The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

For several years I’d been talking about getting a Litespeed tandem frame and building it up with Di2.  This idea was accompanied by a fantasy of stashing that tandem at Will’s place in Berlin so that we could ride in Europe without flying around with the bike.  Perhaps you can tell that I was not entirely serious about it.

Here’s what they say about Litespeed tandems on bike forums:

They started out as customs, then Litespeed played around with production-model tandems for a few years (’98 – ’02 or ’03?) and then switched back to build-to-order / custom fabrication

The first Taliani’s used Rick Jorgenson’s Tango uptube design but shifted to a more conventional, full-length internal tube before kicking into production and the basic road tandem design has remained the same since then.

Here are the Litespeed catalogues I could find on-line for the relevant period:

2006 – custom tandem mentioned, but no specifics

2004 – no mention of tandems

2001 – caliper brakes, looks like a carbon fork  [PDF]

2000 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork  [PDF]

1999 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork  [PDF]

1998 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork

1997 – tandems not discussed

It is interesting to note that the ownership of Litespeed changed at some point in 1999, which may have influenced their appetite for low-volume, labor intensive,  high price-point products like tandems.

I saved an eBay search and went to the Seattle Craigslist periodically to see what was available there.  During most of 2024 and the first nine months of 2025 there were only a handful of Litespeed tandems listed on eBay (and none that I saw on the local CL).  I saw one, with an original Ultegra groupset, that was listed for $4,500 and which sat there for at least six months.  (It was a medium frame – 56 captain –  which was just slightly bigger than I wanted or else I might have made a bid of a couple of thousand.)  I don’t know if it sold or was just deleted but the seller didn’t lower the price and nobody was ready to pay that much for it.  There was another one at a similar price that I almost jumped on.  It was a medium sized Ultegra located down in Portland.  I equivocated too long and it sold, but it was a Santana anyway and not really what I was looking for.  It became apparent to me that there was no trade in bare frames.  Everything listed seemed to be not just a complete bike but decked out in bling.  Generally they were listed for much more than I would consider but they still came off the site quickly.  Somehow when people spend eight or ten grand upgrading a bike they expect to recover at least part of that when they sell it used, so they list their tandem for ten or twelve grand.  In my experience it generally doesn’t work that way –  fancy components don’t usually command much of a premium on vintage bikes.

For several months during the summer of 2025  my saved search didn’t turn up any eBay listings, but one day when I checked the Seattle Craigslist I found this listed for $2,500:

This is a rare titanium tandem that weighs under 30# on a bath scale! Size Medium. Seats are set for 5’11” captain and 5’4 stoker. Everything on this bike was upgraded to best of including Carbon spoke spinergy wheels, gates carbon drive, carbon FSA cranks, Campagnolo record 10 long cage and ti cassette, carbon tandem specific fork, titanium stems from Seven cycles, carbon bars from Zipp, titanium Campagnolo record seat posts! Can include shimano or speedplay pedals. Continental tires. Metallic blue custom powdercoat. None like it. I would put this up against any tandem at all for ride quality, weight, speed, shifting and braking, whether comotion, moots, seven cycles, Santana…whatever. This is 10# -15# lighter than most preowned tandems. Must see and ride to appreciate. I live on the Burke Gilman Trail in Lake forest park. Come test ride for 5-10 miles before you decide.

https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/bik/d/seattle-litespeed-titanium-tandem/7882773889.html

The post had been there for 17 days (updated 3 days earlier) so I confirmed that it was still available and arranged to come over to his place that afternoon to look at it.  Odette came and looked over my shoulder as I set up the meeting which gave me the chance to broach the idea of a third tandem – she didn’t object too loudly and agreed to come with me to see the bike.

I was afraid that the bank would be suspicious about me withdrawing that much money in cash (or at a minimum that they would say I needed to come back the next day) but Odette was polite and they gave her 25 – $100 bills with no questions asked about elder abuse or anything else.

The seller (“Brian”) was a guy about our age who said he had been married 40 years.  The bike was in his garage with bunch of other bikes hanging up – the nearest one was a Davidson.  He bemoaned the decline in people riding tandems and said that he and his wife bought a tandem together before they were married.  He said he had a quad and then a quint when his kids were young.  He had health problems that meant he couldn’t ride any more and he was in the process of cleaning out his garage.

Brian said that the bike was from the early 2000’s.  The Litespeed catalogue for 2000 shows a change in the seat post collar that year, and this bike seems to have the new style, so it should be from  2000 or later. The 2001 catalogue announces a change to Ultegra dual-pivot  brakes and since this bike has canti posts it must be from before 2001.  However, this bike has the David Lynskey signature on the left chainstay – probably meaning that it was built before the change in ownership.  It could be that it was in process when the deal closed and that the closing was at the end of 1999.   Or it could be that the new seat post collar got phased in during 1999 but didn’t show up until the next catalogue when they needed something for marketing. And, of course, if it was a custom build, all bets are off.

Here are links to Taliani specs for 1999, 2000 and 2001 – you can see the evolution of the brakes here, matching what is shown in the catalogue, and placing this bike in the year 2000 – but I’d take those user reported spec sheets with a grain of salt and question if they really put V-brakes on the 2000 tandem.  (The seat-post collar change was evidently across models, not tandem specific, and I encountered it once before while dating Odette’s 2000 Tuscany.)

In retrospect, Brian didn’t say he got the bike new in the early 2000’s, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he got it used some time after it was built.  He said that he had upgraded it at the start of the pandemic and that it hadn’t been ridden since then.  (The belt drive – and probably the FSA cranks – are older than that.)  He said that the powder coat was done at a place in Mukilteo and that he got the bike painted  just to make it  unique.

When we went to load the bike on the roof rack I couldn’t release the brakes to get the front wheel off and ended up having to deflate the tire.  Brian said that there were brake releases on the side of the hoods.  Google has a better description: To release the brakes on a Campagnolo 10-speed shifter, squeeze the main brake lever, then push the small, inner lever (also used for downshifting) inward. This action opens the brake caliper, providing clearance for wheel removal. You learn something new every day – but it kind of makes me think about how close Brian was to the operation of this bike.

On the way home I had the usual buyers remorse (not very serious, but I kicked myself for spending a bunch of money on a toy.)  This time my train of thought was something like “this bike has been freshly painted and has a new fork – maybe it’s stolen or he’s hiding a crash.”  I definitely didn’t get the vibe that Brian was fencing a stolen bike.  I couldn’t see any indication of crash damage.  It’s possible that he was flipping a frame he got somewhere sketchy, but it’s unlikely you’d pick a tandem frame for that kind of exercise and expensive components like Spinergy wheels aren’t what you’d put on a bike you’re flipping.  I’d like to get a serial number and ask Litespeed what they know about this bike, but I haven’t seen any sign of an engraving yet, what with the powder coat (no serial number – another red flag.)  I checked BikeIndex and didn’t see any Litespeed Tandems reported as stolen anywhere on their site.

That powder coat was one of the things that made me call this a “weird-ass bike.”  Who paints a Litespeed?  If you lay out the money for a Titanium frame don’t you want to flaunt it?  (I’m exaggerating here – the Litespeed catalogues include some bikes with paint options and at least one of the Litespeed tandems I saw listed on eBay was painted.)  The paint on this bike seemed to be intended to evoke a mid-90’s Lemond or something where the chrome sleeves and the colored paint meet in hard lines.   (Those white “Litespeeds” are official replacement decals and the heraldic blocks are newer and must have come with the powder coating.)   Weird.

I also reacted to the Bontrager fork as weird-ass.  Brian said he wanted to upgrade to a carbon fork and he wanted one that was tandem-rated and that this one was top of the line.  But Bontrager?  To me, it changes the whole esthetic of the bike to put something that big and bulbous out there in front.  Surely there were tandem-rated carbon forks available from brands that didn’t target the mass market.  (The spec site talks about about Co-Motion forks, but from a time before Litespeed switched to carbon.)  I expect that this fork is the reason that the brakes don’t match – vintage campy side-pulls on the front and Shimano XTR cantilevers in back.  The Bontrager fork didn’t have canti bosses so he must have gone to his parts bin and pulled out a pair of Campy Record calipers and said “good enough.”  (I’ve heard reports that Campy caliper brakes don’t stop all that well, but I believe that was directed at older models.)   In any event the mis-matched brakes undermine his intention to have a best-of-breed, tandem-rated, configuration.  (The cantis likely came stock but the brake pads are thin and wrinkly.)  Weird.

The other big-deal thing that contributed to the “weird-ass” reaction was the drive train.  The bike had Campagnolo Record 10-speed brake/shift levers, a Shimano Ultegra front derailleur, an FSA triple crankset, a Campagnolo Ti 10-speed rear derailleur and a Campagnolo Ti cassette.  Weird.

I’ve seen bikes that have Campy shifters and Shimano derailleurs, but except for very specific combinations they generally don’t work well together and people normally want a complete groupset.  My guess is that the FSA crankset came first and that Brian wanted to stick with the triple chainrings when he upgraded the rest of the drivetrain.  It wouldn’t be surprising if he had to use a Shimano derailleur to make those chain rings shift smoothly.  Campy made triple cranks in the ’90s and definitely made derailleurs that would work with them – but that doesn’t mean that a vintage front derailleur is going to work well with modern levers or with that set of Shimano chainrings.  Or it may have just been something else he pulled out of the parts bin.

When I got the bike it was set up 53/39/30 in front (FSA crankset) and 13/29 in back (Campy cassette.) That (30/29) is pretty close to a 1:1 gear ratio at the bottom, which is about what we’re currently riding on our Rodriguez:  30/32.

My last entry in the weird-ass category is the handlebar situation:  carbon in front  / alloy in back.  The front bars are  Zipp – expensive but they don’t match anything else on the bike.  If you’re going to shell out for fancy bars why not get FSA Wing Pro or something that complements your other components?  Besides, you got money for expensive titanium stems and seat posts both front and back but you can’t afford matching handlebars for your stoker?  Weird.

I took the Taliani in to R+E on a Wednesday afternoon (10/15) to discuss my project  with Alder.  When I told him that I wanted to convert the bike to Di2 his first question was “why?”  I didn’t have a prepared answer and responded with something about reviews and flawless shifting with larger jumps and just wanting to get educated about it seeing as how Di2 has been around for over ten years now and isn’t going away.  I didn’t feel like I was exactly convincing so I added that I was thinking about eventually needing to put Odette in front and thought that she’d do better with the effortless electronic shifting.  Somehow that seemed to resonate with Alder.   (He told me a story about accidentally shifting into the big ring while climbing all-out in a cyclocross race.)  Here are some Di2 links that I saved in advance of that conversation.

Here’s the list of questions I prepared for our conversation:

1. 1. 1. can you convert this tandem to Di2?
         1. which Di2 version?
         2. can you use the FSA triple crankset?
         3. can you swap free-hub bodies on the Spinergy hub and use that wheelset?
         4. can you drill holes for internal wiring runs?
      2. can you drill a hole through the brake bridge to mount caliper brakes on the rear?
      3. what about a steel tandem-rated fork (slender, like the one on our Rodriguez ultralight) but with bosses to get canti brakes up front?
      4. how do I remove the cranks (are those self-extracting bolts on the non-drive side?)
      5. why does the rear hub look like a narrow hub with a spacer?
      6. what do you recommend for a stoker suspension seat post?
      7. any ideas where I would find / uncover the serial number?

A couple of days earlier I took the cassette off the hub to verify that it had Campagnolo splines (the visible side of the cassette didn’t have any markings labeling it as Campy, and I wanted to confirm that it was a Ti cassette as described in the listing.)  When I put it back together I tightened it until it squeaked, but that was evidently not enough because it wasn’t shifting right on the ride over and when Alder went to count the cogs he exclaimed about how loose they were.  Luckily that cassette won’t be on the bike when I go to ride it home.  (Evidently only the four largest cogs are titanium, but before tariffs that cassette retailed for $300.)

• • The consensus of the shop (Alder, Smiley, and a random frame-builder) was that it was a cool bike
  • probably looking at 11 speeds in the back and two in front
  • I said I’d go for 50/34 over 48/30
  • to avoid drilling holes in the frame it sounds like we’ll run the wires under tape and use external battery mounts
  • the belt drive is old – from before the advent of a center track in September 2010 – I don’t know what they’ll recommend in that regard although it sounds like the FSA cranks are keepers
  • I shouldn’t think about caliper brakes.  Cantis are more adjustable and have more stopping power
  • to mount caliper brakes on the rear of this bike you’d need to add a reinforcing bracket or something, not just drill a hole
  • a steel fork with canti bosses would look good and give a more flexible ride
  • the Spinergy hubs are made by White Industries and ought to take a regular Shimano free hub body
  • those wheels were expensive, as were the Campy Ti rear derailleur and Ti cassette
  • body float seat posts likely need more room than we’ve got on that frame, at least the way the stoker saddle is currently adjusted. They need to have Odette come in for a fitting to see if it will work
  • l left the bike there, Alder will work on a quote

I hadn’t planned to leave the bike at R+E so when I left the shop I called Odette and asked her if she had time to pick me up.  We agreed that I would walk up  Ravenna toward Green Lake.  First she confused R+E with Recycled Cycles, then she had trouble remembering where Ravenna was.  She stopped three or four times to use Apple’s “Find My”  app but couldn’t project where I would be when she arrived.   I finally saw her turning left onto Ravenna from 65th (about halfway to Green Lake) and called her cell to say where I was.  She turned around but then got into the left turn lane and went back onto 65th…  We finally got together but I gave her a bad time about impending senility.

Alder called on Thursday (10/16) saying he had found a freehub body for the Spinergy wheels and had specced out an 11×2 set-up and that parts would come to about $2,300 plus $400 in labor to install.  I told him that was a bargain.  I told him I wanted a steel fork (and that I would supply Paul Components  canti brakes) and he said that the fork would be another $400.  I gave him a credit card but I expect there will be some additional costs (like a body float) and some stuff I need to procure on my own (like saddles).

