OP here. Thanks, everyone, for the thoughtful recounting of your own experiences. A lot of good real-life stuff here to ponder!
Originally Posted by
Paul J
Others have given you great information. The one thing I wanted to add is you Speedster is a great touring bike and one that can be used and used. We have one with the diagonal tube and find it to be a great bike for us and we are a heavy team. You did raise the question on tire size and the Speedster is limited there with probably a 35 being the largest and maybe a 32 with fenders. The Java looks to be a good bike and it would give you nice tire options and if you wanted you could purchase a second set of go faster wheels when at home. I've seen many using the open frame design with over-sized tubing but I have no experience with those. We enjoy our diagonal with the added benefit of water bottle placement.
Our Speedster, too, has a diagonal, and I've been curious about whether the new versions without diagonal don't sacrifice something. And we like that bottle placement, too!
Somewhere on the interwebs I saw an account of a couple who ordered a custom Java with the diagonal added back in.
I was able to fit fenders onto our Speedster that work on 35s front and back with a little jury-rigging of the fenders and their mounts.
I'll probably stick with the Speedster for now. It's been a heck of a lot of fun using the frame as a platform and replacing components bit-by-bit to customize it for our needs. The money we save by not getting a new tandem can buy a lot of upgrades/replacements/cool stuff with $1,000s left over.