Last evening, Nicole and I experienced our first crash on our Ruegamer tandem. It was a minor incident and not much happened. Here are the details. About 1/4 mile from the start we were rounding a corner and some railroad tracks. Immediately after passing the tracks as we were traveling somewhere around 10mph we had a front tire blowout. Now a blowout or flat is not usually something that is of much consequence if it is on the rear wheel, but this was a front tire blowout. With the added weight of two riders and the sport geometry we have on our tandem suffice it to say it was a bit squirmy as well as unnerving. Instead of crashing in the road and suffering all sorts of road rash I had the idea that we would head straight for the lawn of the house next to us. Fortunately here in our riding area there are few curbs or sidewalks so I did not have any problem rolling into the yard. What we do have here are drainage ditches and we ended up going down one side of the ditch then attempting to climb the other, at least we missed the large bush as well as the mailbox. That ditch is where we finally went down.
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Sorry for the lack of updates here. It has been a hectic few weeks. Promotion at work, means more responsibilities and learning new tools, good in some respects. Being put in charge of a team also means longer hours and more accountability. End of the quarter also means account reviews and in this economic climate those are even more important than ever.
For the curious out there that want to know details of the components that are on our new tandem I now present a build list. Please note that the choices we made, we did for personal or availability reasons and might not have been the choices you or anyone else may have made. Also take into account what your end goals are in comparison to ours when looking to outfit your own single or tandem bicycle.
Here are a few more images taken today. A bit better focus, a different background. To see the effect of the unidirectional carbon take a look at the image in front of the trellis and garbage can. That particular image really looked a lot like the actual bike from the specific angle the sun was hitting it at. The striations in the carbon tubes are clearly visible through the clear coat.
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.
Here are some more images taken during the build process.
First thing we needed to do is to insert seat posts. This is not a permanent thing but it assists in clamping the bike in the work stand. Any old seat post will work, but I only have these two Thomson’s here so I will use them.
It arrived safely and it is beautiful, Nicole took about 95 pictures of me unpacking and unwrapping the frame and fork. The box is very well used. On it hand written is the phrase, “Rue Sports, We recycle everything.” Inside there are sheets of used Styrofoam. A lot of packing material to protect the frame during shipping. The frame is wrapped in one of life’s dishonest pleasures, bubble wrap! Also in the box are an Alpha-Q Tandem fork, Bushnell eccentric and seat post clamps. Everything is in great shape.
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