teamdonterri

A couple that we ride with have tired of "chasing the tandems" and recently bought an older Santana tandem with canti brakes. It's a good looking bike that was well cared for but since they are a heavier team he wants to upgrade the braking. So we were wondering if a set of V-brakes can be swapped in and mounted to the canti mount posts. Is this a straight across swap???

steve53mg

Yes, the brakes themselves, will directly replace the cantis with no modification.
They will, however be mismatched, as far as cable-pull. Because of the difference in geometry, the v-brakes need twice as much cable movement to work properly. Your friends will need to get "travel agent" cable amplifiers (https://www.jensonusa.com/store/produ...vel+Agent.aspx). These consist of, essentially, 2 concentric pulleys; one twice the diameter of the other. The brake lever rotates the smaller diameter pulley. The larger diameter (outside), which activates the brakes, ends up going twice as far, being twice the circumfrence. This is the only way to adapt the older dia-compe (or any other road type) levers. It is a very simple solution and works very well. I put the same setup on my Santana Visa.

specbill

.....before going to the V's, I would spend some serious effort maximizing the performance of the existing canti's. Fresh quality pads, cables and a well tuned set-up can be quite effective We have had the full range of brake types on our various tandems and all have their strengths and weaknesses. I had good results with Avid SD 7's with travel agents but our old school shimano SLX canti's were very satisfactory when well tuned.

Bill

teamdonterri

Thank you both for your advice, I will pass it along.