I'll start by being honest, I am hard headed and wanted to figure this out on my own. CAN'T! FAILED! NEED HELP! PLEASE!

I've been in the process of converting our Litespeed tandem from Ultegra 9 speed (bye bye!) to New Campy Record 10 speed for the past few months. I bought

New Campy 2014 Record QS shifters (work great)
New Campy comp triple long cage rear derailer (works great)

4 Front Derailleurs all new


#1 Campy Racing T with a 32mm
My tandem is 35mm. I thought that the clamp came off but it does not. So this one is a straight up mistake to learn from. All the rest are braze-on

#2 Campy Centaur 10 speed triple
I thought for sure this one would work, but I was wrong. The right side of cage hits my crank arm. If I adjust the high limit to where the cage does not hit the crank, it will not shift to the big ring regardless of where the chain is on the rear cassette. I believe this is because the cage is too wide. The front ring is a 53 tooth and I have Logic cranks.

#3 Campy Centaur 10 speed double
I bought this because the cage is narrower and it did shift on all three rings without hitting the crank. BUT the cage is not long enough and if I am in the high gears (shorts cogs) in the back and low gear in the front the chain rubs on the bottom of the front derailleur cage. If I adjust the height of the front derailler down then the right side of the cage hits the big ring and cannot pass by.

#4 Campy Comp triple 10 speed QS
Again I thought this would be gold, but it is the exact same cage as #2 Campy Centaur 10 speed triple. I didn't even try it because it's brand new and I want to return it.


My magical Ultegra derailleur FD6503 works and does not hit. It does rub in low gear in front and highest (fastest) 5 or 6 gears in back. It does jump over the big ring sometimes, but even then it does not hit the crank. I don't like having one different brand part on my bike and I don't like that the indexing is not the same as campy, but I can limp along this way until I get to the bottom of this.

ANY help please???

Without seeing the installation in person, I can't hazard a guess as to why your Campagnolo deraillers won't pass between the ring and the crank. But the Ultegra FD will work fine with a Campag shifter as a permanent solution -- it's not a matter of "limping along". The Campag shifter doesn't index in the Shimano sense. One full stroke of the upshift lever should sweep the chain onto the next ring and then you trim it if necessary with the small clicks, which are finer than the Shimano trim clicks were in our Ultegra days. To downshift, you press the thumb paddle down as many clicks (2 or 3 usually) as it takes to drop the chain onto the next smaller ring. I can't see how the action would be any different with a Campag FD installed. Possibly the 10-speed chain might not shift as precisely with your existing 9-speed FD (because the wider cage has to move a tiny bit farther during a shift in order to engage the narrower chain.)

I hear you that you seem to have bought 4 expensive pieces of kit that you can't use but in our experience an Ultegra FD works so well with a Campag shifter that we don't notice that the name isn't the same.

Disclaimer: we have stayed with our 9-speed set-up so be cautious in extrapolating from our (and your) 9-speed experience to 10. Our rear shifter is a 10-speed Record (old) with a Shiftmate to make it work with a Shimano XTR rear derailler on a Shimano 9-speed cassette (to get the 34-tooth low.) Our front is a Centaur (cheaper) with an Ultegra derailler. When we bought the Ultegra, it was available only in the 10-speed version and so the cage is just slightly narrower than the Tiagra it replaced. But even with a 9-speed chain, it trims well without rub in the normally used gears. (We did step out the bottom bracket a mm or 2 to reduce rubbing against the outer cage plate.)

As you most likely know the FD cage should be approx parallel with the rings. I cannot tell from the pictures for sure if that is the case. If the cage is at an angle then adjusting it to be parallel may be the solution.

That out of the way I suspect that the Ritchey crank may be the problem. It may not allow enough space for a modern cage. How large is the gap between the top of the large ring and the inside of the crank arm? That space has to be wide enough to allow the cage to move over. Sometimes parts from different decades (centuries?) don't play well together.

The 10s shifters that you have are EC7-RECX?

There was no 2014 10s Record system - 10s Record was officially discontinued in 2009 (though production continued up to 2012 in accordance with EU law to allow satisfaction of warranty claims), the most recent version change was 2007, with the switch on the LH lever to QuickShift.

The Campag FDs that you have rely on the ring spacing being as Campag space their rings (narrower than the Logic crank) and the pull ratio of the FD matching the lever so immediately we can say that the only FD that is going to work correctly is the last, as it's the only QS FD. The problem, though, is a combination of three things ...

1. The ring spacing is wrong so you need a longer "throw" than the Campag FD is designed to provide with the levers that you have.
2. Everybody thinks that FD indexing doesn't matter - it's a myth I see propogated time and time again - it does, for the longevity of the lever and for the predictable behaviour of the shift - and that matters because if you are looking down to figure out why the shift isn't doing what it should, you are not looking where you are going ..
3. The design of the Logic crannk is such that the big chainring is closer to the crank arm than would be the case were you running a Campag triple crankset. The Campag FD cage isn't so much wider, (although it is a little) but it's also shaped differently internally to the Shimano FD so it needs to move further right to activate the shift, unless the requisite ramping and pinning to catch a Campag chain are present on the inside of the big ring.

