Monday, November 23, 2009

Sachs New Success WTF?

The Bicycle Guide that provided last week's Mavic article also provided this gem:



Sach's New Success group was built from parts they sourced from various other companies - Modolo did the brakes for this group, and Campagnolo would later produce cranks, derailleurs and a Sachs model of Ergopower for them. Sachs provided the hubs for the group. Nice looking stuff, and something a little different.

This advertisement for the group from 1990 has something a little odd in it. Spot it yet?



In the upper right hand corner of the group picture is this beauty. A 6 speed freewheel + internally geared hub? Definitely a 'WTF' moment.

Anyone know if these actually existed? If you have any info, let me know!

7 comments:

The Shed Master said...

It's called the "Orbit" hub. Yes they exist, gotta check the 'Bay for 'em.

cycloped said...

i'm not completely sure, but think they were used with the "commander" deraileur, where the link for the internal gearing went through the mounting-bolt or something. also sometimes on the bay.
btw: i'm a big fan of your great blog
greetings from leipzig

cycloped said...

me again, told rubbish.
chek this out:

http://www.disraeligears.co.uk/Site/Sachs-Huret_Commander_derailleur.html

bye!

Skippy said...

I've been thinking of doing a New sucess on a Girini frame i've got. looks like nice stuff but i'm leaning toward Mavic now.

Here's one of the hubs.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Sachs-Rear-Bicycle-Hub-Commander-Orbit-2-X-6_W0QQitemZ200411330213QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item2ea97236a5

Anonymous said...

i impulse-bought one of these hubs a couple years ago via a CR (ibob?) lister that found a pile of them in australia, and later found a matching thumbshifter for it on ebay. i never built it up tho. it kind of makes no sense; all the ostensible downsides of derailleurs (maintenance) and hub gears (internal resistance).

also, the 0.74 low-gear ratio, which i think was chosen to mimic a 39 when paired with a 53t ring, combined with the poorly chosen 12/15/17/20/24/28 cogs gives a pretty redundant set of gears. i wound up setting up my liquor store bike with a 12/34 freewheel and a single 46t ring instead, which gave me about the same range and number of useful gears.

i've thought about using it to increase the gear range on a two-chainring bike, sort of emulating a triple, but really it's more like a quad... a 42/52 crank and this hub would give you a 24-speed bike with ratios from 30 to 117 inches, and a shift pattern that would drive you batty. maybe one day...

David Belcher said...

The multiple sprocket/internal hub gear combination is genuine; the Sachs-Huret brochure for (I think) 1995 featured a number of groups with this option, though the road groupsets such as New Success didn't seem to be amongst them - those which were offered were mostly aimed at leisure and off-road riding. Sadly I no longer have the catalogue in question so it's difficult for me to verify this by way of producing a scanned page or two.

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