The next day I started thinking about using those touring cantis on a go-fast bike and decided that doing it right would mean getting a set of neo-retro brakes.  I ordered them that evening, but nothing will happen over the weekend and I’ll be lucky to have them by the end of the next week.  R+E isn’t going to start working on this bike for at least a couple of weeks so my timing will still be fine.  (The touring cantis will go on Odette’s Stellar where they were headed before this whole thing got started.)   I cut a length of housing liner that ought to be enough for the run of brake cable along the top tube and I plan to put that in the box with the brakes.  I think it makes sense to cover the cable just to protect the paint but using a chewed-up length of exterior housing  leaves much to be desired.

Stuff still in process:

• saddles – I’ll start with that Selle Anatomica carbon saddle I’ve got in the garage; we’ll try to get Smiley to sell us something for Odette when we go in for a fitting
• Time Atac pedals / cleats – nothing to consider, I just need to get around to ordering them
• body float / bike fitting – we’ll do this separately after the conversion is done
• ProblemSolvers downtube shifter boss covers – unless Alder has a better idea I’ll order them myself
• bar tape – the front needs new tape; if we do anything other than black there we’ll do the same on the rear bars
• fork color – I think we’ll just go with black and see how it looks.  I may come back later and see if I can get the fork painted to match the blue on the frame
• front brake hanger – to mount the cantis we’ll need a hanger…
• chain – I couldn’t tell if the quote included a new chain but the one that’s on there now is 10-speed Campy and after the conversion we’ll need an 11-speed Shimano
• FSA belt drive – still unclear if I need to replace all or part of the old drive
• collect old parts – I want to make sure I come away with the parts that get removed: Bontrager fork, FSA chain rings,  Campy  levers, Shimano front deraileur, Campy Ti rear derailer,  Campy Ti cassette, Campy free-hub body, Campy 10-speed chain, Campy caliper front brake, Shimano XTR rear canti, outriggers,

Craigslist photos:

Odette put a couple hundred miles on the Tuscany and said she liked it.  Then she had an accident and was off the bike all winter.  When she started riding again in the spring she said she wouldn’t get on the Tuscany until I raised the handlebars or for any ride that involved climbing.  (She managed to ride it on the trainer for a few months, though, so I took her pronouncement with a grain of salt.)

I ordered a Campagnolo 10-speed crankset with compact gearing and 170mm cranks.  I had been kind of doubtful about the 175 mm cranks I’d originally put on that bike, and I would have gone with compact gearing earlier if I’d been able to mount smaller chainrings.  The crankset I got was a cross setup with carbon cranks and it was new old-stock so I expected it to work with the rest of the groupset.  Here’s how the seller described it:

New Old Stock
Campagnolo CX 10 speed Carbon Crankset
– 170mm
– 9/16″ pedal threads
– 50/34 Chainrings
– stated weight of 629 grams
These cranks have a lot going for them. Super stiff carbon in traditional cyclocross gearing or compact road gearing at a price that you can even upgrade your commuter bike. All weather, the chainrings feature a coating applied to keep them cleaner in dirty, wet conditions. The inner  machining  of  the  chainrings  was  created  to  facilitate  the  up  shift  and  downshift  of  the  chain,  so  that  the  movements are fast and precise in all conditions. They require Power Torque bottom bracket cups (whichever your frame calls for) and those feature a double lip seal to keep contamination out. Cut the factory Campagnolo box seals to photograph these cranks. We have these for 10 or 11 speed drivetrains in 170, 172.5, 175mm lengths with options of 46/36 34/50 chainrings, they are listed separately in our store.  Visit My eBay Store: Vintage NOS Bicycle Parts for thousands of new old stock, vintage and modern bicycle parts.

After reading more in the on-line forums I decided that with the new crankset I could get away with a cassette that had a bigger low-end and I got a 12-30.  The combination of the smaller chainring and the bigger bottom cog gave a ratio that was really close to the bottom end she had on her Rodriguez.

I also put on the stem extender I’d bought earlier, even though it looked dorky.   I had hesitated because I was worried about unwrapping the handlebars and redoing both brake and both shifter cables, but I used housing couplers and added exactly four inches of housing to each of the four front housing segments so that really it was just a matter of replacing the internal cables with longer ones.  I had trouble getting the front shifter cable to thread through into the housing so I ended up unwrapping that side of the handlebars anyway, but it was a surprisingly painless project overall and the cabling didn’t look too bad when I got done.  I had a long bolt that I could use with the stem cap, but it took me a while to figure out that I needed to have the spacers “stand proud” of the interior tubing both above and below the extension.

The new crankset required a power-torque bottom bracket which I ordered.  I couldn’t tell from the descriptions whether I was getting a full BB or just cups, so I also ordered bearings which I ended up not needing.  I had trouble getting the square shank bottom bracket out of the shell, but Recycled Cycles helped me out.  The shifting was off when I got done and the chain jumped in the smallest cog.  I took it in and was informed that I really needed a long-cage derailleur and a narrower chain.  I know that people have been able to run 30-T cogs with a regular derailleur and I know that the chain on there worked for a couple hundred miles, but whatever.  After they got done it seemed to work fine and to shift really smoothly.

Once Odette decides whether she prefers Selle Anatomica or Giles Berthold saddles I’ll put a better one on the Tuscany.  In the meantime I think Odette is set to ride her summer bike.

Here are the revised specs:

Litespeed Tuscany
Bicycle Type: Road race & triathlon
Weight: 21 lbs (with pedals, pump & toolkit)
Size: 47cm

Frame & Fork
Frame Construction: welded titanium, tapered, butted
Frame Tubing Material: “symmetrically enhanced” 3Al/2.5V titanium
Fork Brand & Model: Look
Fork Material: Carbon fiber composite

Components
Component Group: Campagnolo Record
Brakeset: Campagnolo Record
Shift Levers: Campagnolo Record 10-Speed Ultra
Front Derailleur: Campagnolo Record 10-speed
Rear Derailleur: Campagnolo Chorus 10-speed (long cage)
Crankset: Campagnolo CX Carbon 34/50 teeth
Pedals: Speedplay Frog
Bottom Bracket: Campagnolo PowerTorque
BB Shell Width: 68mm English
Rear Cogs: Campagnolo 10-speed, 12-30 teeth
Chain: Campagnolo Record 10-speed ultra-narrow
Seatpost: Thomson, 27.2mm diameter
Saddle: Gilles Berthoud Marie Blanque, Stainless Steel Rails
Handlebar: Salsa Moto Ace Short ‘n’ Shallow
Handlebar Stem: 17 degree rise on 75mm Origin8 Extra-Lift Stem Riser
Headset: Cane Creek 1 1/8″ threadless

Wheels
Hubs: Campagnolo Veloce
Rims: 650C Mavic CXP 14, 32-hole
Tires: Continental Grand Prix 4000s II
Spokes: Stainless steel straight gauge
Spoke Nipples: Brass nipples

here’s a gallery of photos 

here’s the original page

UPDATE – Cyclocross set-up

More update:  Ti rear derailleur and cassette

For my birthday in 2016 Odette bought me a 1998 Litespeed Classic.  At the time she was training for our planned tour in France and she was very focused on getting her requisite miles.  She settled on a pattern of riding tandem on weekends and riding her 2003 Rodriquez Stellar two or three times during the week.  Since it was spring in Seattle she wanted a bell and fenders (we got Gilles Berthoud fenders from Peter White Cycles and they are gorgeous, they have the right curvature for 26″ wheels, but they are not light.)  She also has a frame bag with an accumulation of junk that she always brings and she can’t leave the house without a pound-and-a-half of keys.  As I got accustomed to the Litespeed I was impressed by how heavy her Stellar seemed in comparison.  It struck me that the wheelbase on the two bikes was identical and that the Litespeed was a taller bike, yet it was at least ten pounds lighter than the Rodriquez – probably 15 pounds lighter the way she loads it.  As I rode with her I noticed the clattering when she shifted and even after cleaning the bike and lubing her chain it still was not quiet.

So… I decided that I would build up a light bike for her birthday.  My last project had been an upgrade of the Ibis Tandem to a 10-speed drive train with Rene Herse cranks and Ultegra derailleurs.  I’d completed that in late 2015 (later adding Gilles Berthoud fenders and a Nitto chromoly  rack) and I’d been toying with the idea of building myself a full-suspension mountain bike.  Then I’d received the Litespeed and put any more builds on hold – but the Litespeed was a functioning bike when I got it and there wasn’t any “project” involved.

My thinking was that I would take my time and find a carbon or titanium frame small enough for Odette and then buy used components to build it up for her.  I planned to make it a full Campagnolo build because she’s been riding a Campy bike for the the last twelve years and has never used Shimano brifters.  I wanted something that would shift as smoothly as my Litespeed and that would climb well.  I wasn’t looking for another Litespeed since neither of us enjoy appearing as “twinsies,” but I wanted a frame that was relatively high-end that had enough of a bling factor to attract some attention.

I measured the seat tube on her Stellar and determined that it was a 48cm frame.  She has the seat post up pretty high and has an extender to raise the bars so I figured she could probably take a slightly larger frame, but my preference was for exactly the size she had been fitted to.  I’ve always put 26″ tires on her bike – originally 26 X 1″ and later as wide as 1-1/2″ –  but they were probably really 650c rims and I just didn’t know any better.  I didn’t really think about what wheel size I was looking for when I bought a frame, but I knew that I didn’t want a 50cm frame if I went with 700c wheels.

I let the guys at Recycled Cycles know that I was looking for a small lightweight frame but they told me they rarely saw anything smaller than a 54cm.  I saved a Craigslist search and saw a bunch of interesting bikes but none that I wanted to buy.  I monitored Ebay and figured out that in general there weren’t a lot of older high-end frames sold separately – and very few small ones.  I saw several Lynskey frames in their small size (which must be about 48cm) but they were all from last year and besides mostly being the wrong style they all ended up being too expensive  (I bid on a couple but didn’t come close.)

In early May I saw a 48cm Litespeed Tuscany listed on Ebay.  It was a complete bike but the description was kind of wacky and didn’t give much information about components (or even about size:)

I saw from the Litespeed catalogue that the Tuscany came in a 47cm or a 49cm – not in 48cm –  and that the smallest size had 650c wheels while the 49cm frame had 700c wheels.  With the markings reported on the tires I figured that this bike probably had 650c wheels and a 47cm frame.  I guessed from the Ebay photos that it had Shimano componetry – presumably a 105 groupset. It looked like it had a threadless stem.

I decided that I would treat it as a stand-alone frame and if it came with wheels or components that I could use it would be a bonus.  As nearly as I could tell I was the only bidder.  To make a long story short the bike arrived professionally packed with a good-looking Shimano 105 groupset, clunky 650c Sun Venus rims, and the same Serfas saddle that Odette had on her Stellar.  I managed to get it into the basement and hide it without Odette noticing.  I stripped off the drivetrain and found little wear and no scratches or dings on the frame.  The bottom bracket was hollowtech with an octolink spindle so my crank-puller wouldn’t work.  Google educated me about using a bolt to push against the opposing crank or using a dime – I didn’t have a bolt the right length and the dime turned into a mushroom on me.  I took the frame in to Recycled Cycles and bought the appropriate crank puller and then had them remove the cranks and bottom bracket for me.  They had trouble breaking the bottom bracket loose and advised me to use anti-seize compound when putting it back together, so I think I made the right call there.

I emailed Litespeed asking when serial number 55520 had been made and got a reply from their account manager saying that it had been built in 2000.  I was proud that I had guessed 2000 based on the location of the cable-stops and the presence of a separate seat post clamp.

As soon as I won the auction for the bike I ordered a Campy Record 10-speed groupset on eBay.  There were several Record 10-speed group sets listed but the others were all from eastern Europe and this one said it would ship from Boulder.  I clicked the “buy it now” button and paid the asking price, which was more than I’d paid for the full bike, and I paid through PayPal when I committed to the purchase.  A couple of days later the seller contacted me from the Ukraine saying he needed to cancel the auction because his PayPal account was blocked. I wasn’t too happy but after consulting with the Reddit Ebay forum I figured that I wouldn’t loose my payment.  The seller did in fact cancel and refund and then relisted the groupset.  Despite my better judgement I clicked the “buy it now” button on the new listing and repaid through PayPal.  A couple of days later I got the notice that the item had shipped – from the Ukraine.  I had to go to the post office to pick it up, but it actually arrived really quickly and was exactly as described – except that he included a bar of Ukrainian chocolate presumably because I’d stuck with him.

I needed a bottom bracket to be able to install the cranks and it occurred to me that Odette might be happier with compact gearing than with the 53/39 chainrings that they came with.  Google helped me figure out that square taper Campy cranks from before 2005 would have a 135 BCD that would not take a chainring smaller than 39T.  I was deliberating between Phil Woods and SKF bottom brackets, but neither of them seemed to come in a 102mm which was was the web said I should be planning to use. I also figured out that I was going to need a Campy free hub body to mount a Campy cassette on the Shimano hub.  I went to Branford Bikes on capitol hill – a new shop to me but listed as a Campagnolo Pro site – and they sold me a Chorus bottom bracket and an 11-25 10-speed cassette.  They have a very different vibe from my usual haunts at R+E or Recycled Cycles and they were skeptical that you could put a Campy free hub body on a Shimano hub.

I went to Recycled Cycles looking for a free hub body and after some poking around figured out that the series 5500 Shimano 105 hub I had simply wasn’t compatible with Campy free hub bodies.  I bought a pair of vintage Campy Veloce hubs (with wide flanges and 32 holes) and had Recycled Cycles build me a pair of wheels with NOS Mavic CXP 14 rims.  (The rims were a bargain since they are no longer in production – they are a deep-section alloy rim without a machined braking surface.  At 520 g they are not super light, but they ought to be very stiff, they’ll look great and they are period appropriate.)

While I waited for the wheels to be built up I mounted the bottom bracket, cranks, derailleurs, brakes and brifters.  I didn’t use anti-seize compound.  Everything went on just right.  I replaced the alloy stem which had no raise with one I’d bought for an earlier project with 17% rise and I put the whole stack of spacers below the stem.  I figured that this was about as high as I was going to get the bars without using a stem extender as was done on the Stellar and I wanted to try it first before resorting to that kind of hack.

