Everyone wishes our bikes were 100% reliable and that, especially when away on a tour, nothing goes wrong. But then there is Mr Murphy and his law – stuff does go wrong. Over time, most teams that tour start building up a variety of spare parts that they bring with them, just in case. This newsletter aims to address a specific, somewhat common problem that happens with tandems, and some things to help.
On traditional mechanically shifting bikes, cables sometimes break. This has happened to teams on a few AIT tours. Usually it’s the rear derailleur and the break happens right in the brifter. Then it’s a matter of picking out all of the pieces of broken cable and running a new one. But that takes a while and it’s not a roadside repair. If you want to finish your ride, you need a hack of some sort to get you home. If you have electronic shifting and it breaks, well, more on that later…
Our travel tandem has traditional mechanical shifting and we’ve been carrying one of these in our on-bike tool kit for a long time:
It’s a one foot section of derailleur cable with the end on it.
Why carry this, you ask? Well, if your rear derailleur cable breaks, you better hope it’s flat or downhill all the way home because your rear derailleur is going be stuck in your smallest cog. With this piece of cable, you can put the derailleur in position for any cog and lock it in place, as such:
You can even sort of shift – by getting off the bike and moving the position of the cable. We’ve had to use this twice, once for my bike and once for a friend’s. It’s a real ride saver.
That’s the main reason we like the traditional mechanical shift systems for travel. You can hack them and make things work reasonably well so that your ride or tour doesn’t get completely derailed.
With electronic shifting becoming more and more popular, we have worried about what would happen if one of them were to stop functioning on one of our tours. We know it’s not our responsibility if your bike breaks, but would feel really bad if you couldn’t ride while you were on one of our tours.
Well, on our Chile tour last month, this actually happened. The rear derailleur on one of the tandems just broke apart, mid ride.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and we came up with an idea. We needed some parts:
- Our tandem has a disk drag brake in the back controlled by an indexed thumb shifter.
- We were able to get an old 9 speed mechanical derailleur and a long section of cable housing.
- We always carry spare tandem specific brake and derailleur cables with us on a tour.
I disassembled the thumb shifter and removed the indexing and installed it on the captain’s handlebars, ran the long section of cable housing to the rear dropout using zip ties to attach it to the frame, installed the mechanical derailleur and inner cable, and voila, they had a bar end friction shifter that let them complete the tour. Since we are using a non indexed shifter, the type of derailleur does not matter.
If you ever attempt something like this, make sure to set the limit screws carefully so the chain does not fall off on either side.
We all carry some tools and spares on our bikes when we ride. Some of us carry a whole bunch more stuff (off the bike) when we go on a tour, just in case something happens. AIT has now added an “electronic shifting rear derailleur emergency kit” to our spares bag, consisting of a rear derailleur, a long shift cable, a long piece of cable housing and a thumb shifter in case this happens to someone else on one of our tours. Hopefully, we never need it, but just in case…
Do you have any other emergency repair hacks you’ve come up with and would like to share? We’d love to hear them!
Happy Riding