Originally Posted by
waynesulak
True it is the ring count that limits the gears but the primary reason for giving up a triple is often to allow for the right side sync. It seems that the main reasons two rings get used on tandems are either Di2 or right side sync ruling out a triple. I haven 't seen too many posts about a modern double ring, left side sync, mechanical shifting tandem.
I am finally catching up on this thread. I wanted to comment that we do in fact have a
double chainring, left side sync, with mechanical shifting. It works quite well.
Now one might ask "why"? The reason is that when spec'ing our new bike a year and a half ago, I really wanted to go with Di2. At the time, I was not sure if I'd like the wider gearing and if we would not like it in the long run. So I had the bike built with cable routing for electronic shifting, but set it up with mechanical (cheaper) to see how we liked the gearing. Turns out that the gearing works well for us. 52-34 chainrings with 11-36 cassette. SRAM Red shifters and X.O long cage deraileur. I think we could get away with 52-36 chainrings, but I like having the idea of an easier gear, just in case. Maybe if we were road racing or racing TTs, I'd want some tighter gears, but we spend most of our time going up and down hills where we live.
At some point we will likely switch to some kind of electronic shifting. Maybe once SRAM wireless is out for a while, that might be worth looking at.
My point of posting is that going with 2x works fine and chasing a right side drive does not need to be the rational for using it. Besides, the component manufacturers seem to be going more and more towards 2x. I don't mind the bigger jumps in gearing (I guess we're just not that sensitive to it, maybe due to spending more time on the mountain bike tandem?). A long cage deraileur and wide range cassette goes a long way!