I bought Jagwire brake and shift cable housing and installed cables for both derailleurs and brakes.  Campy levers are interesting but by pulling back the hoods I was able to get everything to seat properly.  I had worried about mounting the front derailleur because I couldn’t see from the photos if it was braze-on or clamp mounted.  It turned out to be the clamp type and the size it came with worked on the frame.  I couldn’t operate the derailleurs to adjust the indexing because I didn’t have wheels or a chain installed, but they moved in and out with the levers just like they should.

In the middle of this process I decided to take the Shimano 105 groupset and use it to build up another bike – an ’84 Centurion Elite that wasn’t getting any use.  Since I had the frame and the components that project was relatively inexpensive (especially since I ordered enough cable and housing stock to do a couple of bikes.)

It took a couple of weeks, but I got the new wheels from Recycled Cycles after the wheel builder called to say that he couldn’t true the front one perfectly and that I might feel some pulsation when braking.  I mounted continental grand prix 4000s II tires and ruined one tube because the tire was so tight.  The tubes I had didn’t have long enough stems so I couldn’t inflate the tires after I did get them mounted – so back to Recycled Cycles for valve stem extenders.  (Ultimately I got 650c tubes with 48mm valve stems and that solved the problem.)  I put the wheels on the bike and installed a new chain (after taking out two links.)  Out of the box the front shifted okay but the back wouldn’t go into the three smallest cogs.  I fiddled with the brakes and got them pretty much where I wanted them.  I mounted the pedals.  I decided that I wanted to get a pair of carbon bottle cages instead of using the one that came on the bike.   I made a note that I needed to assemble the stuff I needed for a wedge-bag toolkit.

I persisted with tweaks to the derailleurs and the issue on the rear resolved with a couple turns of the limit screw. The front derailleur never seemed to get beyond requiring two clicks to shift, but it worked in both rings.  I mounted a couple of serfas carbon bottle cages – the same model we have on the tandem – and put together a toolkit.  When I ordered the tire levers and stuff for the toolkit I went ahead and got a stem extender and some spacers so that I would be ready when Odette said she wanted the bars higher.  I unbolted the stem I had on it and mounted the extender to confirm my suspicion that I was going to need to recable if I wanted to position the bars three inches higher.  I was able to figure out that with the extender and the 17-degree stem I could get the bars up almost as high as the ones on the Rodriguez.  It does look like a huge stack of spacers but it isn’t as ugly as the Rodriguez.  (I wonder about putting that much leverage and clamp-pressure on the end of a carbon steerer-tube, though.)

I took the bike in to Recycled Cycles a couple of days before we left for a bike tour in the south of France.  I overheard some of the guys up front whispering “Litespeed” as I wheeled it back to the service desk, so I think I achieved my bling objective.  I explained that I was going to be out of town for a couple of weeks and wanted them to torque everything and get it adjusted while I was gone.  They said that would work with their schedule.  I also asked them to pull the bottom bracket and put some anti-seize compound on it.  Then I took Odette’s Rodriguez and rewrapped the bars and cleaned and lubed the chain.  It’s a pretty good bike – I hope I haven’t made a mistake with the Tuscany.

Here are the as-built specs:

Litespeed Tuscany
Bicycle Type: Road race & triathlon
Weight: 21 lbs (with pedals, pump & toolkit)
Size: 47cm

Frame & Fork
Frame Construction: welded titanium, tapered, butted
Frame Tubing Material: “symmetrically enhanced” 3Al/2.5V titanium
Fork Brand & Model: Look
Fork Material: Carbon fiber composite

Components
Component Group: Campagnolo Record
Brakeset: Campagnolo Record
Shift Levers: Campagnolo Record 10-Speed Ultra
Front Derailleur: Campagnolo Record 10-speed
Rear Derailleur: Campagnolo Record 10-speed
Crankset: Campagnolo Record Titanium (pre-2005) 39/53 teeth
Pedals: Speedplay Frog
Bottom Bracket: Campagnolo Chorus 102mm spindle
BB Shell Width: 68mm English
Rear Cogs: Campagnolo 10-speed, 11-25 teeth
Chain: Wipperman 10-speed stainless
Seatpost: Thomson, 27.2mm diameter
Saddle: Serfas
Handlebar: Salsa Moto Ace Short ‘n’ Shallow
Handlebar Stem: generic 17 degree rise
Headset: Cane Creek 1 1/8″ threadless

Wheels
Hubs: Campagnolo Veloce
Rims: 650C Mavic CXP 14, 32-hole
Tires: Continental Grand Prix 4000s II
Spokes: Stainless steel straight gauge
Spoke Nipples: Brass nipples

Here’s a gallery of photos

Odette got me a 1998 Litespeed Classic for my birthday in 2016 and I got her a 2000 Litespeed Tuscany for hers.  As I stripped the Shimano 105 components off the Tuscany frame in order to build it up with a Campagnolo groupset, I started thinking about what I could do with those 105 parts.

The friend Odette got the Classic from was moving out of town and had a girlfriend who didn’t have a bike – he was planning on getting one for her.  I thought I might be able to put something together so that he could take his time in figuring out what bike she really needed.  Alternatively, Odette’s college roommate had moved to Seattle a year ago and we’d been talking about biking with her, but she held back because her bike wasn’t suitable, so maybe I could build something that she could borrow for a while.

It occurred to me that I had this 80’s vintage Centurion that was set up as a single-speed which I’d only ridden a couple of times in the last year.  I knew that it had a derailleur hanger so why not turn it back into a geared bike using the components from the Tuscany?  The frame was light but Tange steel is quality tubing so it ought to be a fun ride if I put it together right.

I measured the seat tube and figured that the frame size was 52 or 53cm – likely too big for either the roommate or the girlfriend – but still a good project.  I stripped it down and everything came off easily and nothing looked to be in bad shape.  the frame had some spots of surface rust but no dents that I could see and nothing that looked concerning.  The threads all seemed to be intact.

I took the frame and fork to Seattle Powdercoat and had them sandblast it and paint it black with 80% gloss.  They did a really good job.  I mounted the hollowtech octalink bottom bracket and it fit and went in just fine.  The cranks went on like they were made for it.  Brakes were similarly not an issue.  I had ordered a Chris King 1″ threaded headset and waited to install the fork (and handlebars and brifters) until I could put that in place. The bearing race on the fork wouldn’t work with the Chris King headset and the one with the headset wouldn’t fit on the fork – so I filed the shoulder off of the fork and went with the one from Chris King. (Maybe a case of an ISO crown race and a JIS fork?)

I took off the wheels with the single speed rear hub and decided that I’d spring for something kind of sexy.  Velomine had a wheel set with H Plus Son deep-section rims on Shimano 105 hubs in black for a price that was less than what I’d pay for a wheel set built on used hubs at Recycled Cycles.  The cassette from the Tuscany looked like it still had some miles left and it went on easily – I didn’t have any tubes with stems long enough to work with the rims, though.  I mounted a set of Gatorskins I’d taken off of Will’s bike because they had flat spots. They still had flat spots when mounted on the new rims.  I replaced the Serfas tires on my Rodriguez with cross tires in anticipation of a tour on gravel and I used the Serfas tires on the Centurion  – but I had to wait until I could get tubes with 60mm stems to work with the deep-section rims.

The Centurion had originally come with downtube shifters – the pair of them mounted on a single braze-on in the middle of the downtube.  As I started thinking about cables I realized that I needed clamp-on cable stops which I ordered from Amazon in silver.  When I mounted the front derailleur I discovered that the clamp that fit the Tuscany was too big for the Centurion, and Recycled Cycles sold me a braze-on adapter clamp that they only had in black – meaning that I had to order another clamp-on cable stop so that it would be black, too.  I had to use a spacer from some old set of brakes to make the bolt from the Shimano clamp work with the braze-on adapter. It seemed to me that the cage ended up positioned too far inboard, but until I got the brifters installed I couldn’t really resolve that.  I ordered a problem solvers shifter boss cover for the downtube braze-on from Vello Orange.

The brakes hooked up easily although I probably left too much housing on the back brake.  With new true rims they adjusted really closely.  The shifters were a different story…

Where more modern frames run the shifter cables under the bottom bracket (presumably to get a larger radius bend) the Centurion frame had metal guides brazed onto the top of the bottom bracket.  This arrangement should  add some protection for the cables, but at the expense of tighter bends.  I figured that it couldn’t hurt to put some teflon cable housing liner in the guides to reduce friction, and as long as I was buying liner I got enough to sheath the whole section of bare cable figuring that would protect the paint on the frame.

The shifter boss covers I got to put on the braze-on where the down-tube shifters had mounted didn’t look right to me, so I ended up with just a leather washer and a flat headed bolt instead.

I threaded the cables though the shifter levers and cut housing to length and inserted barrel adjusters, then threaded the cables through the liner and the guides and hooked them up to the derailleurs.  (First I had to figure out which shifter  went to which side.)  When I got done the front derailleur wouldn’t shift into the large chainring and the back one wouldn’t shift at all.  I fiddled some, but all I had to work with was the attachment of the cable to the derailleur and I knew that after loosening and tightening a few times I’d need a new cable.  Eventually I got the back derailleur to move, but it felt like there were no ratchets in the lever.  I was a running out of time to get the bike finished for a promised delivery over Memorial Day, so I hauled it in to Recycled Cycles for a consultation.  They observed that the cable housing was cut too long, the way I’d routed it to be underneath the bar tape didn’t help, the ferrule at the frame end of the back housing section had crimped and was a problem – and most likely the end of the cable on the right brifter wasn’t seated.  They said that they would be able to squeeze it in over the weekend so I gratefully left it to them.

While screwing up the shifting I had also put a new battery into the flight deck and set the wheel size for 700 X 28,  I downloaded an instruction manual and figured out what button was supposed to do what, but the selectors on the brifters didn’t seem to work and I didn’t have time to figure it out before dropping the bike off at the LBS.

On Monday I got a call from the LBS asking if it was okay for them to replace the bottom bracket because it was too long and causing the front derailleur not to work.  I said okay, that I’d expected an issue with the positioning of the derailleur, and we had a discussion about hollowtech and hollowtech II.  (Later I got a call back saying that I didn’t need a new bottom bracket after all – torquing the cranks down a little more got everything lined up where it needed to be.)  I went by the next morning and picked up the bike along with a couple of inner tubes and a couple of valve extenders.  They had the rear axle shoved all the way back in the dropouts so that the wheel rubbed, but that was easy to adjust.  I got it home and fiddled with the brakes and tightened the headset locknut.  I took a small ride and noticed that the bars weren’t straight but that it shifted just fine. I loosened the headset (and then figured out that I needed to loosen the stem) got the bars straight, and tightened everything up.  I tightened the brakes good and tight but decided not to shorten the housing runs.  I taped the handlebars noting that the spiral on the left went the opposite way from the marks left by the previous wrap.  I checked the chain and saw that the gauge wouldn’t go in even on the 75% side.  I put on some cheap platform pedals without toeclips and rode to the grocery store for lunch.  The bike felt good to me.

I spent some time fiddling with the flight deck – I got it to display speed but the buttons on the brifter didn’t seem to work.  I realized that I’d mounted the cyclemeter on the left side of the bars and that if I were doing it right it should probably go on the other side.  I switched sides and Odette got some more of the settings fixed but the mode button on the brifter still didn’t seem to work.  (I counted teeth on cogs and determined that the cassette was 12-13-14-15-16-17-19-21-23 but couldn’t figure out how to set the flightdeck to those values.)

I swapped out pedals for a set that work with my shoes and I rode the bike for 35 miles (including a good climb) and was happy with its performance.  I felt that the handlebars were tilted down too much and corrected that, but otherwise I didn’t have any complaints.  Then I took my pedals off and replaced them with the cheap plastic platforms.

Here is the as-built configuration:

1984 Centurion Elite R/S
Bicycle Type Road/sport

Frame & Fork
Frame Construction: Lugged steel
Frame Tubing Material: Tange Champion 2
Fork Brand & Model: Centurion
Fork Material: Tange Steel

Components
Component Group Shimano 105
Brakeset: Shimano 105 5500
Shift Levers: Shimano 105 5500 (Flightdeck)
Front Derailleur: Shimano 105 5500
Rear Derailleur: Shimano 105 5500 9-speed
Crankset: Shimano 105 5500 53/39
Pedals: generic platform
Bottom Bracket: Shimano original Hollowtech (Octalink)
BB Shell Width: 68mm
Rear Cogs: 9-speed, 12 – 23 teeth
Chain: Shimano
Seatpost: SR Laprada (aluminum)
Saddle: Selle Italia Mundialita
Handlebar: Sakae SR Custom Road Champion
Handlebar Stem: SR Custom
Headset: Chris King 2Nut (1″ threaded)

Wheels
Hubs: Shimano 105 5800 (32 holes)
Rims: H Plus Son SL42 (42mm deep, machined sidewall)
Spokes: DT Swiss 2.0
Tires: Serfas Seca 700×28

 I cleaned the bike up after the ride and stamped my initials on the bottom bracket so that there was some identifying mark since the original serial number was hidden under the powder coat.  (The original serial number, which is now illegible, is N4G7424.  My mark is JPS2016.)  Here’s a couple of photos:

About Centurion serial numbers: the story I heard was that at the beginning of the ’70s the guy who represented Raleigh in the US ordered 2,000 bikes from Japan for the American Grand Prix but wasn’t allowed to sell them as Raleigh – so he put Centurion decals on them, made a bunch of money, and started a new brand.  At the end of the ’80s the Yen tanked and like everyone else he moved production to Taiwan, consolidating the road models into his Diamondback mountain bike line. (Here is the Wikipedia version.)  Based on the algorithm in this Bikeform thread, (which is repeated by Wikipedia) the N4G7424 serial number on this bike equates to a manufacture date of week 13/14 of 1984.  That sounds right based on the catalogue and everything else I know about the bike.

