About 2 years ago at Cirque, I was talking to David Cooper about the Spence Wolf cage mod. Turns out, Cooper had several of these made up so I bought one. They are still available from Dave Cooper to my knowlege.
Mike Schmidt Millington, New Jersey Sent from my iPhone
On May 6, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Jerome & Elizabeth Moos <jerrymoos@sbcglobal.net
> wrote:
>
> Well, it was worth asking. It turns out I had never actually seen a
> Spence Wolfe conversion before. But seeing the photos posted by
> several members, it is obvious that one cannot confuse a Spence
> Wolfe conversion with a factory-produced Rally, as the Spence cage
> plates look obviously homemade, or at least small shop-made. The
> only Rallys I had previously seen, including the one I own, have
> essentially the same cage as a factory Campy Rally, although the
> face plate is somtimes marked Nuovo Record.
>
> Now, it is still posible the ones with Rally cage plate were
> homebrews, using Rally plates to modify an NR. After all, one of
> the big advantages of Campy stuff In The Day was that small parts
> were readily available, so it would not have been difficult to
> obtain Rally cage plate to modify an NR RD. But the motivation for
> such Rally-era conversions would have been different from Spence
> Wolfe's. Spence or his customers obviously needed a wide range
> touring RD, and were not satisfied with the Huret Allvit or other
> wide range RD's then available, or were simply fans of Campy. So
> Spence improvised a product to meet a need the commercial products
> were not meeting. But the NR long cage conversions done after the
> Campy Rally was available would probably have been to save money by
> buying only the cage plates to modify an NR one already owned,
> rather than buying a whole new Campy Rally. After all, In The Day,
> Campy NR and Rally RD's were considered quite
> expensive, more than double the price of most competitors.
>
> I agree with Mike's assessment of the shifting of the "Japanese
> looking" Rally as being excellent, and I suspect it was far superior
> to the Rally that was basically a long cage NR, whether factory-
> produced of homemade.
>
> However, I do not believe the "Japanese looking" Rally was actually
> a Slant Parallelogram, but what I have usually called a Horizonal
> Parallelogram. It does look somewhat like a SunTour, in that rather
> than the long dimension of the parallelogram plates pointing down,
> as in the classic Drop Parallelogram, like Campy NR, the plates
> instead point forward, roughly parallel to the chainstays. But the
> SunTour RD's added an important additional feature the Rally
> lacked. Although pointed forward, the Rally parallelogram plates
> still lie in a vertical plane. But the plates of a SunTour "slant"
> inward. That is, their top edges are closer to the FW than their
> botton edges. As a result, as the parallelogram plates of a
> SunTour, and the jockey cage attached to their forward end, move
> inward, they also move downward at the same time. This maintains a
> more nearly constant distance between the up