I recently, after much faffing, got myself a road bike. Its great. I also recently got an old tandem, that too is great! The tandem needs a bit of attention and one of those things I wouild like to address is the brakes.

Currently the tandem has caliper brakes, which are old and I am not 100% convinced by them, and flat bar style levers. If I were to remove the brakes off my road bike and put then on the tandem would they work ok with the levers? Is the pull from drop bar style levers different to the pull from the flat bar levers?

I know all this is a bit vague but I am talking in general terms!

I quickly must add I am not going brakeless on the road bike they calipers would be replaced with some nice 105 ones to match the rest of the kit!

Older kit is almost never compatible with newer kit. It keeps us buying, you see.

I forgot to add the tandem has relatively modern shimano levers. SO what are my options? What brake calpier will work with mtb stlye levers?

It depends on the levers. If they’re designed fo canti brakes they’ll be fine, it was V-barakes that reduced the cable pull. I’ve tun V-brakes with road levers and calliper brakes with V-brake levers, both work, but probably not to their best (IIRC the drop levers and v-brakes were really grabby, mtb levers on a road bike hit the bar before anything really happens.

There’s several different standards for road bikes and their callipers, as a guide most higher end (105 and up) Shimano kit of the same generation wil work perfectly together. But they do like to tweek the cable pull every so often (recently 10speed external gear cables, internal gear cables and 11s levers have all had different brake cable pull), but they do actualy work perfectly well together, just look at the nunmber of bikes that come with aftermarket brakes with unkonwn pull rates!