I have been meaning to get an announcement out to the CR list but I have been so busy this has been on the back burner. As Mike Schmidt correctly says, I have produced replica Spence Wolf derailleur modification kits for NR derailleurs. I have about 20 kits in stock. Mark Petry and Nelson Miller were good enough to provide an original sample to copy. The kit includes two chrome plated side cages and two large aluminum guide washers that go around the jockey wheels. $50 plus $5 shipping. David Cooper Chicago, IL
On May 6, 2009, at 11:13 AM, Mike Schmidt wrote:
> 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