Thursday, April 16, 2009

Sugino Cranks, Christophe Toeclips, Etc.

My quest to acquire some vintage 110 BCD Sugino cranksets is beginning to pay off.

First, I swapped the frame for my decommissioned Trek 620, part of the loot from this included a curious Sugino Mighty Tour:



Apart from the non-factory paint, if you look closely at the pictures, you can see that the flute and the logo on the crankarms don't exactly match. On the drive side arm, the logo is a bit smaller and the flute is tapered compared to the non-drive side arm.

On the back side, we can see that the drive side arm is has the typical flute with "Mighty Tour" in raised letters, where the non-drive side has no flute or lettering.




Looking more closely, one can see that the drive side is NOS, never mounted:



Finally, the date codes don't match on the arms:



Being on different sides of the bike, no one would ever notice these details, but I'm officially looking for a perfect match, other than date code, for the drive side arm. It is pretty rare to find a set of these NOS, and I'm halfway there.

Swapping out some of the other parts from the Trek 620 yielded another Sugino Mighty Tour crankset:



This one is well used, but still very nice cosmetically. We can see that the 52 tooth big ring is drilled for a chainguard ring. Notice that these early triples used a 110 BCD innermost ring instead of the now commonplace 74 BCD:



These were just all stacked up on special long chainring bolt hardware. Also note that the non-driveside arm is engraved and emblazoned with "Mighty Tour". The outside flutes on this set seems more similar to the non-driveside arm fluting on the previously described set.

I then hopped over to The Bike Stand, which has a little vintage parts thing going on. Unlike some online vintage parts dealers, their prices, while not a giveaway, are fair and reasonable, items are as described, shipping is fast, and Steven Willis is an all around good guy to deal with - they get 5 Otakus (out of 5) on the vintage supplier rating scale.

I picked up a bottom bracket for the Mighty Tour, most of the parts are NOS, with the exception of the very cool adjustable cup, which still has lots of miles left in it.



The Mighty Tour/Mighty Compe cranks have the same taper as old NR/SR cranks, ISO, and spindle lengths, actually, the Mighty Compe cranksets overall were pretty much a copy of Campagnolo NR crankset, so this puts one in some competition with the vintage Campagnolo crowd for these parts.

Finally, I spent a little time putting some Velo Orange toe clip leathers on a nice old set of Christophe Special toe clips.



These leather covers are a wonderful little product that add a nice touch for only four dollars or so; I've taken to putting these on all my bikes. I've done enough of these that I can apply a set pretty quickly now, maybe 30 minutes total for all four covers.

I love the logos on these old clips:



That's all for now. Happy wrenching and riding.

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