Here’s a gallery of photos taken right after my ride.  These photos don’t show any decals – I did order Centurion decals (in yellow with gray outlines) for the downtube, a yellow “C” namebadge and a Tange Champion sticker for the top of the seat tube.  The bike should also have had a “Japanese quality – designed in America” decal at the base of the seat tube, but VeloCal didn’t offer one of those. They were supposed to be shipped in ten days, but three weeks later I inquired and got this response:

Hello Jerry,

Moral to the story is don’t buy from VeloCal if you have any other options.  (They showed up the day after I delivered the bike so a few days later I mailed them

UPDATE

Six months later I got the bike back as it was too big for the girlfriend.  Shortly after that Will finally got the Copenhagen Wheel he’d backed on kickstarter and needed a bike to mount it on.  It went on easy and seemed to work just fine.  After riding it a few times he complained that the front shifter was stuck (and the handlebars were slipping down) and left it for me to adjust while he was out of town.  I found that the rear derailleur cage was fractured and that the shifter for the front derailleur had just been jammed too hard.  I surmised that the issue was that the chain from the Tuscany was simply too short for that frame.  I put a new chain on, installed an Ultegra 10-speed rear derailleur from the Ibis tandem, and took the flight deck off of the bars.  As far as I could tell everything was working when I returned it to him.

I grew up in a little mountain town in eastern Oregon and I spend quite a bit of time outdoors as a kid. I hunted with my dad from an early age and most of the attraction of the hunt was the tramping around in the woods and the camping.   I was in boy scouts for the hiking and camping.  When I was in high school my dad and I built an A-frame cabin just beyond the end of the driveable road. I learned a lot about manual labor, improvisation, and first aid from that experience.

I took a rock climbing elective in college (in Clifton Gorge – Ohio doesn’t have much in the way of mountains) and did some hiking and scrambling in the Alps and Pyrnees. I climbed Mt. Washington in the White Mountains while on a co-op in Boston.  I went to Bear Mountain while we were living in New York. Then I moved to Seattle.

One of my main reasons for returning to the west coast was to be able to do outdoors stuff. (The other main reason was that my wife hated New York and was going to move whether I did or not.) When we arrived in New York in 1985 one of the first things I did was to take her for a weekend at Mt. Rainier where I learned that she was terrified of trails. (We hiked to the Pinnacle / Plumber saddle in the Tatoosh range and she had an anxiety attack about a boulder field. We hiked rampart ridge and she stopped to huff and puff half-way up each switchback. We hiked the skyline trail above Panarama Point in the fog and she was in tears most of the way.) After that we joined the Mountaineers.

There was a time, I’d say from the late fourties until the late sixties, when the “club climber” was the norm in the pacific northwest. That era may have lingered even somewhat longer, but when I started climbing technical stuff the heyday of the climbing clubs was over and the sport climbers were in their ascendency. In many respects I feel like I am a generation older than my contemporaries and the comraderie and traditions and structure of a club like the Mountaineers worked really well for me. I took the Mountaineers alpine scrambles course in about 1987 (before Will was born) and did quite a bit of backpacking through the club.

I took the their basic climbing course in 1991 with experience climbs up Baker, Little Tahoma and Yellowjacket tower. I climbed Adams and Rainier (on the summer solstice in 1992) as private trips. I took the Mountaineers intermediate course in 1993. Later, while in the intermediate course, I climbed Mt. Olympus and Glacier Peak to earn their “coveted” Five Peaks Pin.

I have led backpacks, scrambles and climbs for the Mountaineers as well as snowboard trips. I’ve served on various committees for the Mountaineers, been really active in one of their lodges (Meany), and was the chairman of an avalanche investigation committee and served on the nominating committee for the Board. I was an officer of the club for several years (mainly involved with the Mountaineers Books division) and served on the executive committee. At one point I was the president elect but shortly before I should have taken office I realized that didn’t have the commitment to see it through and I resigned abruptly and haven’t had any administrative role in the club since.

I don’t climb difficult rock (or ice) but I’m not afraid of brush or rock slides or strenuous approaches or loose rock or crappy weather or downclimbing fourth class sections – or a bunch of the stuff that makes for the basic Cascade experience. I enjoy teaching and I enjoy being out in the mountains with friends.

Here’s a list of my climbing books.

In the late fall of 2025 I picked up a Litespeed tandem and spent a good bit of time retrofitting it with a Di2 drivetrain. In the middle of that project I was interrupted by the failure of our Ibis tandem, naturally occurring just when the weather called for a bike with fenders.

The history of the Ibis goes back to 2014 when I had just quit working and was looking for a project bike. I retrofitted it with S&S couplers, a Rohloff hub, and a dynamo lighting system, eventually spending many times the original $200 purchase price. We took it on some epic rides including a couple of Gran Fondos east of the mountains. After my experience with the Franklin Rohloff conversion, I went with the Gebla shifting system – mainly because I didn’t like the look of flat bars on what was essentially going to be a road bike. For the Ibis I bought new Chorus 12-speed shifters and had R+E disable the downshift mechanism. The Gebla “Rohbox ” was never as satisfactory on the tandem as it was on the Franklin. It may be related to the length of the cable run, but in the six or seven years we rode it we had at least half a dozen episodes where the right shifter became really difficult to operate and eventually the end would break off of the cable. I became proficient in replacing Rohloff shift cables as a result (cable splitters make a huge difference) but we ended up hesitating to take the bike very far from home in case we had to ride it back as a single-speed.

In the summer of 2025 we had another broken cable and took the bike to The Polka Dot Jersey for service and repair. When I picked the bike up I had a long conversation with a mechanic there who had worked at Rohloff in Germany some time ago. He was impressed with the OEM cable holder and torque block, but was less impressed with the Gebla shifting, telling me that the system was only available for a little over a year and that the company was out of business now.

I rode the bike home and it worked well with clean shifting – a fun ride. Odette and I rode it once or twice on unpaved roads that fall, a total of maybe 50 miles, and found that while the bike worked properly, it didn’t shift as easily with a stoker on the back as it did when I was alone. Before Thanksgiving I installed fenders on it and rode it around the block to make sure it didn’t have any rubs – and the end broke off the cable. This time it seemed to be more than just a broken cable – the shifter didn’t have any resistance at all and there was no sense of a ratcheting process. I was pissed.

I fretted about shifting the Rohloff for a couple of weeks – the choice seemed to be spending whatever it took to make it work right vs. getting it rideable as cheaply as possible with an eye toward selling it. Eventually, after consulting with Alder at R+E, I ruled out rebuilding / replacing the Campy lever and decided that I would mount a regulation Rohloff twist-shifter and decide separately whether or not to sell. (Alder told me that while Gebla was still around and doing fine, they had only had a single American agent(Cycle Monkey?) who had gone out of business or at least weren’t importing Gebla any more.)

I had a few options for mounting the twist-shifter but I knew that I didn’t like the way any of the available bars had looked when I had them on the Fuji a decade earlier, and I figured that they would look even dorkier with one twist-shifter appended. After looking at the Velo Orange crazy bars in combination with a rando bag, I decided that it was something I could live with. In preparation for taking the bike in to R+E for a Gebla decommissioning I removed the drop bars with the broken shift lever and installed the crazy bars. I removed the bar tape, partly because it was an ugly hack and partly because I needed to get under it to remove the shifter cable housings. The shifters themselves, DuraAce bar-ends, came off really easily and I remembered that the ends of crazy bar extensions were too small for shifters and I had to ream them out to make the shifters fit. I thought that I could just take the faceplate off the stem and mount the new bars, but the crazy bars apparently had a clamp area that wasn’t 31mm (I had a stem with a 26 mm clamp that worked so I assume that they are 26mm bars.) The stem I found with a clamp that worked had a lot of offset – probably close to 100mm. I had to fiddle around with the rear brake to get it to pull properly but the whole process was pretty painless. I rode the crippled, tapeless, Ibis over to R+E (down the hill on 73rd!) and the brakes worked ok but I had to reach really far forward to pull those reverse brake levers. I had R+E order a Rohloff shifter and install it for me using their proprietary “doohickey” to mount it on the stem instead of on the bars. A couple of weeks later I found the extra parts – including a shifter – from when I originally had the Gebla system installed. At some point I realized that without shifters on the bars I could swap them for different bars really easily. I toyed with the idea of upgrading to Rivendale bars with a lot of raise, but decided to hold off on spending any money.

When I got the Ibis back with the twist-shifter mounted on the stem it seemed like a new bike. First, it shifted easily and cleanly. Second, I could see what gear I was in on the shifter and could tell Odette that I really was shifted down enough as we started up hills. The reach for the brakes was definitely too long and I kept moving my hands to where I expected the drops to be – especially on that first thrust when I got out of the saddle to climb. I gathered up all the spare stems I had and found a Cannondale stem with very little offset and a 26mm clamp. I swapped out the stem and tilted the crazy bar horns up by almost 45 degrees. I found the stem that had originally been on the drop bars and mounted it on those bars again. I took the 26mm stem that I’d replaced with the Cannondale stem and mounted it on a set of K2 flat bars taken off a mountain bike 25 years earlier because they seemed too wide. I ordered a shim so that I could use a 31mm stem with the Prima TTT bars I’d taken off the back of the Litespeed tandem. I still had a couple of stems to work with but no more bars that I wanted to try. (I did have a set of Nashbar butterfly bars but Alder had discouraged me from going that route and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to put any energy into them because I hadn’t cared for them when I had them mounted on the Fuji.)

The next ride we took on the Ibis was much better – the flats were closer to me and comfortable as a hand position and the levers were just about where you’d find them on a set of drop bars. I took the Pauls Component levers off of the butterfly bars and mounted them on the flat bars. I figured that hooking up the brakes to those levers wouldn’t require much – the straddle cable was already connected on the front cable so that wouldn’t need anything more than repositioning the knarp to adjust the length of the straddle. The cable on the rear brake lever had been sized for the Fuji – a single bike – and unless the cable splitter was pretty far forward I’d need a longer cable for the tandem. Of all the cables to replace, though, the rear brake cable is the easiest.

Before I took off the crazy bars to mount the flat ones, I figured I would take a look at what would be involved in installing a set of drop bars. I sorted through my collection of brake levers and found that I had the Dia Comp levers that were original to the Ibis as well as a set of drilled Dia Comp 202 knock-offs (Origin8?) that had originally come on the Centurion. I also had the levers from a Giant Rincon that were pretty rough looking but might work on flat or trekking bars, and several sets of brifters. I mounted the drilled levers on the Prima TTT bars and they fit just fine. Then those brifters got me thinking…

I took half the tape off of the drop bars that I’d removed from the Ibis. (FSA Wing Pro alloy bars – nice because they have really big flats and shallow drops.) I unmounted the right hand brake/shift lever and removed the downshift internals. I had to buy a torx screwdriver set (a whole $10) but one screw and the upshift internals came out too – and then I removed the other half of the bar tape and the shifting mechanisms on the left hand lever. The only broken part I could find was a spring on the the downshift internals – and I may have broken that figuring out how to get the mechanism out. I remounted the levers and rewrapped the bar tape I’d removed. The cannibalized brifters actually looked really good. Since those bars and levers had come off of the Ibis I figured that I wouldn’t have any adjusting to do to put them back on – and that proved to be the case. I rode the bike around the block and it felt good (better than with the crazy bars.) The bar tape needs to be redone (I bought new tape but didn’t want to use it until I was sure I was done moving the levers around.) When I hung the bike back up I remembered that Jan Heine’s blog had a recent post about the advantages of cantilever brakes where he described four of his bikes with cantis, two of which have campy levers with the internals removed :

The Weigle has Campagnolo 11-speed Ergopower levers with the shifting internals removed. They work the same as the older Campy levers on my Oregon Outback bike—superb.

Mine are 12-speed Chorus levers, but it’s the same concept and the ergo hood shape is definitely more comfortable than those Dia Comp levers, drilled-out or not.

Odette and I rode 30 miles on the Ibis with the drop bars and it felt pretty good. I came away wanting to make sure the bars were straight relative to the wheel and I wanted to adjust the left hand lever so that it didn’t toe-in as much. Our speed was slightly higher than the last time we’d ridden the Ibis but I’m not sure I can attribute that to the drop bars. When we got home I fiddled with the left hand lever and then removed the drop bars and mounted the flat bars. The straddle cable was too short for the brakes to work right and there wasn’t any extra tail, so I replaced the straddle. The housing seemed too long (the straddle was almost at the end of the cable and barely cleared the tire) so I cut about three inches off the housing. The rear cable was too short so I replaced it with a new cable and cut three inches off of that housing to match the one in front. I got the rear cable too short and had to break out a second cable, but in the end both brakes worked and it looked like a reasonable setup. I rode around the block and except that one grip needed to be tightened, it seemed great. I’m not certain that I have the levers mounted where they ought to be but with the shorter housings I probably can’t slide them much further out without new internal cables. It’s clearly not a touring configuration but I could see day trips with those bars. When I finally got the cables adjusted the brakes worked just fine with the MTB-style levers.

I put the crazy bars back on the bike and figured that I would ride it that way a few times before switching back to the drop bars. When I did this on the Fuji I quickly figured out that even though it was a ten-minute process to swap bars I wasn’t likely to want to keep doing that and settled into a favorite (the drops) pretty quickly. I expect that the process with the Ibis will be similar.

Before hanging up the Ibis I spent a little time with the butterfly bars. I removed the bar tape and held them up to the bike to look at how they would fit. The right hand bar end would make it hard to access the twist-shifter if they are installed in the conventional way. I could install them so that the ends go forward and up at an angle. but I wonder if they’d end up too far forward for a comfortable reach. I tried to slip the Giant levers on and couldn’t get them around the first bend. I’ve got a shim coming so that I can mount them with a 31mm stem, but I’m not inclined to take it much further.

Late in January I hesitated to head out on a frosty morning and decided to fiddle with the butterfly bars while I waited for it to warm up. I found several scraps of brake cable, including one that was long enough for a rear brake run. I found a Campagnolo straddle cable carrier! I found a Knarp and fabricated a straddle cable. By the time the white had melted out of the back yard, roughly two hours, I had a working bar option that just needed final adjustments and bar tape. The grips are small and the levers really ought to point in the other direction, but I think that this set up will work and it doesn’t get in the way of the shifter knob. I need a ride to assess the reach, but I think I’ll tape the bars first.

