Tandem boredom update

As with all blogs on th'internet, this one ain't especially interesting to anyone other than the bugger who wrote it. It's just as well I'm the only person who ever looks near it then I guess.

After having to return our wonky tandem, we've agreed to buy a second-hand one from a bloke who owns a bike shop vaguely locally and should be collecting it towards the end of next week.

Our tandem to be is not a new bike by any stretch of the imagination and is a triple (Of course) seven speed with a Reynolds 531 (Hurrah!) frame (With a 'ladies' bit at the back, which seems slightly pointless as most woman aren't likely to be wearing dresses or skirts whilst cycling), downtube shifters and flat bars with a quill 'rising' stem. It's got an Arai drum brake at the back (Which I might change sometime in the future if I find it's not particularly good) and those cantilevers most touring bikes seem to have. I'm not especially enamoured with such brakes in my experiences with them and may stick some V-brakes on it instead. I'm hopefully (Naively?) assuming they will simply slot into the same holes on the frame currently resided within by the calipers. Obviously we'll stick new saddles on it immediately too. We've no desire to get other people's bum sweat stinking us up.

I've bought some new Ergon bar grips and SRAM brake levers for the tandem already (Presumptuously, as we don't have it yet), all from Chain Reaction. Just on that subject, I recommend Chain Reaction very highly. I know we live within about thirty miles of them and that must help but I seem to get nearly all my stuff the day after I've ordered it and that can include ordering in the afternoon. Their customer services is excellent too and I can't say enough in their favour. By the way, they're not paying me. This is all purely 'satisfied customer gushing'. Now where was I? Oh, that's right, I was going to mention about the downtube shifters et al. I've not used a downtube shifter on a bike for quite some years now. I think I was about thirteen the last time I used a bike with downtube shifters for any longer than a few minutes. To be honest, I'm not a great fan of them and hope I can put little 'stops' in where they are and use some mountain bike shifters instead. There seems to be quite a range of seven speed (Well, twenty-one speed I guess) mountain bike shifters out there and it should work with the low gearing of the tandem. That's the theory anyway. Wish me luck!

I reckon the quill stem might get changed with an Ahead type converter at some point too and the tyres could find themselves making way for some Schwalbe Marathon 32mm efforts as I've only heard good things about them and the Continentals (Which we use on our solo bikes and I rate very highly) currently on it look a bit on the skinny side for tandem usage. I'm sure they can find a home on one of our other bikes. Eventually, I've got an inkling the (700c) wheels might get changed to a different, newer model too but that's all for thought in the future. If everything works well and safely as is, not much will be getting changed at all. I'll stick up a photo of the tandem when we get it. It's not exactly a glamorous bike to look at but it should function.

Hopefully we will find everything to our satisfaction and get many many hours of happy tandeming. Here goes tandem experiment part 2...