The tandem is a 2004 Orbit Andromeda (V-brake version.)
It was bought for £600 in 2004 from Orbit’s sole agents in Sheffield , Gearshift Cycles, as a mail-order return. Apparently it had been bought to do serious downhill MTB work and hadn’t been up to the job. (I’ve posted a link at the bottom of the page to a contemporary review that seems to agree.)
It is that rarest of things in the UK
The pedals are detachable MKS Promenades originally fitted to get the bike to fit into our home-made flight case, but which are a handy extra anti-theft feature, bicycles provide a handy means of escape for their would-be thieves, but less so if they have to push them... (As a footnote, the bike is about 10' long overall, and with panniers etc is usefully over 30kg and very awkward to carry too. With both wheels removed it just fits diagonally into the biggest Volvo estate that not-a-lot-of money can provide so you'd need a decent sized van if you were intending to steal one.)
Keen-eyed tandem enthusiasts will have spotted that the front and rear pedals are 180 degrees out of phase in the picture above, more on this later.
It rapidly became apparent that the tandem as purchased had some serious issues with drive-train quality. Mostly this showed itself in the form of major problems with gear selection, but our first outing on it came to a premature end with the front chain snapping on the second moderate hill we came to. Something had to be done.
I stripped the entire drive-train from the bike and had a good look to see what we’d bought. The first problem we spotted was that the rear bottom bracket was about 20mm short on the drive side, meaning that the triple ring drive sprocket was hopelessly misaligned with the rear sprocket hub, so much so in fact that the big ring was gently machining its way into a weld on the aluminium trailing arm. Not good.
The bike was sold as being Shimano equipped. In truth, it had Shimano hubs in both wheels, a Deore rear derailleur, and that was about it. Everything else in the drive-train seemed to be soft, cheap & nasty Sugino or no-name stuff. I’ve retained the Sugino front and rear crank and sprocket pair for both ends of the front chain, but they are now bolted onto a pair of Deore bottom brackets with Deore cranks and sprockets opposite them on the right side of the bike. After several false starts we found (with great help as always from Chain Reaction in Northern Ireland
Pedals. As purchased they were in phase, which lead to quite severe instability with both power strokes being put onto the same side of the bike at the same time The 180 degree setup was initially adopted to enable it to sit in the case as above, but obviously fixed the instability problem too so we stayed with it for several years. The only problems with that are that it makes it a bit easy for one or other pedal to bash the ground or a kerb when cornering, and the stoker's shins are a bit vulnerable to a kick from my heels when pushing off. Ever keen to try new things, we currently have the front pedals leading the rears by 90 degrees after reading that it was a popular arrangement, and after a few hundred miles of mixed riding we would concur. It's a little disconcerting at first as it's the first time that we have been able to feel each other's power strokes as they are no longer masked by our own. That in itself is not an issue, but it does now mean that during the occasional fidget around on the saddle that are apart of cycling any distance, I often get the feeling that the bike is accelerating out from under me as Sarah's power stroke arrives which takes a while to get used to. It also means that it is a little harder to get the initial acceleration from standstill that you badly need on this (and any?) tandem. Below about 5 mph, moving the handlebars only makes the thing wobble, so from standstill you really need to go from 0 - 5 mph instantly to retain full control.
Pedals. As purchased they were in phase, which lead to quite severe instability with both power strokes being put onto the same side of the bike at the same time The 180 degree setup was initially adopted to enable it to sit in the case as above, but obviously fixed the instability problem too so we stayed with it for several years. The only problems with that are that it makes it a bit easy for one or other pedal to bash the ground or a kerb when cornering, and the stoker's shins are a bit vulnerable to a kick from my heels when pushing off. Ever keen to try new things, we currently have the front pedals leading the rears by 90 degrees after reading that it was a popular arrangement, and after a few hundred miles of mixed riding we would concur. It's a little disconcerting at first as it's the first time that we have been able to feel each other's power strokes as they are no longer masked by our own. That in itself is not an issue, but it does now mean that during the occasional fidget around on the saddle that are apart of cycling any distance, I often get the feeling that the bike is accelerating out from under me as Sarah's power stroke arrives which takes a while to get used to. It also means that it is a little harder to get the initial acceleration from standstill that you badly need on this (and any?) tandem. Below about 5 mph, moving the handlebars only makes the thing wobble, so from standstill you really need to go from 0 - 5 mph instantly to retain full control.
