thegreatape – IIRC you live north of me. What we use it for wandering around the estate roads and its surprisingly good at that – often towing camping kit. The key to smooth riding is to use a lot less bodyweight shift and a lot more steering input. Its a serious offer to borrow it for a weekend if you want a shot.

When you get used to it all you have to do on the back is sit, pedal and look at the scenery on easy trails / roads. You soon get in synch and it allows you to ride at the same speed and chat as you are riding

Love ours, it’s great. Different to solo bikes though, harder to handle.

Mrsdickyboy reminds me of myself. As the stoker for nbt, I’m always looking around and saying ” ooooh look at that kestrel”, or “did you see that tea room”, which of course he can’t because he’s concentrating on keeping the thing on the road and us safe.
Great things tandems, every cyclist should have a blast on one, but choose your partner carefully 🙂

Tandems are great fun – acquired a mates tandem a couple of years ago for a pub crawl – Christmas one year, Halloween the next. The tandem is, errr, a bit old (biopace chainrings…) and knackered. It had a brakes that ‘sort of slowed you down a bit’, a stick rammed into the front mech to keep it in the middle ring, and a piece of string connected to the rear mech cable for the rear gunner to pull: front rider randomly selected a gear from the (no longer) SIS gear wotsit, which didn’t move the rear mech until the rear rider pulled the string, then you ended up with a completely random gear – usually one of 3 of the working gears from the 7 speed cassette…

Funniest moment was when on the RLSCC Halloween pub crawl. Pedalled the bike from Warwick to the meeting point in Leamington. I was on the front, in my ‘Zombie Banana’ outfit (as yer do…), and my g/f was on the back in a ‘Zombie Gorilla’ outfit.

We all pedalled slowly down the Leamington Parade, and we heard a girl scream to her friends: ‘See – look! I TOLD you I saw a monkey chasing a banana on a bike!’ 🙂

Scariest/funniest moment – when we swapped round. Both hilariously funny and terrifying scary at the same time – for about 100 meters before we had to stop as there was no way this was going to end well!

Have now spent some money on it: new gear and brake cables all round, new combined brake/shifters on the front (now have 3×7 again, with no string required…), a new bell (v.important), new chains all round (the f-r chain was so stretched it kept falling off), and new tyres.

Now ready for the next crawl!

But I wouldn’t want to take it round Cannock!!

We hired a cheap step through single speed one in china. Riding a super flexible bike in Chinese urban traffic was interesting.

Great fun but you do need to communicate and take the experience with a laugh.

TJ cheers, I’m sure we would like to take you up on that at some point.

I stoked a tandem where the timing chainrings were diferent sizes.

Wobble wobble surge.

Hilarious. I want a tandem

TJ offered to take me on a tandem ride.. I think I’ll do it. D’you think it’ll end in an argument?

Depends who is steering

Miss my old 80s peugeot tandem. Did stupid speeds on it back int day. Getting another when my kids legs are long enough. Always wanted a cannondale tandem. Hmmmm
Saw some bcf men riding through Leeds last summer on some mental road tandem, I think stoker was blind. They were I think around 45mph on the flat. Mental.! Love tandems.

Blah double post phone thing…..

I can confirm that TJ’s steering is exempary. He only put us on the ground once. At a bottleneck with poor visibility. At Hit the North, where spectators had gathered to see people fall off.

Slowoldgit – gaga brings back happy memories.

Molgrips – you really should take up his offer. But don’t argue with him when he is captain, wait until he’s on the back 😀