The next day was similarly frosty so I fiddled with the bike for an hour or so before riding. I taped the butterfly bars, which was interesting to do in the cold. I cut about a quarter inch off the rear brake cable and when I put the brakes back together again they seemed to be about right. I rode around the block and everything felt fine, although would take me a while to get used to that lever position. I removed the butterfly bars and mounted the drop bars and rode around the block again. Eventually I suppose I ought to re-tape those bars, but they don’t look too bad and they work just fine.

So now I have a Rohloff equipped tandem with four handlebar sets configured for quick changes. I really can’t justify three tandems and the Ibis is probably the first in line when I go to sell one of them. I’m not likely to do a lot of handlebar switching but to be honest I’m not likely to sell the bike soon, either. That’s probably a pretty good place for me to be and now I need to settle on the next project.

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

(or how I ended up with three tandems in my garage)

Di2 Back story

After we got back from the Danube I focused on riding and didn’t spend a bunch of time or money on bike projects.  When the chain gauge said it was time, I took the Fuji and the Centurion in for seasonal tune-ups, without addressing the seized seat post on the Fuji.  I bought a pair of Paul Component Engineering Touring Cantilever brakes for Odette’s Stellar, but I kept procrastinating on installing them.  I kind of had this idea of a blog post poking fun at the MAGA / America First guys by describing my American-made bicycles – but somehow when I thought about it some more I realized that it wasn’t actually funny.  Mainly I was just waiting – for the weather to change, for Amazon to deliver, for the bike shop to finish up, for Odette to agree to a ride, for every day to bring one more card.

The fall shaped up to be pretty uneventful, a trip to Long Beach (memorable mainly for squirrel bridges) being the only excitement.  I went out to the garage on a Monday after lunch to put fenders on the Ibis.  Odette likes to ride on Tuesdays and the forecast was wet.  The fenders went on easily but at some point the bike fell over and although I caught it and it didn’t hit the floor, it did make contact with the stand.  I finished the installation (stripping out the socket on the head of one screw on the front fork) and went for a ride around the block to prove that there were no rubs.  And… the bike wouldn’t shift up.  I kept trying and it “gave” – the shifter moved further than it should and then had no resistance at all.  I got back to the garage and removed the hood – the cable was broken and the lever was no longer ratcheting.

I was really upset about this failure.  For one thing, it was the fourth or fifth time the right-hand shift cable had broken on me and I don’t feel like I can ride very far from home for fear it’s going to break on the road.  For another thing, we’d only ridden the bike two or three times since taking it in after the last failure.  I don’t really blame the Polkadot guys but I don’t feel like they fixed what I asked them to work on.  Finally, I was pretty close to getting the Di2 tandem and if I were to sell one of the three it would be the Ibis – only I can’t really sell it if it’s broken and I’m upset about spending money that I won’t recover on a bike I want to sell.

I spent a bunch of time thinking about options and preferences and decided that I’d take one of the handlebar sets from my bar-swap project and mount  Rohloff twist-shifters on them.  I kind of remembered getting a pair of twist-shifters in the process of converting either the Franklin or Ibis, but I wasn’t certain.   If I already had the bars and the shifters I could probably hook them up  myself, and if I needed to go to R+E or Polkadot it wouldn’t be for a big deal project.  I was suspicious that the bars wouldn’t be the right diameter but I knew that I had mounted thumbies on them, and those ought to be the same size as a twist grip.  I scoured my parts boxes and found some Rohloff parts, but no shifters.  I figured that I could go to eBay or Amazon for shifters, but I’d need to know what else I needed to switch back to Rohloff.  I spent some time online reading Rohloff installation guides and realized that it was probably beyond my level of competence.  I also realized that the Rohloff twist-shifter moved the gears both up and down so that you only had one shifter, not a pair.  I dug out those handlebars – butterfly bars and Velo Orange crazy bars – and remembered that I didn’t really like the way either of them looked when I had them on the Fuji.  I remained upset and continued to try to figure out a plan.

On Tuesday (10/28) R+E was open and I needed to drop off the brakes for the Di2 tandem that had arrived while I was focused on the ibis.  I stuck the brakes in my handlebar bag when I went for my daily ride and stopped at the shop on my way home. The Di2 bike looks great – they were done installing the Di2 hardware and said that they just needed the fork to finish it up.  The battery mounts to bottle cage rivnuts on the stiffener tube.  The wires are taped to the down tube and are almost invisible.  The 40-T big cog in the cassette is huge.  The BCD on the FSA crankset was too big to mount 50/34 chainrings so they went with 52/38 – and I’m guessing that a 38-40 granny gear will be fine.  They had already taken off the chunks of housing hung on the brake cable to protect the top tube, replacing it with cable doughnuts. That’s probably a better approach than the housing liner I was proposing.  They were familiar with the ProblemSolvers downtube shifter boss covers and offered to order them for me but I took them up on the offer to remove the barrel adjuster from the outriggers – I think that will be lighter and look just as good.  I got to see the Zipp bars with no tape.  Alder said that there was no need to update the belt drive until it broke.  I asked Alder about timing and he said “a couple of days – maybe a week” which was pretty exciting news.

As I got ready to leave I told Alder about my Ibis dilemma.  He told me that he had a box full of Rohloff / Gebla parts because the Gebla-modified shifters broke a lot and a bunch of people ended up deciding to remove the Gebla and go back to straight Rohloff. He said to bring the bike in and he’d see what they could do.   I told him that I was pretty sure I wanted to go back to the Rohloff twist-shifter that the hub was made for.  He offered to order a shifter for me and said that they could fix me up with a doohickey.  I said that I’d gone with Gebla to be able to keep the drop bars because I didn’t like the way the doohickey thing looked (that plus bad memories of twist shifters on cheap mountain bikes.)  I said that I had a couple of sets of handlebars at home from a previous project and that I was thinking about mounting the shifter on one of them – and I mentioned the butterfly bars.  Alder said that he also had a bunch of butterfly bars because people migrated to them when Gebla was an issue and then decided that they didn’t like that style of bars.  He said that they often ran into issues of cable clearance between the bar end and the stem.   I mentioned my other option and he pulled me over to see an extreme travel bike he was finishing up – S&S, Rohloff, heavy duty tubes – and a Jones bar.  I don’t exactly like the dimensions of the Jones bar but it validated my thinking about moving away from drop bars.  I told Alder that I needed to think about it some more but in fact I pretty much knew where I was headed and just had to figure out some details.

While waiting to go on my ride on the red tandem on Wednesday I took the crazy bars and held them up against the rando bag I use on the Ibis.  They looked like they were made for each other and I knew I’d made my choice.  When i got back from the ride I removed the bar tape and bar-end shifters from the crazy bars.  (I dropped one of the bar-ends and didn’t get it back together right but it’s just going to sit in the parts bin for a while anyway.)   I had to change stems because the one on the bike wouldn’t clamp down tight enough for the crazy bars.  They are from the same manufacturer (Profile Design – the one from the crazy bars has a longer reach) and they’re supposed to have the same clamp dimensions, but only one of them works.  The straddle cable attached to the bars was for a narrow 700C wheel while the Ibis has a wide 26-inch wheel. I had to replace the straddle cable to hook up the front brake, otherwise that cable was ready to go.  The crazy bars were set up for a single bike and the cable for the rear brake wasn’t long enough.  I had trouble getting the stopper out of the reverse lever and had to remove the pivot screw and take the lever out to remove that cable.  The new one went in just fine and after some fiddling with the cable splitter I decided that it was good enough. I replaced the stripped fender screw and tried (without success) to manually shift the Rohloff into a higher gear.  In order to make sure the cables got split I wanted to attach both pieces of the cable splitter to both cables – but they split in different places so I had one long and one short cable under the keel tube.  I put a short cable end into the shorter splitter and then matched it with a very short cable end in the longer cable.  I wrapped a piece of velcro around the tube to hold both cables in place.)

My plan was to take the Ibis (now sporting crazy bars with no tape) with me when I went to pick up the Di2 tandem. Despite the fenders I figured I would put it on the car because without a shifter it isn’t rideable. (That’s actually not true, I’ve ridden it home with a broken shifter more than once – it would be rideable, just not shiftable.)   If Odette drove me over I could drop off the Ibis to get a doohickey and bar tape, have her take the parts that came off the Di2 bike and I could ride the new bike home.  If I rode the crippled Ibis to get there I would just need a knapsack to carry the redundant parts home on the Taliani.

I wanted a quick lesson on Di2 shifting (somehow I’ve got to learn about automatic progressions vs. the left-hand lever, etc)   and I needed to figure out charging and displays and probably ten other Di2 secrets, but I figured that  I could ride it home more easily than I could connect with Odette on Ravenna – and maybe I could  even sneak in a lap around Green Lake.

I ordered a Brooks Sprung Flyer for Odette and will hold off on a fitting.  Amazon shipped the wrong saddle – a sticker on the box said “flyer with suspension springs” but inside was something with a short nose and no springs –  so I filed for a return and waited for a replacement.  The replacement from Amazon was also the wrong saddle – the same error as the time before.  The leather on the side was stamped “B 68” so I assume that’s what got put in the flyer box.  I returned that one too, but this time I requested a refund not a replacement.

It cost almost $50 more, partly because of shipping, but I ordered a flyer with suspension springs from Rivendale.  After really unhelpful tracking information from USPS, the Rivendale saddle showed up two days earlier than expected – they got the right one and I’m confident that it will fit.  Odette thought that the saddle on the Tuscany (that she doesn’t like) was a Brooks and we had a conversation about that.  If she hates the Flyer there are several versions (carved, soft, etc.) that we can try which might make her happier. Meanwhile, it’s been over a week and Alder still hasn’t called to say the bike is ready.

I waited another week and then (11/11) called Alder to check in.  He reported that the bike was basically done and I said I’d be right over.  I grabbed a stuff sac / backpack and set off on the broken Ibis.   I walked up the hill at 73rd and rode down the other side and around Green Lake as if single speed was the new normal.   When I got to R+E I realized I still had the frame pump and the tool bag on the bike so I stowed them in the backpack and went on in.

The Ibis was dispensed with very quickly – “I want a doohickey and a Rohloff twist-shift and some kind of grips on the bar-ends.”  Alder noted that the bar-ends had been cut down.  I didn’t ask him to adjust the brakes, but they seemed to do just fine coming down the hill on 73rd.  (I had a bag of Rohloff parts from th original conversion in my pocket but I forgot to give them to Alder – I expect that he already has plenty of similar ones.) I also forgot to explain the cable splitter thing to Alder and I imagine he’ll think I clipped the two cables instead of opening the quick releases.  .Without shifters to worry about I’m thinking about experimenting with other bars:  (Rivendale Albatross or Choco or maybe Bullmoose would be interesting) or maybe going back to drops.

The Litespeed, however, was more complicated:

Taliani spec sheet: original vs. Di2

Here are some notes from after I picked up the Litespeed:

• Alder says not to worry about synchronized shifting – people always come back and have it removed because you have to shift all the time in very small increments.
• You need to charge about every 150 miles or once a month – there are lights on the battery to show that it’s charging and lights on the front stem that show how much battery you have left.  (Those are the only displays on the system.)
• The battery should have been about half way charged coming out of the shop.  I left it plugged in for three or four hours and the lights didn’t seem to change.
• I forgot where the charger port was (but figured it out the next  morning.)  I pushed the shift button to see the battery light, and learned that the shifters move even when the bike is hanging on the wall.  I never did figure out how to interpret the battery light.
• They installed a body float which I wasn’t expecting.  The thud buster on the red tandem was always set in the lowest position and it looks like the body float on this bike will similarly be as far down as it can go.  (If it doesn’t work I’ll put it on another bike and we’ll start the process of getting a version of the Brooks saddle that she likes.)
• The body float works with springs and R+E says it’s better than polymer discs.   I adjusted it down to the lowest possible position and the distance between the center of the crank bolt and the nose of the saddle is about the same as on Odette’s Stellar.  That means it can go up by at least the distance that it compresses. so there is a little room for adjustment.
• One of the cantis was stuck to the post when they went to replace it, so they replaced the post, too.  Evidently the posts screw in.
• I didn’t get the old free hub body back – oh well…
• The chainrings are Specialties TA rings (130 BCD) 52/38.  They couldn’t use the rings that were on the bike (FSA 53/39 because the big one was too big for the Di2 presets.)
• Alder warned me to be careful about shifting in the front until I’m experienced with it:  it will shift even under load and you may be in a situation where you don’t want to shift up.
• R+E felt that I needed wider brake pads than what came with the neo-retros.
• I needed to get the bike on a scale before we weighed it down with stuff  – Odette got me a new battery for my portable scale and the Taliani weighed between 30 and 31 lbs with saddles & pedals.  After I weighed the bike I removed the body float for a net weight reduction – maybe as much as a pound.  Cutting down the steerer would reduce weight a little and the charger and front wheel stabilizer strap were on the bike when I weighed it – so 30 lbs is probably about right.
• As I mounted the new pedals I noticed that the cranks are 172.5.
• R+E didn’t see a serial number (but they weren’t looking for one.)  I need to give it a good going over, maybe with a pencil to do some rubbings.   Then we’ll think about paint remover.
• The shifters have two narrow buttons – the lower one seems to shift up, the smaller upper one shifts down.  Left is front, right is rear, just like on a mechanical bike.
• Shifting too fast seems to cause the chain to grind.  It only happened once (while starting out across Aurora at 83rd) and I’m not really certain why it happened.
• I’m not sure what to do about the steerer tube – I either want to raise the bars or cut off the excess tube because the stump on top of the bars isn’t a good look.  First, it appears that putting the stem at the top of the stack would be about the same height as the red tandem; as they came from the shop they are about the same height as the litespeed classic.   Second, it appears that only the front brake is going to be an issue (i.e. it looks like  there is enough slack in the rear housing.)  There is likely enough extra inner cable on the front brake  so that I wouldn’t need to replace the cable, and with a double-ended ferule I ought to be able to add three or four inches of housing without unwrapping the bars.  (I would still have to undo the brake and reset them afterwards.)  I’ll probably live with it for a while and maybe wait for the first tuneup to fix the steerer.
• Alder asked what I intended to do with the parts that came off and I told him about the Tuscany.  (I’m not sure if he was just curious or if he was interested in some of them.)  My current plan is to do the cassette first (like, right away) and then the derailleur, followed by the brakes on the Stellar.  I’ll replace inner tubes (at least on the Tuscany) while I’m at it. I would like to have both bikes done before R+E finishes the Ibis.  Then I’ll take the Litespeed to Recycled Cycles for a seasonal tuneup and somewhere in the process I’ll need to clean and lube the bikes I’m riding in the rain.
• I shifted way down to climb the hill on 83rd (but I don’t think I went  all the way down) and it felt like I had lots of room.  We’ll have to see how it feels with Odette on the rear.
• Based on my ride home, triple vs. double won’t be an issue.  I want to lay out a traditional gearing chart comparing the blue and red tandems but that will mean taking the rear wheels off to count teeth on the cogs in the cassette and that will need to wait for a day when I’m not nursing road rash.
• Dan Toole recognized the Ibis (and said that he was just looking at a photo of it)  and then went to interview a cleaning service, saying that he had many fewer workers and that they didn’t have time to clean like they used to.
•  I need to experiment with the carbon saddle I mounted. Maybe we won’t do  a fitting, but I need to fiddle with saddle height both front and back.  I’ve got to figure out what saddle will work for Odette (probably not the Sprung Flyer) but after  discussing it with her we’ll start out with that raggedy padded Serfas.  I kind of hope she ends up liking the Flyer – if that happens I’ll get myself a B-17 or something (and a Brooks saddle bag,) and cosmetically the bike will look better.
• I wonder if we should move to different bars for Odette –  some kind of upgrade for the Prima TTT 220 bars on there now?  Maybe a Rivendale Wavie (or maybe those cut-off FSA Wing-pros?) or maybe some bullhorns would give her a more upright position than the drops do, and there’s no reason to carry around a handlebar section that she never uses.
• I wonder if hanging it up by the wheel is a good idea with the carbon spokes.  (It seems to make contact with the hook on the rim only and it doesn’t touch the spokes at all.)
• Eventually I will want to replace the blackburn bottle cages with something sexier.  I know that there are bottle cage mounts for mini-pumps that might make the battery look more symmetrical.

