After riding a friends Burley for a few hundred miles, my wife and I finished our first year on our Co-Motion. We have had a great time together and I have been really pleased with the bike with the exception of some frustration I have had regarding front-end shifting.

Despite continually adjusting and tweaking the FD (both me and LBS), I continue to have issues with dropping into the granny. Always seems great on the stand but the only way it will reliably drop into the granny is when I run high rpm and essentially zero torque. It is a 2012 and we have the stock Truvativ Elita Tandem crankset and 105 components.

One tandem shop I spoke with indicated that others had some shifting issues with the Truvativ Elita cranks so I don't know if it would make a significant difference if I replaced these with the FSA or Shimano. I am not running a chain catcher right now so maybe I just need to put one on and adjust the inner limit.

In the end it's one of those things that isn't a huge deal since I can compensate for this by making sure I shift plenty early but it seems like it should work better than this.

Anyone have any thoughts on how much impact the crankset actually makes?