Museum of Mountain Bike Art & Technology

Derailleurs

The derailleur has a couple of complicated tasks: keep the chain tensioned and shift the chain from cog to cog.  This sounds doable but then throw in mud, stream crossings, sticks and rocks and it gets more complicated.  At the beginning, Suntour had the upper hand in the derailleur market until Shimano created the Deore XT components with index shifting in 1987.  Suntour slowly faded away and Shimano had most of the market to itself until recently when SRAM has risen to the challenge.  In between Suntour and SRAM, Campagnolo and Sachs made half-hearted efforts and the American CNC companies of the mid 1990's made a stab at the high end market, but all of these effort failed.

	Joes with red center link and black knuckles	Pewter Pro Shift by Precision Billet
	SRAM 9.0 SL "Woody" limited edition	Silver Paul components with sticker