DISRAELI GEARS
SunTour suffered from a serious but very creative case of multiple personality disorder. On the one hand it created exquisite, refined and delicate jewels like the Competition and the first generation Cyclones. On the second hand it created madly eccentric designs of freakish originality like the Skitter and SMS Max. And on the third hand it was all about raw power, brutal strength and primal simplicity. This last, and possibly most genuine, tradition gave us the SunTour 888 Wide pull chain derailleurs and the SunTour Honor and SunTour GT.
The SunTour Honor was the mid range, steel workhorse of the SunTour range for two decades. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t light, it wasn’t sophisticated, being steel it was a touch noisy and it certainly wasn’t going to impress your europhile friends in the local cycling club. But it was cheap, strong, reliable and effective.
This, pleasantly rusty, example is the fifth (and possibly final) style of SunTour Honor, and it shows signs of how SunTour was starting to struggle. There is a tackiness about the branding, SunTour has abandoned its signature ‘Quick Cage’ (possibly in response to misplaced consumer safety legislation) and has moved to a more Shimano like pulley cage. Somehow it is a tentative, compromised design, a shadow of the earlier more confident Honors.