Odette agreed to a short ride on Wednesday to try out the Taliani.  Then, after breakfast, it was raining and we blew it off.  This was the second time we bailed out on a ride around Green Lake on the new tandem – we talked about it the day before I first took the bike in to R+E but ended up deciding not to ride then, either.

After lunch on Thursday I swapped the rear derailleur and cassette on Odette’s Tuscany for the titanium parts that came off the Taliani.  The exchange was uneventful – the chain from the tandem needed a quick link so I kept the chain from the Tuscany and it seemed to work fine.  I needed to fiddle with the barrel adjuster to get it to go into the largest cog but no real problems.  The inner tubes I got have a 42mm valve stem which turns out not to be long enough for those deep-section rims.  I ordered some more with 60mm valves and will use the others on the Stellar.

I took a day off after hitting a pothole in the rain and messing up my face.  On Saturday it was still raining and I didn’t feel like riding so I installed the Paul Components Engineering touring cantis on Odette’s Stellar.  The install was easy and the brakes are much easier to set up than the Rodriguez “big squeeze” cantis that I’m used to.  (I don’t have the hang of the eccentric washers that you use to adjust the toe-in and pad angle, but trial and error got me close.)  I replaced the inner tubes on that bike with new Continental 650C tubes so the bike should be good to go. Those 42mm valve stems really don’t work very well with my floor pump.  (I exploded one tube probably by trapping it under the bead even though I manipulated it all the way around before pumping. )

Here are the details on Odette’s bikes:

I spent the afternoon cleaning and organizing the garage. and really didn’t make a dent.  I found some more Rohloff parts – including a shifter.  I discovered that I have a lot of old cantis.  I found some smaller outriggers and I may try to combine one of those with a light stub.  I didn’t find a side-loading mini pump bracket. I wasn’t able to rotate the right hand shift lever on the Centurion, but it still works despite the crash and actually may not have been twisted at all.  I still need to swap out the front derailleur on my Litespeed for the one from the Taliani and clean the three bikes with fenders.

Tuesday, I swapped the front derailleur on my Litespeed Classic for the one that came off of the Taliani.  I think that I need more tension in the cable but it shifts up and down and doesn’t make any chain noise while on the stand.  (I’m not certain that the old one was broken, but it was way   out of adjustment and I couldn’t seem to get it back in range.)  I found the springs for the body float and spent a little time trying to figure out how to replace them. I finally gave up and downloaded their instruction sheet.

Early in the morning before a ride I changed the body float springs to two purples.  The procedure was not as easy as I was led to expect and the instruction sheets were not exactly clear, but it seems to only go together in one way and it compresses like it is supposed to.  Odette can straddle the frame with both feet flat on the floor but if she sits on the saddle she can only touch with her toes – so as far as she is concerned it doesn’t work.  I mounted the sprung flyer and we took our maiden ride – a couple of laps around Green Lake.  We came back to the garage and adjusted the nose of her saddle so that it didn’t point down quite as much and we raised my saddle a couple of inches (and moved her handlebars up as far as they will go on my seat post. ) The second two laps felt a little more comfortable so we did two more. Climbing up the hill on 50th with Odette on the back feels remarkably like it does on the red tandem. I’ve got to get the saddles sorted out (that carbon Selle Anatomica isn’t going to work for me this time, either.)  I need to raise the front bars and I need to find a set of stoker bars with more rise.  I need to order bottle cages and set up a tool kit.  Otherwise, the Di2 bike is coming together.

After Odette got me more new batteries, I measured the clamping diameter on the rear stem on the Taliani and got numbers that didn’t make any sense at all.  I finally figured out that it helps to zero out the caliper before measuring and determined that I need 26mm bars.  I plan to order a set of flatish bullhorns and we’ll take it from there.   I finally got 650C inner tubes with a 60mm valve stem and I installed one in the front of Odette’s Tuscany and put the other one in her saddle bag.  I replaced the carbon Selle Anatomica saddle on the front of the Taliani with a beat-up old Selle Italia, (a Mundialita, I think.)  I don’t know where it came from but it must have been on some bike that I got used, probably the Centurion.  That will hold me until Odette figures out whether or not she can live with the Flyer.   Ordering the bottle cages means a call to Peter White and I’ll deal with that in the next few days.

I raised the front bars up to the top of the steerer tube and I’ll figure out where I want them before cutting housing or cable or the steerer.  I figured out that what determined the length of the housing was the position of the hanger, meaning that if I left the hanger the same distance below the clamp I wouldn’t have to add any housing.  I end up with a hanger that is really too high and a long exposed cable segment, but it will work for now.  The first time I have it serviced I’ll need to cut the tube or add some housing to the front brake cable.

I got a pair of Origin8 bullhorns and got Odette’s buy-in to try them on the blue tandem.  The weather turned wet and we weren’t going to be riding any time soon so there was no hurry to install them.  The bar tape came off the Prima bars intact, so I wrapped the bullhorns with the old tape just to have something to hang onto while we adjusted their position, figuring that I’d save the new tape until I was sure the bars were going to work.  The bullhorns were the occasion for a conversation about saddles – I read Peter White’s comments to her and we talked about cut-outs and shapes.  Here are the links I gave to her:

• https://www.peterwhitecycles.com/bersaddles.php
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/flyer-carved.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b17-softned-short.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b67-softened-short.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b135.html
• https://selleanatomica.com/products/x1

Eventually we’ll select another saddle and give it a try.

Before riding on Black Friday, I had Odette sit on the bike and tell me if she was okay with the position of the bullhorns and to make sure that they weren’t bumping her knees.  She wasn’t really into it but said they were fine.  After lunch I replaced the bar tape on the bullhorns with a different  used tape – and I moved the posts a little further around the bend and tilted them back a bit.  It’s still a work in process but I think that they’ll be okay when we get done.  While I was in the garage I looked at cassettes and was able to find the number of teeth marked on most of the rings. Here is a basic gearing chart for the red and blue tandems.  As I expected, even with a 2-by setup, the range on the Litespeed is comparable to that on the Rodriguez (3.78 on the Litespeed vs 3.74 on the Rodriguez.)  At 0.95 the Litespeed granny gear is actually a little lower than the Rodriguez’ 1.07.

The Specialites TA bottle cages from Peter White came the weekend after Thanksgiving – I mounted all of them except the one that will fit over the battery.  I wanted to mount a Zefal side-loading mini-pump mount on there too, and even though it’s coming from California and even though I ordered it in mid-November, it’s not expected to get here until Christmas!  I hauled Odette’s Tuscany upstairs and put it on her trainer.  I’m not betting that it will get much use but I know she won’t ride it if it is out in the garage, and maybe it will help her decide on a saddle.  I’ve been taking short rides because of a couple of atmospheric rivers – which leaves me extra time for waiting.  I mounted clip-on fenders on the red tandem hoping that we’ll get out for a ride eventually.  There isn’t any clearance in the front with the current tires (30s) so I mounted a 23 on a spare rim and figured I’d ride with that until spring.  The front fender mounts with a single bolt through the fork crown and I’m not very confident that I’ll get away without rubbing, but there’s one way to find out.

The little mini pump bracket I ordered back in mid-November finally arrived – two weeks early.  The real story is that I didn’t realize it was actually coming from the UK, but  I wouldn’t have had to wait so long if it hadn’t gone in and out of the Seattle distribution center so many times.

Here’s what it looks like after mounting the bottle cage and the mini pump bracket on the same riv nuts as the battery:

The 15th of December was a Monday and R+E wasn’t open, so I planned to call that Tuesday, figuring that after a month I’d waited long enough that it didn’t look antsy and that I ought to check in to see if they could tell me when the bike would be done.  After a wet ride I was scanning email when the phone rang and it was R+E saying that the Ibis was ready for me to pick up.  Odette gave me a ride over and I rode home in almost dry  conditions.   The bike shifts really well.  It has always been geared too low and that is even more noticeable now, but with Odette on the back it likely won’t feel as light.   Its started to rain as I pulled into the driveway but I decided to take some photos anyway.

Now I need to take the Litespeed in to Recycled Cycles and take my trashed glasses in to Eyes on Fremont – two things I’ve been waiting to do until the Ibis process was over.

Here’s my “made in America” gallery:

Here’s a gallery of Di2 bike photos:

From July 26 to August 8, 2025  Odette and Jerry rode from Donaueschingen, Germany to Vienna, Austria

After Denmark we really didn’t have any firm ideas about tandem trips.  We agreed that we wanted to get back to Berlin but didn’t come up with loop rides that appealed to both of us.  At some point I realized that if we shipped our bike cases to the end of the route, we could do one-way trips and that really opened up the options.  At Christmas we talked to Will about travel in Europe and visiting him in Berlin –  he encouraged us to visit and agreed that shipping our cases there from the start of our ride was a pretty low hurdle to get over.

Odette wanted to go to Vienna and proposed a one-way trip ending there.  It seemed backwards but I didn’t ask too many questions.   Odette found a large German bike tour company – Radweg Reisen – that offered a standard trip on the Eurovelo 6 route down the Danube.  I told her that it was fine by me as long as they got our bike cases to the end of the ride and she assured me that they’d take care of it. We signed up and put down a deposit and then didn’t hear anything for a long time.  Odette eventually managed to get a hotel list and then a Komoot itinerary for the ride.  We figured out that by paying for the Komoot premium level we could export the daily routes as GPX files and although it seemed silly to start up with a new application, we got all of the route files for the German part of the trip and imported them into Ride with GPS.  There wasn’t any explanation for the absence of the Austrian part of the rides and there were some issues with track artifacts but it felt like things were progressing.

Starting in about May Odette began to get anxious about the length of the daily rides and the elevation involved and about hotels that were way out of the center of town and about places that didn’t have restaurants or that had restaurants that were closed on the day we’d stay there.  She was also anxious about the weather.  We ramped up the training rides to deal with the first fear and she emailed the tour company about the second one (to no real effect.)  For months we followed the daily temperatures at the beginning and end of the trip and that seemed to have a calming effect even though it looked like it could  be very hot in Southern Germany.

Eventually the final installment of the fee was due and the company clarified that the Austrian portion of the tour was being supplied by another big European bike tour company – Pedalo.  Coordination was not easy but we learned that  Pedalo had their own application and that there was no way to download GPX files from it.  We didn’t have direct contact with the Austrians, but the Germans assured us that written material would be available in Passau (the last German town before crossing into Austria) and discounted our request for GPX files, saying “you always have Google Maps”.    Odette remained confident that everything would work out.

Odette booked flights on Delta and then had second thoughts about a 1-hour connection in Amsterdam.  Having been delayed more than an hour by passport control there, I told her I wasn’t comfortable cutting it that close either, and she rebooked us through New York with a 3-hour layover.  We got the bike serviced and had new tires  put on it – The Polkadot Jersey shipped our front wheel to California to have a new rim put on it, and then weren’t able to get our bike ready until the day before we were set to leave.

The weather seemed to change and our concerns about excessive heat changed to concerns about  flooding.  I decided to take my touring shoes for wet weather and my regular bike shoes for warm days.  I also decided to take full rain gear. I broke down the bike and packed it into the cases. I took a headlight in case we needed to comply with German regulations.

The flight to New York was good –  everybody seemed determined to get us into the new Delta lounge in JFK but it was just crowded and not very interesting.  The flight to Zurich was fine although not a comfortable as the bigger Delta planes,  We had a little confusion connecting with our van but the ride was not too long and the boarder crossing wasn’t even a formality.

