Tandem concept

I have done a nice drawing of the tandem bike in a form that could look a lot like a finished product. The idea of a folding compact tandem would be an interesting on to try out.

Tire Wear at 200 km

Here are some images the front and rear tires at the 200 km mark. The image on the left is the front tire. The original line at the centre of the tire is still there. The rear tire shows greater wear due to the greater weight put on it. There are some small cracks on both front and rear wheels but the tires overall wear is good. I am expecting these tires to last a while.

Tandem A-bike concept drawing

I was interested looking at the idea of a tandem A-bike type folding bike. As it stands now, it is only a drawing concept, nothing more. Here are some drawings of the design. I have no idea if it would work or not but it is fun to draw it up at least to see if the concept works or not. On paper at least, it works out.

The drawings shown show the drawing of the single seater version and the tandem set-up by basicly copying single drawing and adding 20" on to the bike. I then altered frame to make it into the tandem set-up. A drawing showing the tandem folded up is included on the page.

Spring detail problems

Although the overall bike is working great, small details items have shown signs of wear. Over the winter time, I noted the front locking assembly lever had become slightly bend out of place. I removed it from it's assembly and tried to fix it. It had become slightly bent out of place but I did manage to put back into the pin again. The rear section of the lever has been somehow damaged so I just held the edges of the lever on the pin while tightening up screw on to the frame lock assembly. The lever needs replacing for it to allow the lever to lock and unlock the quick release properly. For now, I have it working so it holds the quick release assembly section together.

The original light I put on the bike has worn out and broke a few weeks ago. The rough ride on the bike makes any part that can not withstand bumps will break at some point. Since this was just a very cheap way of getting my first bike light into place, it did not have a long life span on it. The original light design was just a book light. It was not ever really designed for bike use. The remaining broken section has been removed from the bike.

Overall the bike is working out becoming more of a work bike that I just treat as any other bike I ride without too much though as to how different it is from the regular bikes I own.how different is is from the others.

Bike update

I managed the best speed on this bike to date. I had to ride the bike home seeing that my girlfriend had to go to work I was about 6 km from home. I managed to get an average speed of 16.2 kph. This is very good considering the size of the wheels. It took only 21:18 minutes/ seconds. Having set-up the drive train into a tightened condition helped out.

Having pulled out the bike, I have found out a number of things about it. On one ride, I reached a top speed of 32 kph on a section of down hill! This not something I would recommend to do. The bike is not set-up for this high speed riding.

Drive train tune-up

Spring has come and the bike is out and being used again. The bike has about 175 km on it now. I had to readjust the chain so it is tight again. There was a bit of slipage on the chain that was connected to the drive wheel. I also took the drive train casing apart to see how well insides where holding up. It is holding up well. Once the adjustments where made, it rode far better. Climbing smaller hills in the area where done with no slipping of the gear drive train.

The readjustment was done by loosening 4 small bolts on each side of the rear drive assembly. I pulled this down a bit to tighten the final drive chain up. The more I use this bike, the more I like it.