Functionality.
The way this dérailleur is designed to work is unlike any other of its era. With hindsight and the benefit of having dismantled hundreds of gear mechs over many years, it's hard to understand the mindset of those designers who had come up with such complexity to turn this and its associated dérailleurs into working models and into mass production. There's intricate plastic pieces and no end of shims and washers and that strange cable guide appendage. It was designed to bring simple one click shifting to the rider. The dérailleur itself has utilised an inline parallelogram which is highly unusual for the company. Then there's an intricate mechanism that both sets the pulley cage under five or six gears whilst rotating the body in clockwise steps to accommodate the bigger sprockets. It's quite difficult to get your head around understanding how it works.
The front face of the Dura Ace AX is slick in appearance and unlike anything else before. But the rear view reveals the actual horror show of this dérailleur. Along with a level of complexity previously unseen there's another surprising element to this gear. It's very flimsy and the quality is not what you might have expected after the Dura Ace EX master-class in component engineering. The pulley wheels are very basic and the finishing to the upper pivot bolt is not nearly as clean as the later Cranes and other Dura Ace gears.
Functionality.
The way this dérailleur is designed to work is unlike any other of its era. With hindsight and the benefit of having dismantled hundreds of gear mechs over many years, it's hard to understand the mindset of those designers who had come up with such complexity to turn this and its associated dérailleurs into working models and into mass production. There's intricate plastic pieces and no end of shims and washers and that strange cable guide appendage. It was designed to bring simple one click shifting to the rider. The dérailleur itself has utilised an inline parallelogram which is highly unusual for the company. Then there's an intricate mechanism that both sets the pulley cage under five or six gears whilst rotating the body in clockwise steps to accommodate the bigger sprockets. It's quite difficult to get your head around understanding how it works.
The front face of the Dura Ace AX is slick in appearance and unlike anything else before. But the rear view reveals the actual horror show of this dérailleur. Along with a level of complexity previously unseen there's another surprising element to this gear. It's very flimsy and the quality is not what you might have expected after the Dura Ace EX master-class in component engineering. The pulley wheels are very basic and the finishing to the upper pivot bolt is not nearly as clean as the later Cranes and other Dura Ace gears.