Chainring quality

On Sep 11, 5:24*pm, incredulous wrote:

3. Looking up chainrings with the Stronglight label from an English
shop, I found one line of rings, labeled as to the aluminum type,
costing twice as much as another.

Basically Stronglight have three qualities of rings. There is the
famous top quality Dural ranges, there Stronglights's medium range
which itself includes several materials/qualities, and there is a low
range. (You can easily identify more ranges within these, but three
price groupings correspond roughly to three quality groupings.)

The expensive stuff includes the famous Dural ali rings. It's more
than just material, it is the design and also the manufacturing
process of cutting the teeth by lathe, rather than stamping or laser
cutting. There are the rings on which Stronglight's reputation are
built.

In the middle range, most recently identified as the Impact series,
you're getting Stronglight-branded Sugino gear of XD-2 quality.
Careful, you're in fact looking at sets of chainrings of several
manufacturing/material/quality differentials, steel, ali, stamped,
lasered, machined, etc, in a wide price range. Prices range from cheap
to expensive; you get what you pay for. The Stronglight version of the
XD-2 crankset is better finished than the Sugino version, and
available cheaper if you know where to shop. I'm not sure the rings by
themselves are in the same bargain class as the cranks/chainset combo
as the best of the replacement rings are getting close in price to
Stronglight's own best stuff.

The Stronglight bottom range is easy to spot. There is a non-
replaceable outer ring fixed to the crank. This chainring is drilled
for fixing a second or in some cases two more rings to the inside.
Most recently the series number was xx55. These are apparently good
commuter quality at a fair price. However, when I looked into this,
because of the peculiarities of the distribution system, the Impact
gear at the discounters seemed a much better deal than the 55 series
which was only available from full-price distributors.

(Actually, there's an el cheapo singlespeed/commuter/hub gear type
from Stronglight as well. It's probably okay but the Shimano versions
are less ugly, very reasonably priced, even if of suspect durability.
But I don't suppose this cheap end of the market is what you're
thinking of.)

HTH.

Andre Jute
The lightness of carbon is the vanity of cyclists

post 7

I was told what you see there exists only in cyberspace unless you
call ahead for a 100 or more.