Brakes. With our aggregate weight being about 150kg in our usual cycling gear, + panniers, lights etc the “GVW” is heading for 200kg and, as it is easily capable of 40mph+ on any worthwhile hill, brakes are a serious matter. Sadly, despite the example tested in the review I’ve linked to having discs front and rear, ours has V brakes. The brake blocks it came with were very prone to fading, so I changed them for some Clarks XTR type ones which are a great improvement. Inspite of that, we are still trying to stop a lot of bicycle with no more brakes than a fairly low-spec solo bike would have, and it really isn’t enough.
I had a long talk recently with the excellent people at tandem specialists SJS cycles recently to start the process of upgrading to front and rear discs. Sadly that is going to be expensive as the RST forks are prone to snapping at the crown when subjected to bending loads, so the upgrade will now require new forks too, and we just don’t use it enough to spend a four figure sum on it currently (and we can’t afford it either, come to that.) As an aside, SJS suggest retaining the V brakes and adding a rear disc, but with the proviso that even with £400 worth of rear disc and six-pot caliper, they will still boil the fluid on a long downhill… Ho hum.
So it's now January 2015, a few years have passed and a few changes have been made...
The Schwalbe Marathon tyres were looking pretty worn but would have done a few miles yet, however we've replaced them with a pair of the Schwalbe Dureme Tandem tyres, despite the lower max pressure (75 psi against 100 psi for the Marathons,) and greater width so it's increased the rolling resistance a little, but the Marathons have no tread on their edges whatsoever, and we got bored of being dumped in the dirt at corners if there was even the tiniest trace of anything slippery on the ground. The Duremes have some nice nobbles and since fitting them we've only managed to fall off when standing still, because...
We've finally joined the ranks of grown-up cyclists and fitted SPD pedals. We've had no real experience of riding clipped to a bike before this change, so made it in stages, letting Sarah get used to hers for a few rides before I ditched my usual walking boots in favour of a pair of Shimano SH-MT91 Gore-Tex boots: one of the few advantages of a tandem over a solo bike. Apart from regular displays of "synchronised falling-off" when stopping, (including a particularly memorable performance right outside the window of the café we'd just ridden to for a friend's birthday,) the SPDs have made hillclimbing significantly less miserable than before, so they're well worth the tumbles. To retain the Tandem's ability to be flightcased, and, to be honest, to make life easier in the garage where it lives, we've paid the extra for quick-release pedals again. We've stayed with MKS (don't think that anyone else makes them) and fitted "MKS Cube Ezys" this time supplied by Tredz bikes.
We finally found the money for the upgrade to the brakes two years ago, and now have Magura MT4is calipers, hydraulics and their 203mm discs front and rear, (all supplied by Cyclesports UK apart from the long front-to-rear brake pipe and a few mounting bolts supplied by mike at RaceMechanic.co.uk.) Except that we don't actually have them on the rear, currently. The front set is fitted and working, but the rear caliper gets clouted by the pannier rack at every bump, so it's currently back in it's box while we save up for one of Thule's beautiful "Pack 'n' Pedal" touring racks that attach to the swing arm... I replaced the supplied AlexRim with a 48spoke RhynoRim and a decent front hub partly for peace of mind but mainly because the existing front hub didn't have a disc brake mount, so had to be changed anyway.
There are plenty of horror stories circulating about what happens if you put any significant braking load through the cheap RST forks so we've ditched them in favour of a vintage pair of carbon / magnesium Pace RC37s, mainly because they are a triple crown fork so at least I know that they won't snap off at the crown if I ever have to brake really hard. Whether or not they break the headstock off the frame or not is another matter of course, but the Orbit frame seems to be quite substantial there so fingers crossed, eh? Unfortunately they do deflect quite dramatically (but evenly) when braking hard so I've learnt not to look down; always good advice, but not usually needed on a bicycle. They are ridiculously light (2kg?) so it'd be unreasonable to expect any different, really. Before fitting I had them overhauled fully by Tim Price at ForkEnglish, including uprating the springing in them to cope with the greater weight, and he changed a few other parts and settings too, though none of the mods are irreversible. He's not happy about the bending load that the combination of the tandem's weight and a 203mm front disc could provide, given that the RC37 is only rated for a 180mm disc on a solo bike, but we simply can't spend the £3,500 or more that sorting all the bikes woes would cost, so we have to put up with some temporary compromises along the way.
