Dave Staub wrote (giving me an excuse to comment on the thread):
Thanks for the intro date on the Rallye derailleur. I think the story about the GT replacement with a Crane was correct in that Schwinn probably ran out of GTs, and everyone was certainly happy to get a Crane as a replacement.
The Gran Trashmo came as close to threatening our marriage as anything so trivial could possibly come. It was some time about 1973, and I had scored one of those boat anchors somehow. Pride of place meant it went on the tandem, a very close-coupled Schwinn Town & Country. Impoverished as we were, the T&C used a conventional Campy DT shifter on the back, since we had no reasonable source for tandem cables. Susan, try as she might, kept blowing the shifts. Reduced to tears; she's a good rider. She finally said, "Harvey, you shift it!" Sooo, I started reaching back to shift it. Didn't work for me either. I have one still, hanging on the wall with the Campy one-pulley Sport derailleur and a plunger-type front derailleur, as examples of some of the real turkeys our sport has seen.
Some good came of all this: I learned to listen a bit better, and we've use stoker shifting on the tandem ever since.
harvey sachs mclean va
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