Kinetics - Suntour Derailleurs

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Suntour U:

The oldest Suntour in the museum at the moment, and a bit of an odd one. The body and cage are the same as the common GT, from the mid ‘70s, but the reversed bracket is for fitting to track dropouts.
Since track frames are usually too narrow to fit many derailleur sprockets, it can’t have been a big seller!

Vx and Vx-GT:

Newer versions, with aluminium knuckles. One common touch with Suntour mechs is the open cage, to let you thread the chain without undoing it...

Superbe Tech:

Probably Suntour’s most innovative and beautiful derailleur - and the company’s first glorious failure. The 1983 Tech has a completely enclosed linkage instead of the open parallelogram other mechs use. The cable routing was clever too - straight along the chainstay with no loops of cable.
That clever linkage would be the downfall, though - it wore and broke very quickly, and was very difficult to fix - so the Tech only lasted for a year.

Mountech:

The second glorious failure ;-) Also from 1983, the Mountech was the world’s first derailleur specifically designed for off-road use. The cage has two pivots - one in the normal place, under the right-hand bolt in the top pic. The other is built into the top jockey wheel. Both are spring-loaded (unlike the Huret Duopar), and the effect is to give the Mountech a massive capacity.
Again, though, durability was the problem - the seals around the top pulley and pivot were not up to off-road use, and the Mountech was withdrawn quickly.
One nerdy neat touch - the bolt through the hole in the parallelogram is the cable clamp - so the cable runs inside the parallelogram - elegant.

Superbe Pro:

This is the last incarnation of Suntour’s top racing mech, and the pinnacle of Suntour’s engineering. All aluminium, with the angled parallelogram that Suntour invented, hidden springs, sealed bearing jockeys, and incredibly smooth pivots.

When Maeda-Suntour became SR Suntour in 1995, the tooling was sold for scrap...

The Important Small Print: All of this website is ©1995-2008 by Kinetics. Don't even think of pinching bits without asking. All prices, specifications and other information are subject to change without notice. I do my best to keep this site correct, but sometimes I get things wrong, and sometimes things change very quickly so I cannot keep up.


	Last updated on: 19 November 2008


	Kinetics, 54 Switchback Road, Bearsden, Glasgow G61 1AE, UK tel/fax: 0141 942 2552, email: mail@kinetics-online.co.uk Opening hours: 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

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