is a denigration of what the old man stood for and it demonstrates Valentino's immature and unwise leap into "doing his own thing"... an effort which came off rather badly.?
To wit:
- Rear derailleurs that had sprung upper & lower pivots but worked only marginally better that GS/NR/SR but with shorter range and were over weight too.
Dale,
This is a very common misunderstanding. So common, in fact, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Campy's own people were guilty of perpetuating the myth. The upper spring on the first generation C-Rec rear der was not active during shifts. It's only purpose was to hold the parallelogram back during a wheel change. It is still not clear to me whether it was supposed to make the parallelogram pull back automatically, or was supposed to hold the parallelogram in place after the mechanic swung it back. The reason this is unclear is because there were and are so few of them out there, and they all seemed to feel a little different once bolted to the dropout. I lean toward the belief that the mechanic was supposed to pull the parallelogarm back, drop the wheel out, put the new wheel in, and then move the parallelogram back into place. In effect, there's very little benefit. On the other hand, the mechanism opens the possibility that the rider will head down the road with the body swung way back, which obviously degrades that "famous" Campy shifting quality. I have seen a guy on the start line of a race with his C-rec rear cocked back like this.
The common fate of this system was for the stop plate to break. I have noticed that there are two types of stop plate, one cast from brittle grey metal and one that was machined from stainless steel. I suspect the later was the warranty replacement part. After about one year of production, the spring was deleted and a body angle adjuster set screw was added. Later, the slot was added to the pulley cage, then the logo was changed. There were also two types of pulley bolt (two piece, then one piece), though I'm unsure when that came in. The early version with the the spring is now very hard to find on good contion, whether the plated is cracked or not. I've seen nice examples sell for over $300.
Tom Dalton Bethlehem PA, USA
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