Dificult gear changing on a Rohloff tandem.

[Yannik]

Hello every body,

I am new to this forum, but not a newbie when it comes to the Rohloff gearbox and still I have a rather complicated question on the Rohloff:

I have a Utopia Silbermowe with the Rohloff gearbox since 2000.
I go to work with this 'single' bike and I love the Rohloff[^]. My early version has some minor minuses and I had the internal gearcable broken (after 6 years of use), but I would not change it for an other system!

This year i rented a Hase Pino tandem equipped with the Rohloff and it disappointed me. When we rode in the ardennes and the vosges, with their continuously succession of up and down hills, I had to change gears continuously. This did not go well!
The Pino tandem has a different cadance on the stoker pedals than on the captain's pedals and the stoker (who's place is in front) can freewheel. This means that I could not determine when the stoker would push or 'pause' on the pedals.
To change the Rohloff's gears, I need to change the gear when their is not to much power delivered to the gears. On my single bike i can coordinate this perfectly, on the Pino it was inpossible under those conditions. This resulted in temporarily blocking to 14 gear or not changing the gear.
Once the geographical relief was smother, even in the jura, their was no problem anymore.
Is this also a problem on classic tandems, or can the captain feel or coordinate with the stoker? The pedals being in a fix position one to the other.
We rode a 1400km long trip from Brussels to the Mediterranean Sea and we loved the tandem, bycicle-vacation concept so much that we want to buy a tandem, but we would not like to have such problems, they really were verry disturbing, for my peace of mind and to the bike's speed and effort efficiency.
I tried blocking off the stoker's power but that did not help much and costs lots of power to do.


Thank you,

Yannik


Hase Pino:
http://www.hasebikes.com/

If the english is not up to standard, excuse me please, it is not my mother tongue.

[graham]

Hello, Yannik.

We've had our Thorn Rohloff tandem for over three years, and what attracted me to the Rohloff hub was difficulty (caused by inexperience) in getting a conventional tandem to shift chainrings when the stoker's trying hard.
I think the problem you had was more to do with the freewheeling / variable cadence set up on the tandem you hired than a specific issue with a Rohloff hub.

Our tandem uses a 'direct drive' (all the chains are on the same side of the bike) timing chain connecting the two sets of cranks. I set the cranks so mine are slightly in advance of the stoker (usually between ten and thirty degrees - it varies according to how the chain goes when I rotate or clean it). This means we help each other through the 'dead spot' a bit and does seem to give a smoother action. I don't set too much offset, though, because if the action is too far out it all goes wrong when we both get out of the saddle.

Obviously with a timing chain, both captain and stoker are pedalling at the same cadence all the time. The only decision the stoker makes is how much pressure to put on the pedals. Assuming the captain is the stronger person (normally true), it is quite easy to induce a momentary pause. With both cranks at (roughly) the same position, you can also set the pedals to make sure you don't ground a pedal when cornering, or even to clear obstacles on the ground. Just like a solo bike, in fact.

With practice tandem riding becomes more or less instinctive for both riders. We've probably now done over 12000 miles on ours and we might soon be getting good at it. We were asked yesterday whilst out on our club run, what secret signal we use when we decide to 'honk' the bike. The answer was simple. I get out of the saddle and the wife does the same. Instantly. It works a treat for us. Mind you, there are four or five other tandems we ride with from time to time, and on none of them does the stoker ever get out of the saddle. Probably because the first and only time they tried it they nearly crashed the bike and were too scared to try a second time.

Try another tandem which has the cranks fixed via the timing chain (a classic tandem) and see how you get on with that.