Originally Posted by
wn rider
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?
I seem to have had almost the same problem on my '87 Santana. After fiddling with it for a while I decided to go with the chain catcher approach and it has worked elegantly for me. That is, have the front derailleur increase its throw towards the small ring by adjusting its limiting screw, and add a chain catcher in case of overthrows.
I'll state the obvious here, but there are many parameters in adjusting a front derailleur.
- the height of the front derailleur, meaning how high or low it's clamped onto the rear seat tube
- the angle at which the front derailleur is clamped
- the state of the limiting screws
- the cable "tension" - combination of where the cable is clamped, the length of the housings, the state of barrel adjusters, etc.
- (might be a small factor) things like the chain design and chainring design
In my case, I did not want to get rid of some of the original parts partly because they are rather "classic". So after trying to adjust the first four parameters above, and not succeeding after some amount of time, the chain catcher seemed like the best option.