Just before Thanksgiving, I had a rather strange incident on my daily commu te. There is one rather steep hill for which I usually shift to the lowe st gear. The last couple of weeks I have been riding an early 80's Assen macher custom touring bike with an Avocet/Ofmega triple and a Campy Rally R D. So I shifted to the inner chainring. The FD overshifted and droppe d the chain, which proceeded to wedge firmly between the inner ring and fra me. Evidently the momentum of the wheel drove the RD back and up. I l ooked down to find the Rally RD snapped clean in half, with most of the det ached RD hanging from the chain ABOVE the DO. Anyone ever experienced a failure like this? In 35 years of cycling, I've never seen anything like it. The whole thing occurred within a couple of seconds of dropping the chain. The section of the Rally body between the parallelogram and the upper DO was what failed.
I had to walk the bike 2 km back home. Forunately, I had another Rally RD, so I replaced the broken one. The only other damage was that the ha nger tab on the DO was toed in slightly. I easily corrected that with a TA chainring straightening tool, which seems much better suited to straight ening gear hangers than chainrings. Wound up being 2 1/2 hours late to w ork.
So anyone have a Campy Rally body only for sale? Or an otherwise trashed one with a sound body and parallelogram?
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Big Spring, Texas, USA