Kind of afraid this would be the case, Jan. I have a private horde of 7 Suntour Winner Pros. Fortunately Winner Pro were so well made, and now, thanks to a tip from Patrick, I found someone who is much more adept than I rebuilding freewheels, mine should outlive me.
On Saturday, April 13, 2013 10:17:47 AM UTC-5, Jan Heine wrote: > > On Saturday, April 13, 2013 5:37:03 AM UTC-7, Matthew J wrote: >> >> Welcome development especially so if quality approaches that of its >> parent. If they bring back the Winner Pro freewheel I would take special >> note. Wonderifthese are made inJapan or sub-contracted out. > > > Most of the classic Japanese names no longer have any factories. The old > tooling is long-gone. None of the skilled workers remain. For example, > Dia-Compe is little more than a warehouse in Taiwan. The new SunXCD parts > are sub-contracted out, mostly to Taiwan, it appears. It's great that some > of the old names are involved, but it remains to be seen what they can > achieve. (Remember that Mr. Kawai is in his 90s.) > > There are small shops in Japan that never did close down, like Nitto and > Honjo. They still make their own products the old way. > > Regarding freewheels, Compass Bicycles has looked into bringing back true > high-quality freewheels, but it's very difficult. First, there isn't > anybody with the know-how any longer of how to make these, and second, > freewheels have huge economies of scale. There are many different small > parts, which means huge tooling costs. The actual production costs once you > have the tooling are very small. So if you sell 100,000 freewheels a year, > you can offer them at a decent price. But if you sell 1000, the price goes > up tremendously. > > Jan Heine > Compass Bicycles Ltd. > http://www.compasscycle.com > > Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