As an aside the ramping and pinning on the inside of the big ring is going to be pretty agricultural by comparison to what Shimano and Campag were doing by the 10s era, so the FD is going to have a much more challenging job to get the chain up onto the big ring anyway.

You can probably get away with the Shimano FD but I'd try and adjust the derailleur movement so that it indexes correctly - so that one full sweep of the finger lever (three clicks) gets the FD centered over the middle ring when you are on sprocket 5 or 6 at the back - which should be a more-or-less straight chain line. You then want another full sweep of the lever to have the FD as far to the right as it will ever need to go - i.e. big ring, smallest sprocket and maybe 1 mm between the ouside surface of the chain and the inner surface of the FD's outer cage plate.

You can adjust that with cable tension and possibly by adjusting the route that the FD cable takes under the pinch bolt - Campag used to provide a specailly shaped pinch washer, for instance, to change this relationship so that an UltraShift lever would work correctly to spec with a QS mech.

Whatever you do is going to be less than ideal as so many things are when working with tandems, fundamentally because so few companies do anything tandem spaecific (it's a tiny market) and even fewer techs out there know much about the oddities of tandems ... but if you are prepared to spend the time adjusting the pull / throw relationship of the Shimano derailleur to work as outlined above, you will get good longevity from the shift lever (important as spares are going to get harder and harder to find) and as good a performance as it's possible to coax out of a set of parts that were just never designed to work together.

As an aside, I might be tempted to change (or get changed) the finger levers in your Record shifters from the composite item currently fitted, to alloy ones. These are more durable and in tandem-world, where there is a lot of front shifting, and on a triple at that, it might be a worthwhile thing to do, especially where you have a sub-optimal set up anyway.

9 to 10s really marked a bit of a watershed where systems became much more sensitive to the fact that they are developed as systems - prior to that, a good mechanic could get most hybrid systems to work together to meet their customers' expectation. After that, not only did systems become more "systematised" but there started a steady rise in what the customer expected the system to do.

As one of the other posts says, you are trying to bridge across that void!

I'm assuming in all the above, that you don't want to try and find a Campagnolo triple crankset that fulfills your chainring size spec? A Comp Triple sat on a 115 mm Campag BB should allow you to run the system as designed, with a Campag chain, and get good shifting. That BB length assumes a 135 mm back end, BTW, so a chainline of around 43.5 - 44.5 mm. If the back end is wider than that, there might be some other adjustment of chainline needed and that may give you some further headaches ...

Thanks for the help guys. Yes I am bridging across the void, and I will do it! I bought a Campagnolo Racing T crankset off ebay last Friday. The crank on the Campagnolo cranks curve out unlike my logic cranks that go straight up. I believe that it is about .090 wider from the big chainring to the crank arm than my logics. Hopefully this will work. I will update with results. THANKS!

How strong is the stoker?

It might be possible to grind 1/16" off the backside of the crankset without significant risk. Are they solid or hollow?

gfk_velo, props to you. That was a truly masterful post, the whole thing I mean. I stand corrected on the FD indexing issue. On reflecting, I can see that yes, one sweep of the upshift lever will move the chain cleanly to the next larger ring only if the spacing between the rings matches what the shifter and derailleur are expecting. Our setup seems to meet this criterion "close enough" (in that we don't normally need to trim after a front shift, just a small click or 2 after several shifts on the rear as the chain moves laterally. I can see how, if the spacing was wrong and you had to fine-tune every shift it would be hard on the front shifter's innards.

Anyway, I learned a lot from reading your post. Thanks.
Les

Thanks Les, I very much appreciate you taking time to respond. Go well!

Thanks to everybody for the help and information. Turns out that my Logic Ritchey cranks are very straight up and leave zero tolerance for a triple FD to travel far enough to get on the big ring and clear the inside of the crank arm. I bought a Campagnolo Racing T crankset off ebay. The Racing T right crank arm curves out .090 more than my Logic/Sugino crank arm. This allows my FD to shift properly onto the big ring and not hit the crank. I just didn't realize how much the Campy arm curves up and how straight my logic crank arm was.

Current setup

Campagnolo Comp triple QS front derailleur
Racing T crank arm 30-42-53
Ritchey logic bottom bracket 120mm
Campagnolo QS 10 speed record shifters
Comp triple rear derailleur
Ambrosio Campagnolo Cassette with shimano splines 12-28. I highly recommend this


In the process, I discovered that the bearings in my bottom bracket are not good. It is a Ritchey logic 120mm. I can't find any 120mm bottom brackets on ebay that are like mine. Any suggestions? I did find 118mm and 122.5mm