Donaueschingen reminded me of Frieberg further north in the black forest.  We stayed at a pretty traditional guest house (Hotel Zum Hirschen) that saw a lot of bike tours.  The food and beer was nothing special but it was still quite good.  At dinner time the room filled up with a collection of local customers that were all about our age and who obviously all knew each other.  We weren’t in the downtown or in the old city but we were within walking distance.  We arrived after lunch and I got to work assembling the bike.  Everything came together well but I had something of an audience.  I was tired from the flight and didn’t feel like pumping tires with a mini pump.  Odette was equally tired and wasn’t much help.  We walked the bike over to a bike shop where the owner shook us down for 5 euros to use his floor pump.

The next day we rode a short (15 mile) loop to verify that the bike was working.  We had enough navigational issues to remind us how much better we did outside of towns.  We went to a museum with an immense, idiosyncratic,  collection of fossils and stuffed animals (and a smaller but no less eccentric collection of modern art.)  We got ice cream at the town center.  We visited the spring that is considered the source of the Danube – but couldn’t figure out how to enter the grounds of the local castle.

Odette called the tour agency to find out what we were supposed to do with the cases headed for Vienna.  She was told that they had no intention of doing anything with the cases other than transporting them daily as regular luggage. The person at the agency said that we were welcome to make other arrangements but that they wouldn’t help.   They suggested that the responsibility for this arrangement lay with their Austrian partner, Pedalo.  Odette capitulated quickly rationalizing that it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle to deal with the cases at each stop.  I was really upset because it invalidated the whole premise of a one-way trip.  We had something of an argument but it didn’t change things – we weren’t going to get what we thought we were paying for and it was too late to do anything about it.

The next morning we got out relatively early.  The ride was mainly through wide valleys and quiet farmland.  Most of the farm roads were one lane wide – but paved.  Unpaved roads were very solidly compacted.  We didn’t stick to the river but seemed to seek out low traffic byways.  We saw a crowd at the seasonal sinkhole where the Danube completely disappears, but didn’t leave the route to investigate.

While the route had it labeled as Fridingen, our hotel (a former forestry lodge called Gasthaus Jagerhaus) was ten kilometers beyond that town, closer to Beuron.  We had to navigate around a road closure (for a parade?) in Fridingen and afterwards the ride was all in forest on double-track gravel.  We stowed the bike in a shed full of farm equipment and crossed the river on large stepping stones. Odette sang the “valderi-valdera” part from The Happy Wanderer as we hopped from stone to stone.   She was afraid of falling off a cliff and there were private property signs all over, so we crossed back and amused ourselves watching small fish in the shallows.  The lodge had a restaurant but it was closed and we were ten kilometers away from any services.  However, there was a snack bar for hikers where we could get food to eat in the “garden shelter.”  After an early dinner (the snack bar closed at 5:00) we watched a thunder storm leave an accumulation of hail on our balcony.

The path beyond the lodge was advertised as single track but it was just an extension of the gravel from the day before.  The navigation was pretty easy as we headed down narrow valleys.  (There were a couple of places where we climbed over limestone bluffs next to the river while the railroad went through ancient tunnels.)  We saw lots of towers and ruins of castles and monumental monasteries and abbeys.  Although it drizzled all day we never got Heavy rain.  The hotel in Obermarchtal (Gasthof Berghofstuble) was pretty modern with a pizza oven out back.  We parked the bike in a garage with a lot of cleaner-looking e-bikes.   We asked the guy at the front desk for a restaurant recommendation which he provided – recommending a restaurant (klostergasthof Adler) owned by his daughter and where he was the headwaiter.  It was quite a walk into town but we saw the old part of the village while we were happily wandering.

The next day,  after a false start,  we rode on to Ulm passing through wider valleys.  For some reason there were fields of dry brown wheat interspersed with shoulder-high green corn.  Much of the wheat had areas where it had been blown down or trampled.  I suspect that the change in weather that we’d observed  (hot and dry became cool and wet) interfered with the wheat harvest schedule, but I never got a satisfactory explanation.  We had an intermittent  light rain, more off than on, and shortly before reaching Um we encountered a police barricade blocking a bridge over the railroad tracks.  Our maps showed a route that didn’t go next to the railroad tracks and we crossed the bridge on foot with no hinderance – we later learned that a landslide just up the tracks from our crossing had knocked a train off the rails and killed three people.  For some reason Odette didn’t believe that the bypass route was the best option so we continued to a larger highway where we found a bikeway that was so muddy we ended up walking it.  

Just as we were entering the town I hit a line of pavers marking the apron for a bus stop and I caught them at an oblique angle.  (It just looked like a line in the pavement and I totally missed the fact that it had a 2-inch lip.)  The wheels were knocked out from under us and we went sliding across the road but escaped any real injuries.  Both Odette and I were paranoid about curb edges for the rest of the trip.

The pathway put us out at the river bank downtown and we had trouble navigating to our hotel.  (Google Maps wasn’t working – if you waited long enough you could see a map but there were no directions to your destination.)  There was a collection of homeless people under the bridge where our route ended and I thought about asking for directions, but then thought better of it.  We finally used a combination of the printed booklet and maps without directions to get us going in the right direction.

The hotel (Hotel Am Rathaus) was downtown but without a restaurant. The front desk was in a different building from our room but the bike storage was locked (and un-openable.)  Ulm is a pretty big town (with the world’s tallest church steeple) so finding a place to eat was not a problem. – we ate just down the block at Gaststatte Krone and were quite happy.

In the morning we rode on to Donauworth mainly keeping to the river and riding significant stretches of unpaved pathway.   As we entered town we saw a red squirrel who didn’t stick around to be friendly.  (He was a very impressive flame-orange color.)  We rode past a big Airbus factory after that. The hotel  (Hotel Donau) was nice – and the restaurant they recommended  (Goldener Hirsch) was very good.

The ride from Donauworth to Ingolstadt spent a lot of time in a nature preserve which was very pretty and pretty buggy.  We found the Hotel Bauer Garni which was a long ways from the center of town, not near anything, and which had no restaurant.   We’d eaten cheese and fruit in the nature preserve so we decided to walk into the old town center for an early dinner.  It was a long walk with a bridge to cross and several busy streets to get under.  Things weren’t helped by serious road construction between the hotel and the bridge.  We walked around the old town, noted the Audi facilities, and ate at an outdoor bistro (Theresienhof).  We spent a bunch of time in a bookstore and then a bunch more looking for a bike shop for chain lube.   We didn’t get either books or lubricant but we bought fruit and cheese for the next day.  While checking out Odette realized that  she couldn’t find the card key for the hotel.

It was late afternoon so we hurried back to the hotel – cutting through the construction site and having to scramble up a sand bank to get around the fencing.  The lady at the front desk was still there and didn’t seem upset about the loss – saying “you can get in with the second card, right?”  Odette had to admit that she kept both cards in the original envelope  and lost the whole thing…

Maybe an hour after leaving Ingolstadt Odette wanted a restroom and soon one appeared – just after I passed a couple of other cyclists.  I didn’t want to pass and then pull over so I asked if we could stop at the next one and then spent the whole ride looking for an open restroom.   Our route took us to Weltenburg and then restarted at Kelheim,  Before leaving Seattle we had noticed that there were two maps for that day but the guys at the tour company explained that Weltenburge and Kelheim were the same thing and Odette didn’t ask any questions.  There were crowds of people on the path around the Weltenburg Abby – theoretically the oldest monastery operated brewery in Germany.  We figured out that the path came to a dead end and turned around to get back to the road.  Google maps wasn’t working again but the maps we could get to didn’t show any road going around Weltenburg to get to Kelheim.  After riding the path a couple times we asked  a ferryboat guy how one got to Kelheim and he directed us to the tour boat at the end of the path.  We rushed onto the boat as it prepared to leave (finding half a dozen cyclists waiting for us) and discovered that the material provided by Radweg Reisen included a voucher for that very tour boat (which they had helpfully neglected to tell us about.)

The boat ride was calm and the scenery pretty.  Across the river we collected ourselves and started off towards Regensburg.   It rained really hard, but not for too long, and the sun came out before we reached the town – a beautiful old city.  Our hotel, Altstadt Quartier Hotel Muncher Hof, was right in the heart of the old town but only a couple of blocks from the pathway so navigation and cobbles weren’t much of a problem.  The bike parking was reached through the hotel lobby and had tools and a bike washing station.  We ate at an old monastery converted to a restaurant (Weltenburger am Dom) and I had Weltenburg dunkel which deserved the awards it has won.

Much of the ride from Regensburg to Deggendorf was on river dikes.  Much of the dike was unpaved and quite muddy from the rain which came down hard intermittently during the day.  There were some colorful markings on the Komoot maps which nobody had explained to us but which were probably detour routes to get  around the dike construction that had been ongoing for at least five years.  We persevered on the dikes and were able to ride through the longest closed section – albeit in a wet muddy fashion.  At one point we helped a german couple lift their bike down to get round a barrier and the man slid down the embankment when he attempted to reciprocate.  My main worry was that the construction guys were going to show up and throw us out of their workplace!  Coming into Deggendorf we rode through the port area and chose the path at the base of the dike because it looked like the gravel wasn’t as loose.  A quarter of a mile later we were in unrideable mud that went up over the tops of my boots.  Luckily our hotel, Hotel-Gasthof Hottl, wasn’t too far off.  The old lady at the front desk didn’t speak english and didn’t want to even try to communicate.  A younger lady eventually did take care of us.  Bike parking was through the lobby and we were really muddy so they sent us around the block and made us enter from the rear.   We ate at the hotel because nothing else was open.

The next day started out wet but dried out before we got to Passau.  We ran into more dike construction but we weren’t as aggressive about riding through the work sites.  (We backtracked from the first one we encountered to avoid a few hundred yards of loose gravel and rode a couple extra miles as a result.)  On this stretch there were signs rerouting the bike route around the construction which made us much more confident about getting where we were going.  We did almost get smushed by a fast car while transiting a cornfield, but that wasn’t construction related.  The Hotel Atrium Garni was across the river from the town and up a steep hill.  You had to ride up a ramp to a bridge across the Danube and we disagreed on the approach to that bridge.  We also experienced a flat tire while we were trying to figure out the ramps.  I located the puncture about a third of the way around from the valve stem but I couldn’t find anything in the casing  to cause a puncture.  The mini pump worked well driven by the threat of rain.

We walked the old section of town a couple of times and walked a covered mall once.  We found a bike shop and bought chain lube.  I cleaned the bike and lubed the chains and made sure that various bolts were tight.  Several of the couplers needed tightening.  I assumed that this was the cause of the rubbing sound we had started to notice from the right-hand pedals since when I lubed the pedals they seemed to spin freely without any noise. The replacement tube held for overnight and didn’t even need topping off.  The first night we ate at a traditional restaurant (Bayerischer Lowe) where the food wasn’t great and where we were seated outdoors, next to smokers, and instructed to clear out in no more than an hour.  The second night was much better.  (Laarco in the Hotel Pulus Bogen.)

Before leaving Passau we met with a guy from Pedalo who said “of course GPX files were available – you just have to ask for them.”  He also sympathized with our complaints about Radweg Reisen and had some advice about making the Pedalo app work.  The bike felt great out of the garage but we quickly ran into navigation problems and within a couple of miles we had a flat tire – again about a third of the way around from the valve stem.  I still couldn’t find anything in the casing but I changed the tire and started pumping only to find that the tube wouldn’t hold air.  I don’t know if it was a bad patch on the tube or if I damaged it getting the tire back on the rim but leaving Passau we had three good spare tubes and now we were down to two.  I reinstalled the tire with another tube and it inflated – only to go flat in about two miles.  When I changed tubes this time I was very careful not to pinch the tube with a tire lever.  I asked Odette to patch the two punctured tubes so that they would be ready if we needed them, but the cement was thick (from an unopened tube) and she apparently hadn’t ever patched a tube before.  Both of her patches came off before we got going again.    We got another couple of miles before repeating the process – I installed our final tube after an exhaustive but unsuccessful search for something in the tire putting holes in the tubes.  When the final tube went flat I got out the patch kit again as it was our only option – only to find that Odette hadn’t gotten the sandpaper back into the box.  I used the file on my leatherman to rough up the surface and I squeezed the last drops of cement out of the tube but it was a long shot that it would hold and it didn’t.   However, I did find a minuscule shard of glass embedded in the rubber that I couldn’t feel from inside the casing.  At this point we were six or eight miles from Passau on a bike trail at a wooded road crossing with no way to fix a flat – Odette was ready to call Pedalo   (for whatever that would have been worth) when the support van for Vermont Bike Tours pulled up and asked if they could help.  When he heard our story the driver offered us a fresh tube and before leaving he insisted that we take two more.  Having found that glass shard the first one was all we needed as it took us all the way to Vienna without even topping it off.

The route got easier from that point.  We took a ferry across to the North bank and rode there for a while before crossing back and finishing up on the South.  Odette had recreated the Pedalo route in Komoot so we had turn-by-turn that didn’t disappear when the phone slept.  (Inasmuch as it was all bike path along the river the turn-by-turn was a luxury.)  Even though it was a short day we wasted so much time on flats that it was late when we got to Aschach – so we headed straight for the Hotel Faustschlossl – which was across a bridge from the town and up an insanely steep driveway.  It took a little bit of doing but we got into the bike cage and parked the tandem and then got to our room and found our luggage.  Only our two backpacks and been delivered – and the luggage tag had been altered to show two pieces instead of the four we’d entered.  Odette called Pedalo who had some trouble understanding the situation but finally said they call us back.  They did call 45 minutes later to  say that our bike cases were on their way to Vienna.

We walked down the driveway and back across the bridge and ate at a Pizza place.  (pizzeria Santa Lucia)

The next day was all bikeway along the river and it was sunny and dry.  This was fortunate since we didn’t have any turn-by turn directions.  There was a ferry crossing, a hydropower crossing (where we didn’t understand the process and almost got out on the deck at the time when traffic was coming in the other direction) and a bridge crossing just before the end of the route.  After the flats we were hypersensitive to mechanical issues and we noticed a rubbing / creaking sound from the pedals for much of the ride.  My left foot started to stick when I tried to unclip and I eventually stopped and determined that one of my cleat screws was missing.  We ate at a cafe enroute and rode through a lot of vineyards and several cute touristy towns.  Grein was touristy but old and historic and very substantial.  There was a bike shop across from our hotel (Hotel Goldenes Kreuz) where I got a screw and a patch kit.  We climbed up a steep hill (on foot) to the local castle but it was late afternoon and the castle closed at 5:00 which didn’t seem like enough time to be worth the price of admission.  We ate at a guesthouse (Gasthof Zur Traube)  a few blocks from the hotel which had great food and beer.

