pipeliner

Without getting too deep into the weeds here... OK I'm diving into the weeds...We have had the bike 3 years. I tore things down tonight and looked them over; the first bad BB I replaced was the rear, which didn't have good chain alignment before or after replacement because of the very wide rear hub spacing on this bike. The BB bearings were bad, real bad. The short spindle made for very poor chain alignment and even though my replacement BB was correct style for the crankset:V1 it had a crappy chainline and shifting performance was terrible. We eventually stripped out the driveside crank. Maybe partly due to chainline but not ruling out installation error either.

I then started having trouble with the front BB so I looked for and found the longer spindle v2 and moved my not-so-old rear BB to the front. It started making noise but is still in the front and is the correct V1 BB for the crank arms. It really pings and cracks when I get on the gas hard. So this BB has been in the back and now front and is going bad. We got out on the bike for a brief ride last fall and the chainline and shifting performance improved a great deal. Happiness on our last ride before stowing the bike for winter but my mistake of forcing the V1 marriage with the V2 BB is why the crankarm stripped this time around. Now both rear cranks are toast.

I think this bike had some sort of special BB when new and had a chainline that was wider than the standard 118 wide spindle offers. It really is an odd-looking axle setup. Very wide hub spacing. Shifting performance (chainline) simply had to be better than this when the bike was new. Either that, or there is some obscure wide spindle Octalink V1 BB available that I haven't found. As it is, I don't want to put this thing back together with a 118mm BB and a couple used crank arms. I know how it performs and it is sucks. Even if I do, I would need to run a right side crank arm backwards and run two right side pedals... not sure if that even works.
We really enjoy tandem riding and I think it's time to part this thing out and go buy a better rig that fits us better. Pretty paranoid about drivetrain durability though. Tandems really open up the wide world of weird in components.

My track record with BB durability isn't good so that influenced my decision making. I've wrecked a lot of drivetrain stuff (especially BB's) over the years because of my size and had no experience at all with this older Shimano road stuff.