Despite being the spitting image of the 1973 Shimano Crane, the 1985 Sachs-Huret New Success was a huge step forward from its Huret antecedants. Crucially, for Sachs-Huret’s new flagship derailleur, it was all aluminium, only the rear parallelogram plate was a pressing the other parts were castings, it had a dropped parallelogram (although without any slant) and, finally, real care and attention had been paid to finish, with silky anodising and well chromed small parts.

It was a demonstration by Sachs that they were no longer interested in the ‘French tradition’ of (mostly odd) derailleur design, and were determined to compete with the best in the world - the Japanese.

This example is the short pulley cage version. Despite this it has a lot of capacity, however it strangely has shorter parallelogram plates (40mm) than the ‘touring’ version (which has 47mm plates).

A good effort - but it is hard to catch up a couple of decades in a single bound.

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1. •Brand: Sachs-Huret
   

2. •Country: Germany, manufactured in France
   

3. •Date of introduction: 1985
   

4. •Date of this example: unknown (no date code)
   

5. •Model no: 47.1D (Sutherland’s 6th edition)
   

6. •Weight: 223g
   

7. •Maximum cog: 30 teeth (Sutherlands 6th edition)
   

8. •Total capacity: 30 teeth (Sutherlands 6th edition)
   

9. •Pulley centre to centre: 50mm
   

10. •Index compatibility: friction
    

11. •Chain width: 3/32”
    

12. •Logic: top normal
    

13. •Pivots: two sprung pivots
    

14. •Material: aluminium
    

0218/G