The ride from Grein to Krems was more bike pathway by the river and more sun.  There was a ferry at the start and a bridge near the end but the river was getting very wide so crossings weren’t as frequent.  I was getting noise from my pedals but it wasn’t constant and I didn’t want to waste time tracking it down since I figured that the real answer was probably new pedals.  Krems is evidently a suburb of Vienna – it feels like a big city with postwar buildings and lots of freeways and railroads.  We stayed at a hotel (ARTE Hotel) next to the University campus which was apparently operated by the hotel management program.  The restaurant (2Stein) was interesting if not polished.  We gave up on getting desert and walked half an hour (past a prison) to a commercial district where we got ice cream.

The ride from Krems to Viena started out with a complicated bridge and highway crossing and then evolved into long stretches along the river broken by crossings of smaller bodies of water.  I was getting a lot of noise from my pedals and couldn’t find a way of pedaling to make it go away so I just tried to be as smooth as possible and attempted to keep the speed up so that I didn’t have to listen to it any longer than necessary.  We crossed over to Donauinsl – an artificial island that is used for flood control – and rode on that for the last stretch into the city.  The bridge crossing from the island into the city was complicated and we were hungry so not at the top of our game.  We missed the hotel (NH Danube City Wien) the first time we walked the bike past it,  but eventually worked our way back (Google Maps was still not working) and got checked in.

Bike parking was in an underground garage but there was no elevator access.  We parked the tandem and then went back around to the front to get our bike cases which we wheeled down to ramp into the garage. I broke down the bike and got it into the cases while Odette reclaimed the clothing we’d put in the cases and got us situated in the hotel room.  When I took the cranks off I found the self-extracting bolts to be loose both back and front on the right side.  I suspected that the noise was from the crank and not the pedal.  (This is a problem since if you ride with a loose crank you deform the hole and can never get it tight again.  Before the pandemic I replaced the cranks on the tandem for exactly that reason and I hoped I didn’t have to do it again.)  We hauled the loaded cases back around to the front and stowed them in the luggage room. The hotel  catered to busloads of tourists so it wasn’t a surprise that the lobby was overwhelmed by tourists when we showed up with our cases (we would learn that the morning breakfast was a free-for-all.) This made it even more mysterious that evening when we ate in the hotel restaurant and were the only guests.

We had two days off the bike in Vienna and we visited the Vienna Museum, the Modern Art Museum and the Leopold Art Museum.  We bought 48 hour subway passes which worked well – the Vienna subway is easy to figure out and not complicated to ride.  We ate at couple of semi-fancy restaurants )(Restaurant Vienne and Bier & Birli) and walked around the city quite a bit.  Google maps finally decided to work in the city and that helped our navigation.  However, the Delta app wouldn’t work so we couldn’t check in on line and had to get to the airport early to check in for an international flight.  That process was super simple and there was no explanation why we could’t do it online. The flight to Amsterdam was smooth – business class just means that the middle seat is left vacant.  The flight from Amsterdam to Seattle was long but typical – we both slept a couple of hours and didn’t have much to complain about.  Our bags came off the conveyor in Seattle at about the middle of the batch and the line at customs wasn’t particularly long.  The face recognition system seems to be working now since customs was shortened to a single click without even any questions.  The elevator to get to the parking garage is a bottleneck and the one to get down to rides hare level is just as bad.  The ride home was slow due to the traffic from an I5 closure.

Reflections:

• One way trips are still a good idea
• seemed like an easy tour and it was:  625 miles in 13 days with only 9,000 ft, of climbing
• I’d like to continue the Danube route on into Hungary
• We’re able to do back-to-back 60 mile days as long as the elevation isn’t too much
• I’m glad I bought a new pump – RoadMorphs rule!
• It’s a fallacy to think  that local tour operators book better hotels and plot better routes
• I visited Vienna in 1975 but didn’t see anything on this trip that I could recognize
• No problem finding english speakers and english menus – probably easier than in Berlin
• The touring shoes with Showers Pass waterproof socks were just right – I didn’t need the regular bike shoes
• Still brought too much stuff – need to work on reducing clothing & electronics
• Treppelweg FTW!

Photos

Maps:

8/8 – Danube Tour 13 – Wien – 56 miles
8/7 – Danube Tour 12 – Krems an der Danau – 53 miles
8/6 – Danube Tour 11 – Grein – 58 miles
8/5 – Danube Tour 10 – Aschach an der Danau – 45 miles
8/3 – Danube Tour 9 – Passau – 43 miles
8/2 – Danube Tour 8 – Deggendorf – 61 miles
8/1  – Danube Tour 7 – Regensburg – 59 miles
7/31 – Danube Tour 6 – Ingolstadt – 39 miles
7/30 – Danube Tour 5 – Donauworth – 58 miles
7/29 – Danube Tour 4 – Ulm – 42 miles
7/28 – Danube Tour 3 – Obermarchtal – 55 miles
7/27 – Danube Tour 2 – Fridingen  – 38 miles
7/26 – Danube Tour 1 – Donaueschingen – 15 miles

From June 9 to June 14, 2025 Odette and Jerry rode out of Winthrop and Chelan 

Early in 2025, as we were planning a ride down the Danube and looking further out to the Agean, I told Odette that I wanted to do a ride east of the mountains in the Spring – and she said OK.  What I really had in mind was a ride in the Okanagan or the Selkirks, but I decided to strike while the iron was hot and booked a stay at Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop.  We hadn’t been to Winthrop since 2022 when we discovered that there wasn’t any place to get early breakfast and vowed to stay at Sun Mountain the next time we went there.  Winthrop is familiar territory for us after a bunch of visits for hiking & climbing,  biking, and x-country skiing.  I mapped out a couple of old favorites (Chewuch and Carleton) and then worked out a down-sized version of the ride to Grand Coulee we’d done two or three times a decade ago.  The basic idea was to ride a couple of days in Winthrop, drive over to Chelan via Grand Coulee – stopping for a ride on the way – and then do a couple of rides in Chelan.  I couldn’t figure out how to book Campbell’s on line so I settled for a couple of nights in an AirBNB.

A week before we were scheduled to go to Winthrop we did a ride on the tandem and discovered a broken spoke on the front wheel when we got home.  I rode to Recycled Cycles and got told that it would be $40 in labor but a three-week wait to get the spoke replaced.  (They also pointed out that the rim was pretty beat-up and likely due for replacement pretty soon.)  I went on down to Polkadot Jersey where I’d gotten the wheels and they quoted me $80 and said they could have it done by the weekend.  On Friday, the day the work order said it would be ready, I stopped by the shop to remind them that I was leaving Monday morning.  They hadn’t started yet but promised me it would be done the next day and it was.

I loaded the tandem on the roof of the car and we  (or rather Odette) drove to Marblemount with no complications other than seeing a bear just before Rockport.  The lack of complications was not guaranteed since it was the first time using a rebuilt tandem carrier.  After Odette ran into low overhead pipes, I took off the Yakima bars and attached the carrier directly to the factory rack.  I removed it in February to mount a ski case and when I put it back together, instead of a longitudinal bar to clip the strut to, I mounted a regular bike carrier with a U-bolt through it about midway.  I also drilled a couple of holes in the tandem pivot plate so that I could put bolts through and entirely lock it out.  I was scared the wing nuts I used on the bolts would loosen up and I was scared that the holes I drilled in the channel for the U-bolt would wallow out.  It actually tightened down very nicely and 100 miles later the wing nuts were loose but not in any danger of coming off and the bike was not swaying enough to bother me.

We rode down Rockport-Cascade Rd from Marblemount to Rockport and took SR 20 back.  Here’s the map.  It was only 20 miles but it was fun – the forest was lush, the day wasn’t too hot, the traffic on SR 20 wasn’t too bad.  I saw a wild turkey but no bears.  We had a nice lunch in Marblemount and then Odette drove another 100 miles to Sun Mountain Lodge outside of Winthrop.  The scenery over Washington Pass was as spectacular as ever.  We stopped in Winthrop and walked the main street and visited a bookstore – not much had changed.  At the lodge we loaded our stuff onto a cart and checked into a nice room on the third floor.  (It was a big room with a nice shower.)  We looked out over the pool and up the valley to snow peaks.  The air conditioning made too much noise but worked quite well.  We had dinner there and liked it well enough to eat breakfast and dinner there the next two days as well.  The restaurant never had more than a half-dozen diners and at each meal there was something the kitchen had forgotten or that they were out of.  They also surprised us with a minimum wage surcharge.

The next day breakfast wasn’t available until 7:30 so after a late start we  left the car in town and rode out East Chewuch River Road to the end of the pavement on Forest Service Road 51 and back on West Chewuch River Road.  Here’s the map.   It was almost 50 miles, but I had mapped a 35 mile route in RWGPS.  (I couldn’t find the stream crossing where we’d always turned around and stopped where RWGPS showed an end to the pavement.)  It was hot and the last couple of miles on the way out were brutal.  The side hill traverse that you do on West Chewuch on the way back wasn’t much better. There was a cable team running wires with flaggers stopping traffic and Odette cried out to them in sobs, pleading for them not to stop us on the grade.    We got back to the car at the community barn and collapsed in the shade on the grass.  We stopped at the Thriftway and bought grapes and cold juice.

For the third day of the trip we left the car in town for another late start  and rode out East Twisp-Winthrop Road to Methow Valley Highway and down to Carleton.  We rode back on the other side of the river on Twisp-Carleton Rd to SR 20.  We left the highway at the river bend after Twisp and rode the river road to Twin Lakes Rd. and back to the car.  Here’s the map.  The way out was pretty much all down hill and we got out before the heat of the day so it was a good ride and we did well.  On the Twisp Carleton road segment we slowed down (I’d forgotten that there always seems to be a headwind there) and stopped in the shade a couple of times because of the heat.  After we left SR 20 we took a long break in the shade and Odette decided that she would walk the rest of the way.  Eventually she got back on the bike but by this time she had decided that she had heat exhaustion and would likely not survive.  The climb away from the highway on Twin Lakes Rd. wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined but it offers very little shade – we finally pulled over to avail ourselves of a patch on the left and we must have looked like we were on our last legs because a driver pulled over when he saw us and asked if we were ok and if we needed a ride back to our car…  We made it back in due time (but without seeing any deer in the fields near the lake where we’ve seen lots of deer in previous years.)  We missed the sign to Sun Mountain and ended up driving all the way to Twisp looking for our turn.  Odette declared that she wasn’t going to ride Grand Coulee the next day and I realized that whether it was physical or psychological the chances of her enjoying that route were pretty slender, so I didn’t argue.  The shower that afternoon was great, the restaurant was fine (although the server didn’t know from Porter) and we slept well.

After a final late breakfast at Sun Mountain we checked out (where they surprised us with a resort charge) and drove to Twisp.  We parked at the city park where we had parked the last time we opted for an easier ride.  We did an out and back on the Twisp River Rd., turning around at the 15 mile point .   Here’s the map.  The forest was dense (but an east-side pine forest instead of the rainforest we usually ride in.)  We saw several deer.  There was a Cascade Bike Club gravel bike event that we encountered on the way out.  It was much cooler than the two previous days and I wondered if we couldn’t have ridden Grand Coulee successfully – and felt some regret in that I’m unlikely to ever ride that agin now.

Odette drove about 50 miles to Chelan and we checked into an AirBNB pretty close to the center of town.  The room didn’t compare to Sun Mountain but It was just about right for what we were doing.  We had dinner at Campbell’s and the NY Strip was frankly much better than anything I’d eaten at Sun Mountain.  The next morning we got an early breakfast at the Artisanal Bakery (which we carried back to our AirBNB.)  We rode out US 97 A to Navarre Coulee Rd to S. Lakeshore Rd and back on US 97 A again.  Here’s the map.  It was another 30 mile day but with enough climbing to make it interesting.  It started out cool but warmed up as we climbed up the coulee. On the highway descent (after the tunnel) I swerved to miss rocks on the shoulder and got honked at by an SUV.  Odette kept looking for the steep part but didn’t seem too disappointed when it never materialized.  After our ride we walked around downtown visiting another bookstore and the riverfront park and then had dinner at Campbell’s again.  Impressively, the waitress from the previous night recognized us.

For our final day we got an even earlier breakfast at Starbucks and Odette drove  60 miles to Leavenworth.  We parked at the ranger station and rode out Chumstick Valley Highway to Plain.  From Plain we took Beaver Valley Rd to SR 207 to Coles Corner  and then rode back to Leavenworth on US 2.  Here’s the map.  It had been a decade since we had ridden this loop but it was still about 40 miles and is marred only by the traffic and deteriorated pavement on the shoulder of US 2.  It was cool at the start and below the crest we met a group of sports cars that wanted to play chicken with us.  We stopped at the crest for a clothing adjustment and after Plain we encountered another bike event (Tour de AlpenFlüsse) going the other direction.  I wore my Cascadia jersey with the idea of joining the No Kings demonstration in Leavenworth, but in the end we decided it felt too much like carpet bagging and we opted not to.  Odettte drove about 120 miles back home taking US 2 over Stevens (noting about a five-degree difference in temperature as we went over the crest) and taking SR 522 and 405 North to Lynnwood as suggested by Google.

Overall it was a lot of time in the car and not enough time on the bike.  The tandem carrier held up to all of the driving and bouncing around.  After a couple hours, though, I need to check the wing nuts.  The bike performed very well.  We have some squeaks in the brakes but I was pleased.  I’m disappointed about the Grand Coulee route but I’m glad we made it back over to the Methow and Chelan is always fun.