New Bike!

One week ago Sunday we bought a new bike! It's a used Bike Friday Traveler XL tandem. We'd been looking for a quality tandem ever since selling the junky one we had a while ago. We even considered buying something new but the prices were way out of our budget. We bought this one from an outdoor equipment consignment shop in north Phoenix and paid about half of what a new one would have cost.

The bike was in basically good shape but I did some work on it to get it into tip top shape. The biggest thing I did was put new tires on it. The original Primo slicks were shot and had even begun to rot on the sides. I replaced them with Schwalbe Marathons. I have those on my Brompton and have been very satisfied with them. I also had to replace one brake cable so far and I adjusted the 3 speed SRAM DualDrive hub and the derailleur. We're now quite happy with the ride and performance.

While looking for a tandem we concentrated our search on a Bike Friday because they can be taken apart for travel. A few days ago we went to Tucson on an overnight trip and took the tandem with us. When broken apart it fits nicely in our Nissan Versa. Besides the first times when we were still trying to figure out everything we can take it apart in about 20 minutes and put it together in about 25 minutes. Not something we'd want to do on a daily basis but reasonable for a trip.