At 11:09 PM -0400 5/16/09, Charles T. Young wrote:
>I thought it odd also but in an off-list discussion with Wayne, he
>pointed out that Chuck Schmidt's timeline has it so:
>
>"1973
>The last year the Record rear derailleur is available. "
>
>I had assumed from the absence in the 1967 Catalog 15 that it was
>supplanted at that time by the Nuovo Record.
>
>If so, the NR must have gutted sales of the Record. How else to
>explain their relative rarity if they were in production for approx.
>10 years? Sales may have been largely confined to those distrustful
>of the durability of a largely alloy unit.
The "available" Record derailleurs probably were left-over stocks... I used to work with a mid-size company making model railroads, which worked very similarly to Campagnolo. Products that stayed in the program longest were the ones that sold the poorest.
Mid-size companies like Campagnolo don't make every part "just in time," but they set up their assembly lines to make a few parts at a time. When they have a year's worth or so, they put them in a warehouse, and switch their assembly line to the next part. However, it is hard to predict demand, and so sometimes, a year's worth of supply sells out in 3 months, at other times, it sits on the shelves for decades, especially if it is superseded by a new and better product.
So if Campagnolo made 5000 Record derailleurs in 1966, there may have been 500 Records left in 1967, when the Nuovo Record was introduced and the Record became obsolete. Rather than throw out the 1000 shiny, new Records, Campagnolo kept them on the order sheets. Being obsolete, they may have taken 6 years to sell.
At some point, when a product sells so poorly that the warehousing/inventory costs are higher than the expected profit from sales, there is either a "blowout sale" or the parts go to scrap. Others stay on the shelves for decades, which is why you sometimes can find NOS parts at factories or distributors.
It would be interesting to know whether the 1973 year date means "available from the factory" or "available from distributors." The first-generation TA cranks with the pear-shaped axle were available in the U.S. for quite a while after TA stopped offering them in France, simply because some distributors had left-over stocks. But the factory had switched to the square taper long ago...
Jan Heine
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