Bike Forums - View Single Post - Tandem drive-train lockup

08-02-05, 11:49 AM

#6

Sheldon Brown

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Join Date: Jul 2002

Location: Newtonville, Massachusetts

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Bikes: See: http://sheldonbrown.org/bicycles

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Quote:

Originally Posted by galen_52657

Help me out so I don’t have to schlepp this beast back and forth to the dealer. The bike is a 2002 KHS Tandemania Milano.

This is what happens:

Occasionally, when standing and climbing, the cranksets will just lock up - unable to pedal - on the downstoke. You have to quickly backpedal to free it up, and then you can pedal again. The first time this happened, it caught me completely off guard. We were climbing a short, steep ‘sprinters hill’ in the middle ring/big rear cog (42/26). The chain locked up and we lost speed so fast I lost my footing coming to a stop and dropped the bike and my gurl!

My guess is that the synch chain is loose. The bottom (slack) run is swinging back and forth, and the end of the stoker's crank can sometimes snag it.

You can adjust this with the eccentric.

See: http://sheldonbrown.com/synchain for specifics on this.

Sheldon "Two Wheels, Four Legs" Brown

Code:

+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|   There are essentially three entities riding a Tandem:   |
|   The captain, the stoker, and the spirit.                |
|   It is the spirit who likes in-phase cranks.             |
|                                      --Osman Isvan        |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

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