Thanks for the good wishes, all. We made it over the mountains and to our coastal cabin and will enjoy several days here before moving forward. We fought a strong headwind along the Coast that presages several days of heavy weather and arrived just as the raindrops hit my riding glasses. Good timing!
At our last camp, a small herd of deer spent the night by our tents and the tandem. They made for very nice neighbors. We saw more deer and three fully grown Roosevelt elk today, and bear scat throughout our journey.
My sister is my stoker for this journey, her first bicycle camping tour. She has been a joyful companion and I am so proud of her. Somehow, she is matching my cadence, but that may due to the timing chain and her SPD shoe cleats making her little legs go all a-blur.
Though my Tandem was produced in 1989 by a now defunct company, I want to avoid featuring it here because this is Thorn's forum and it is not a Thorn. I will attach a couple non-identifying photos (below) showing it and one of the box-cargo trailers I made, so you can see some of the terrain we rode.
In truth, a tandem is not so good a tool for such journeys as my Nomad (which weighs only about 1kg less). This is due to several factors:
1) The bike has such a long wheelbase that even a tandem marketed as a MTB (before I converted it to my favored drop handlebars and road slicks) just does not have the clearance over span under the timing chain.
2) Tandems are faster than single bikes downhill, and are generally faster on level ground (twice the power, half the wind resistance of a single bike). However, because a tandem carries two people (and a touring tandem also carries two people's kit on one bike), it is heavy. That much weight really comes into play when climbing hills, something they not do so well as single bikes
3)Gearing is a big factor, and given the above, owners must choose between biasing their geartrain ranges to climbing or descending. The range to do both at once is generally too wide to be practical, though I for awhile ran four (quad) chainrings and a front derailleur with new parallelogram links I machined to accommodate the quad (and a cable leverage changer so I could shift it). It proved too specialized and was effectively more trouble than it was worth. I ended up with a triple crank (46/36/22) and a 13-28 freewheel for a 20 gear-inch low and a 92-inch high. We coast downhills and find ourselves wishing on climbs for the 12-inch low I made for a past bike. Inladen, it has proven to be a good compromise for our needs, given my (our) generally high cadence.
On this trip, we hopped off and started pushing when grades exceeded 8% as shown on my inclinometer. Sometimes, we could get a run at it and make it further uphill, but 10% is the absolute limit. In contrast, I can top 21% grades on my fully loaded Nomad running 36x17 gearing on the Rohloff hub (about 16 gear-inches as I recall).
As for the handling on such roads, the bike and trailer did really well on pavement gravel, dirt, and grass. I swapped the Bontrager SR1 26x1.5in road slick on the rear for a 26x2.0 Schwalb Dureme. I left the Bontrager road slick on the front because I did not have enough time before departure to make a shorter drop-mount for the fort mudguard to resolve clearance problems with the larger tire. As I've found before, fat road slicks do a surprisingly good job on dirt and gravel and I had no washouts with it on this trip.
The trailer did a fine job outfitted as our "chuck wagon", carrying all our food for the duration. It is more bear-resistant than panniers, and we had more food with us than we could practically bear-bag and loft into a tree. I fitted it with 16x1.5in tires at 35psi. Those were large enough to not fall too deeply into the chuck holes we found.
So far, so good.
All the best,
Dan.