It needed a new freewheel hub a couple of hundred miles ago, and the gearchanging continues to be a nightmare, to the extent that something must be done about it. Ideally a Rohloff hub gear would be a perfect solution for us as the nearest we ever get to proper off road is when there's map-reading error or a shortcut doesn't work out as planned, so the extra unsprung mass shouldn't cause us any trouble. I was looking at Shimano's new MTB electronic shift system a few weeks ago, though...
Is that it? I think so, if you ignore the way that the rear shock has gone decidedly soft recently...
So it's now January 2015, a few years have passed and a few changes have been made...
The Schwalbe Marathon tyres were looking pretty worn but would have done a few miles yet, however we've replaced them with a pair of the Schwalbe Dureme Tandem tyres, despite the lower max pressure (75 psi against 100 psi for the Marathons,) and greater width so it's increased the rolling resistance a little, but the Marathons have no tread on their edges whatsoever, and we got bored of being dumped in the dirt at corners if there was even the tiniest trace of anything slippery on the ground. The Duremes have some nice nobbles and since fitting them we've only managed to fall off when standing still, because...
We've finally joined the ranks of grown-up cyclists and fitted SPD pedals. We've had no real experience of riding clipped to a bike before this change, so made it in stages, letting Sarah get used to hers for a few rides before I ditched my usual walking boots in favour of a pair of Shimano SH-MT91 Gore-Tex boots: one of the few advantages of a tandem over a solo bike. Apart from regular displays of "synchronised falling-off" when stopping, (including a particularly memorable performance right outside the window of the café we'd just ridden to for a friend's birthday,) the SPDs have made hillclimbing significantly less miserable than before, so they're well worth the tumbles. To retain the Tandem's ability to be flightcased, and, to be honest, to make life easier in the garage where it lives, we've paid the extra for quick-release pedals again. We've stayed with MKS (don't think that anyone else makes them) and fitted "MKS Cube Ezys" this time supplied by Tredz bikes.
We finally found the money for the upgrade to the brakes two years ago, and now have Magura MT4is calipers, hydraulics and their 203mm discs front and rear, (all supplied by Cyclesports UK apart from the long front-to-rear brake pipe and a few mounting bolts supplied by mike at RaceMechanic.co.uk.) Except that we don't actually have them on the rear, currently. The front set is fitted and working, but the rear caliper gets clouted by the pannier rack at every bump, so it's currently back in it's box while we save up for one of Thule's beautiful "Pack 'n' Pedal" touring racks that attach to the swing arm... I replaced the supplied AlexRim with a 48spoke RhynoRim and a decent front hub partly for peace of mind but mainly because the existing front hub didn't have a disc brake mount, so had to be changed anyway.
There are plenty of horror stories circulating about what happens if you put any significant braking load through the cheap RST forks so we've ditched them in favour of a vintage pair of carbon / magnesium Pace RC37s, mainly because they are a triple crown fork so at least I know that they won't snap off at the crown if I ever have to brake really hard. Whether or not they break the headstock off the frame or not is another matter of course, but the Orbit frame seems to be quite substantial there so fingers crossed, eh? Unfortunately they do deflect quite dramatically (but evenly) when braking hard so I've learnt not to look down; always good advice, but not usually needed on a bicycle. They are ridiculously light (2kg?) so it'd be unreasonable to expect any different, really. Before fitting I had them overhauled fully by Tim Price at ForkEnglish, including uprating the springing in them to cope with the greater weight, and he changed a few other parts and settings too, though none of the mods are irreversible. He's not happy about the bending load that the combination of the tandem's weight and a 203mm front disc could provide, given that the RC37 is only rated for a 180mm disc on a solo bike, but we simply can't spend the £3,500 or more that sorting all the bikes woes would cost, so we have to put up with some temporary compromises along the way.
It needed a new freewheel hub a couple of hundred miles ago, and the gearchanging continues to be a nightmare, to the extent that something must be done about it. Ideally a Rohloff hub gear would be a perfect solution for us as the nearest we ever get to proper off road is when there's map-reading error or a shortcut doesn't work out as planned, so the extra unsprung mass shouldn't cause us any trouble. I was looking at Shimano's new MTB electronic shift system a few weeks ago, though...
Is that it? I think so, if you ignore the way that the rear shock has gone decidedly soft recently...
