I had gotten a Bruce Gordon tandem on ebay quite some time ago, but it was a bit small for me and I had not gotten around to the build. Anyway, our own Mikey thought it may be a nice thing for the ride that we hosted last weekend, so I had it built up and got some good reports on the ride. I was inspired to try one of these after watching Paul and Rita Lee ride their Paramount tandem with great finesse on our ride. For the past 2 nights, I did some modifications including an extra long seatpost and moved the 3tt adjustable track stem (reversed) to a position more suitable for me, and switched out the stoker bars to a moustache to give me more clearance.
I took it out for the first time this evening. After a couple of miles, I found I could not tolerate the clearance of the stoker bars, and idiot boy forgot to bring a wrench. Rode back home and reversed the bars to give kind of a modified bullhorn. The first thing I noticed was that it did not have quite the acceleration of my track bikes, but nonetheless did ok and had the gearing to spin it up to a good pace on the flat. It seemed quite stable on the ride, but initially had a very slight drift to the left when riding with no hands. This was easily corrected with a slight weight shift. I had heard that corners needed to be taken with a wider angle than a single, but I did not find this to be the case. It handled the corners quite well. the downhills felt quite stable, and the uphills (if you can call them that in nj) did not seem a problem. All in all, it seemed to ride fairly similar to my Raleigh pro in it's dependable sorta way.
It will be interesting to see how it rides with a stoker....
gabriel romeu
in chesterfield nj usa
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G L Romeu
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