I don't think the Jubilee shifted all that badly by the European standards of the time. About like a Campy NR. The problem was the Jubilee was fragile, while the Campy was virtually indestructible. Of course, it was inferior to the all-alloy Simplex Super LJ, with its spring-loaded upper pivot, and far inferior to the slant parallelogram SunTours. Huret did make some good derailleurs in the Duopar and the Success and later models, but these were perhaps too late, as the Japanese were alway two steps ahead of them. Oddly, when you look at the Huret derailleurs on Louison Bobet's bikes in the 50's, they seem to be at least as advanced a design as the Simplex or Campy designs of the time, but somehow Huret didn't make much progress for the next 20 years, though they did at least avoid the adventure into Delrin which was part of the undoing of Simplex.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Houston, TX
> On Saturday, March 8, 2003, at 06:26 PM, Stephen Barner wrote:
> > I always wondered what it was about the Huret Alvits and Sveltos that
> > made
> > them shift so bad.
>
> Bad design and worse execution, the Success was the first deraileur
> they made that I felt shifted well. I do have 3 Jubilee's in my bins
> cause I think the look cool. Check out
> http://www.yellowjersey.org/
>
> This leads me to think about why people like Herse and Singer who
> seemed to never be satisfied with the quality of the parts available
> for their bikes spec'ed Huret deraileurs. When national pride
> outweighs your need for good shifting it's pretty sad. It's not like
> these guys didn't have the skill to make their own copies of the Campy
> or Simplex setups at the time. As a mechanic it just boggles my mind.
> Jan (or other Francophiles) any thoughts on this?
> thanks,
> Brandon"monkeyman"Ives
> SB, CA