I might have ruined our tandem but I had to make an effort to make splittable. It’ll improve was I get some red spray paint on it. I was able to test the fit and the thing rests perfectly in the back of our Mk 1 TT without removing the rear wheel. This is big for our summer trip, but more importantly we’ll be able to go multimodal on trains.
The construction is is just some 5mm stainless I picked up from a junkyard, an M10 bolt and two 28.7mm ID sleeves with three binders each. Bike Friday seem to use these sleeves on their 20" tandems so the must work!
I took off the rear and made a new one from a junked Pelago Hanko. It now has all the binders needed for a rear rack as well as proper disc brake tabs. I changed the 24.5mm seat tube so that Nina can have some modern 27.2mm flexy post for her delicate butt cheeks.
And there is it: Full size tandem with fenders, racks and whatnot in the back of our late nineties sports car. Tomorrow we’ll head on our summer vacation.
car picture in the process. I painted the tandem and the fenders. it’s been megahot in Finland, like 82F/28C, which reaaally helps with the paint drying.
The bike works great. Now I can scrap it and start building a new frame from scratch The splits have caused no trouble, no annoying noises or wobbles.
We rode the bike some 80km in +30°C/86F heat and were overtaking roadies (until we had to take an icecream break). Our average moving speed was over 29km/h which I couldn’t even have dreamed of when riding on our separate bikes. So all and all pretty successfull project.
size 54 bike usually fits with the handlebar sticking between front seats, front wheel removed and back seats folded. we’ve been traveling with this car around ten years with two bikes and our bags in the back. sometimes two and a half bikes. I’m not saying it’s smart or handy, but works for us.
I added some canti posts on a frame I built to a long time ago. Winters on the salted Helsinki bike paths had really taken a toll on the frame, but nothing disastrous yet. Apparently Paragon stopped making these posts, making this bike an instant rarity.
I noticed my local industrial supplier had started stocking Tesa 4287 at 25mm width. One roll is 66 meters and costs 7€/$8.25. In my experience this is the best bang for buck for any tubeless tape.
The splits have caused no trouble, no annoying noises or wobbles.
