Chris_W

While at Eurobike last week, I tried to snap a picture of all the tandems that I spotted. This is certainly not an exhaustive collections of all tandems that were at the show, so please add photos or links below.

First up, the "Twin Power" - a MTB tandem from the German company Stevens:



A road model called "Dual" by the Spanish company Massi, which I couldn't find on their website:



Santana's offerings were described in a post by their owner and president Bill McCready at the Tandem@Hobbes list (see the original post here or TandemGeek's re-posting on his blog here). Center-stage was a 29er tandem equipped with dual Gates carbon belt drive and the 14-speed Rohloff hub. According to Bill's post, this bike was attracting a huge amount of attention, but there was not much sign of this when I was there late Friday afternoon.



They were also showing their Beyond tandem with Shimano's Di2 electronic shifting, which debuted at last year's shows:



Santana weren't the only people showing a dual belt-drive model, German manufacturer Bernds had a fully belt driven version of their Folding Tandem LS on display:



Finally, another MTB from a German manufacturer, the Droesiger TDA 1.1 (the 2010 model was the TDA 10.1C):



The only tandem-specific component that I spotted was this beautiful Vortex crankset from TA Specialites, which uses a Squale outer chainring to hide the chainring bolts and an Alize K middle adaptor ring to mount the inner chainring to:



EDIT: I just remembered that Specialized also had their tandem Shiv concept bike on display (info on TandemGeek's blog here), which they already displayed last year. Sorry, I didn't get any new photos of that one.

Chris_W

Also of interest to me at Eurobike was the brakes that people were putting with the new 7900 & 6700 brake levers. Shimano's new levers have a "Servo Wave" design, which makes the cable pull different from the previous Shimano road brake levers (I believe the new 5700 levers are also Servo Wave). I started a thread about this last year, but it didn't get much response, so I was interested to see what different manufacturers were doing. Santana and Massi are both using these levers with V-brakes and without travel agents (see photos in previous post), which suggests that they pull the same cable as a modern MTB lever does. On other stands, these levers were being used with mini-Vs, with the road version of the Avid BB7, with standard cantilever brakes (with what appeared to be pretty standard length straddle cables), with Shimano's new road caliper brakes that are designed for these levers, and with other road caliper brakes that are not specifically designed for these levers. Therefore, my only conclusion was that the new levers could be used with any type of brake (I think the only combination that I didn't see was the new levers with the MTB version of a cable disc brake, like the BB7)!

I tried to ask some people about some of these lever and brake combinations - the guys at Santana said they work very well with V-brakes without travel agents, and the guys at the stand that had them paired with mini-Vs didn't really understand my question but assured me that they were compatible and worked fine. I then learned that it was rarely useful to ask such technical questions to most of the guys working on the stands, who were mostly only sales people.

dubbelop

FWIW: that Twin Power tandem by Stevens is one hell of a nice bike. It's incredibly light at that price (2.600 Euros); Stevens claim 16.8 kilograms which I think is about right. The frame is Kinesis and it's built up with light parts throughout. It probably won't survive a true MTB course but it's a great "throw around" tandem.

Ritterview

I laboriously perused the Interbike pics posted at Flickr to find tandems, and then saved these to a Gallery. Not much to see, but you can take a look here:

Tandems Interbike 2010

Is this the carbon tandem fork that Co-Motion was developing?

tirli_mirli

Very nice thread, guys! Thanks
Peace

TandemGeek

Yes... It's the same Co-Motion Tandem Elite Carbon fork mated to Chris King Inset headset that you'll find throughout their 2011 on-line catalog / website.

https://co-motion.com/index.php/tandems/supremo

Ritterview

But not listed as a tandem accessory/component that can be purchased separately.

Any idea when they will offer these for sale?

TandemGeek

There's a lot of stuff that you can buy from your authorized Co-Motion dealer and/or directly from Co-Motion that's not listed on the Web, and in many instances not listed on their consumer price sheet... typically an insert if you order a catalog since price sheets are always subject to change.

Yes, they're available now: $475. They still have some Alpha Q X2s for those of us who have Alpha Q's and who might still be looking for a direct replacement fork.

FWIW, I've got a blog entry in work on all of Co-Motion's changes for 2011 that I hope to finish tonight that will include additional details on the new fork offering. It's a nice piece of kit that took a lot of lessons learned from current forks and bundled it into a new product that has nearly the same weight and cost, but 28mm tire clearance and a compression plug instead of a glued-in star-nut sleeve, etc.