"Pete Biggs" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:
More seriously, for road bikes, if in doubt, choose by what brake/gear levers feel the most
comfortable to rest on and use. The rest of the kit will do what's required with either make (and
you can do a certain amount of mixing & matching if you like).
Personally, I like the ability Campag offers to: shift up more than one gear at a time, rebuild
the levers, service & adjust hubs with extreme ease (Centaur+); and their low-end cassettes and
bottom brackets are suprisingly inexpensive, and their cranks and mechs look niiiice!
~PB
What's it for, where do you live and how strong are your legs?
If you want/need low(er) gears, I believe that Campag's largest sprocket is a 29, and that may only
be available in 10-speed format. Shimano will take you up to 34 in the MTB ranges and has
longer-caged rear mechs. Campag's larger BCD (the chainset "star"😉 means that their smallest inner
ring (or middle on a triple) is 39 vs. 38 for Shimano. All in all: yes, you can build a Campag
touring bike, but Shimano tends to give you more options and greater parts availability when
something breaks far from home. OTOH, if you're content with the "normal" range of road gears, none
of this matters.
I prefer Campag's levers for all of Pete's reasons, plus a further one. Shimano has moved heaven and
earth to index the front shifting, and I'm still not convinced it works all that well. Campag left
it as a continuous action mechanism, allowing a greater amount of trimming and even deliberate
overshifting. This is less of an issue with close gears.
As Pete points out, there are various workarounds to allow mix-and-match between the two systems,
but you can't pretend they're truly compatible. Moreover, if you can fit under the maximum size
constraint, the Campag Centaur cassettes seem to allow you greater freedom to set up exactly the
cluster you want, without having to break open the pairs and trios of sprockets that Shimano insists
on riveting together.
Bottom line: Not a simple question, especially if you're offered a heavily discounted "Groupset"
price that incents you to buy it all from one or the other.
Peter Storey
