Ah, now it makes sense. In effect, the "etoile" is a tandem piece, essentially a toothless outer ring, and you use two inners for your chainrings, thus gaining extra clearance to the arm. Ingenious! Of course this means you can't use the normal TA outer rings so the monster size rings (54 teeth plus) are out, but as the inner rings go up to 53 teeth, this should work for normal wheeled single bikes.
And you would need to find extra long chainring bolts to run a triple. These bolts were made at one time as these cranks could be set up as quads, or else you might be able to use the extra long fittings used used for making triples out of 110 bolt circle cranks (Sugino Mighty Tour) or (back to the original topic) Stronglight 99s. Of course those came is sets of five, and you'll need six for the TA rings. And I think the TA spacers aren't quite the same size, so beware of the chainrings not lining up exactly right. And I don't know what BB spindle would be long enough to run a triple set up this way, 127mm? Could be a lot of work to use a TA crank with a modern derailleur, but who says anything about this hobby is sensible?
Tom Adams, Shrewsbury NJ 2/4
Mark Stonich <mark@bikesmithdesign.com> wrote:
I think the "Etoile" may just be a tandem connecting ring adaptor. That's
what I used on my Taylor. There's good shot of it at
http://www.bikesmithdesign.com/
I wasn't looking for more clearance, though it's nice. I only had 52t outers. Since I spin short cranks, I wouldn't need 52t falling off a cliff, in a vacuum, with a tailwind.
In my case I ended up with a perfect chainline using a TA triple spindle. You would have to find something longer to run 3 rings.
At 3/11/2005 10:38 AM -0800, Fred Rafael Rednor wrote:
>Mes amis,
> I believe the "etoile" adapter works like this. (Tom, this
>might have been what you were saying but I can't be sure I
>understood):
> You install the adapter just as you would install a normal
>TA outisde position chainring - i.e. it's affixed to the small
>5-hole BCD positions, directly on the crank. You now mount
>what is normally a middle position ring (80mm BCD?) to the 6
>tips of the "etoile", on the _inside_ surface of the adapter.
>Of course, I could be wrong about the 80mm part of that. It
>might be that the outside BCD of the adapter is 116mm pattern
>used with the "randonneur" chainrings. Anyway...
> Since the inside ring(s) bolt to the outside ring - rather
>than to the crank - the position of all the rings is now
>shifted a few millimeters away from the crank. The fun part
>now is deciding which bolt pattern to use for the inside
>chainring(s). I think no matter which BCD is used by the
>adapter, you now may have the ability to mix 80mm and 116mm
>rings. I just don't have enough TA rings on hand to know how
>many variations are available...
> And people wonder why TA went to removable spiders on their
>newest cranksets.
> Best regards,
> Fred Rednor - Arlington, Virginia, USA
Mark Stonich; Minneapolis Minnesota http://mnhpva.org http://bikesmithdesign.com
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