The first ride(s)

Remember the excitement as a kid when you got your first bicycle and couldn’t wait to get it our onto the driveway. Well the same kind of feeling came over us. That said we get on the road for the first ride and all is not as it seems. First thing is that we miss the Thursday night group by five minutes. Then rushing around I do not do my usual check before starting out. so we get on the road and since we haven’t ridden a tandem since August it was a shaky start. We wiggled and wobbled down the road and I had a hard time holding the handlebars still and straight. Everything giggled. It was like riding in a ‘77 Olds Delta 88 with bad shocks.

What a difference from the ultra stiff Cannondale. Along the route we found out that I had not fully tightened the stoker stem and bars and the first time Nicole put some pressure on them the moved. The shifting was off and I could not trim it out with the Jagwire Rocket inline cable tensioners. I also did not have the front derailleur adjusted enough to get the chain onto the big ring. Even worse we separated the chain at the quick link while climbing a small hill. Luckily we did not lose any of the pieces. All in all not very successful.

The good thing about that ride was that we actually rode! and the fact that after just a couple of miles the bad shock floating feeling went away. The smoother out pedal stoke the more vertically compliant it became rather than wavy. Oh, one more thing, I only had 65 psi in the tires. It was just stupid little things like that in an effort to rush to ride our new tandem.

The second ride was much better. I adjusted the shifting and filled the tires to 140 psi. Tightened the bars and stoker stem. Moved the front derailleur down 2mm along with adjusting the upper limit screw and cable tension to allow easy shifting onto the large chain ring.

We started out of our neighborhood with a little more confidence. Riding out of the subdivision is first a short downhill then a sharp left then uphill to the main street. A bit of level road and into the next subdivision uphill left the left again then a right to a 2 mile stretch of road were we could open it up a bit. Everything worked to perfection. Shifting was flawless and silent. The tires rolled with little effort on the newer paved surfaces. Let’s just say that the rest of the ride was uneventful. We did most of the ride between 20-23 mph with one stretch where we exceeded the local 35mph speed limit by a couple miles per hour.

The frame was built to give Nicole a lot of room in the stoker compartment. She could actually get down into the drops without having her face planted into my rear end. It is a bit stretched out, a 150mm stem would be perfect, but the 130mm we have will do.

Nicole took the pictures above, we will post more this week as well as a complete build list. Give us a month on the road and we will also post a review of what we like and don’t like about our new baby.