Sachs Ergopower?

[Andrew McLaren]

I have a bike with the Sachs levers, the last generation, which were very nice Chorus-level ergo's with carbon bodies and the BB-system. The spacing is designed for the Sachs 8-speed freewheel but I have had excellent shifting on ShimaNO HG cassettes too. My understanding is that they will shift 7 or 8 speed, just slack off the upper limit screw on the rear derailleur to accomodate the full 8 speeds. I don't know the intricacies of the 7-speed Dura Ace hub as far as upgrading to an 8/9s HG freewheel body ( I think the 7s was Uniglide(?) but if you can do that its a cheap upgrade.

The Sachs ergolevers are a pretty interesting set-up, I understand they work with the old Mavic indexing derailleur model 840. They also index great with the older mavic cassette hub I have (model 571) which has it's own peculiar hooked-cog design. Of course the beauty of these things is that you can convert them to 9s Campagnolo very cheap. I've considered this but then again I have a few old 8s freewheel hubs still on the road, which have never shifted better on anything else....

Hope this helps, Andrew

[PKeen]

I have a set of the ergo levers too. A long time ago there was an article in Bicycle Guide Mag(now since defunct) that described these levers and their compatability with ShimaNO HG cassettes and old 105(green finish). It works but with a little fudging around thanks to the gentlemen at Branford bike. Here's the setup I ended up with:
Veloce 8 spd rear der
Sedisport chain (or 8 spd Campy)
105 hubs, HG-50 7 spd cassettes
105 front der. and crank.
The rear der had a problem with the capacity. And the levers are set up for 8 speeds so if you have an 8 speed set up it will work. I have 126 spaced hubs so I can't get 8 speed to fit between the dropouts. On a 7 speed setup you get an extra click but with the limit screws set on the rear der. nothing happens.
The deciding factor is the cassette spacing. Sheldon Browns' articles give more info http://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/index.html.
Good luck

[Allan]

The New Success group i had were the the ones which were first generation 7 speed models carrying the painted alloy main body for the levers.
From what i can remember mine worked well with all 7 speed ShimaNO UG drivetrains, and shifted fairly decent, of course this was done using the New success rear derailleur as well.
Since the later generation 7 speed type Dura Ace rear derailleurs became available as a 7/8 speed model, i could only assume that ShimaNO thought there were some issues with early units and changed something (spring tension, limits etc), on the derailleur to accomodate for the extra gear capacity as their first 8 speed units became available.
The spacings on the 7 versus 8 for ShimaNO was very close,as long as you used the UG cogs in an 8 speed stack, HG cogs were a bit thinner so the whole stack ended up being a bit narrower when all HG cogs were set up.
This slight variation caused some cog line up issues in either end of the derailleurs travel if you tried to set it up to be perfectly aligned from one side. Needless to say, the ideal fit ended up being that you would align the middle cog and let the fuzzy areas slowly fall off center to the outside cogs, not perfect at all,but with the wide chain and the indexing fiddled with, it worked.
You could not however just buy an 8 speed cassette body for your 7 speed ShimaNO hub and change it out, since the new 8 speed units now used a different thread pitch and bore for screwing the longer cassette body into the 8 speed hub shell, you had to now change the complete hub unit as well. ShimaNO were thinking too.
It was a time when we were all much younger and things were simple yet complicated, and we all had fun riding like we still do now.