Originally Posted by
nancyj
As the original owner of a Melton Tandem made in 80 or 81 I can tell you a precious little bit - Mike is no longer into the bike business I gather but the bottom oval tube of the tandem is actually a wing strut from a small airplane .... at least that is what he told me in his shop.... (I used to work at a bike shop in Athens and got the frame wholesale at the time)
He made them in a very small hole in the wall shop in Columbia SC. How are you doing with tires? What rims did he use? Any issues with tires (see my resurrection post) I just got the frame from him and not the bike but ours was a custom 21 x 21. The bike was designed to minimize horizontal flex at the expense of vertical flex. An old Bicycling Magazine article of that era had a showdown of the tandems and Mike's was one of three reviewed - you may want to search the bicycling archives for it. If I can find a copy I will scan the article. I believe your tandem is older than mine. He started to beef up the front forks a bit in later versions and yours look like the old style.
How are you liking it. I know before I got mine two of the guys in the shop tried one out and they were bike racers and not small skinny dudes and they were impressed with the side to side stiffness (one was an experienced tandem owner).
The builder I work with has been using oval tubes on his tandems for almost 30 years... said he got the idea when he was looking at turbine blades for giant wind generators and was told the oval shaped blades were designed to be much stiffer.
That, and at 275 pounds he found many tandems to be lacking in needed stiffness.
The only tandems he makes that don't have oval tubes are S&S coupled models and these hand drawn tubes also go into his longtail expedition bikes... I can attest to the fact that these frames are very stiff laterally and vertically.
My tandem frame is 15 years old but is NOS and am building it up for my fiancée and family... you can see the oval "mesa" tubes named such as Arvon (Stacey) told me that he named them because he does not "mesa round" when it comes to building tandems.
He also likes that extra chain ring...