Tandem Biking

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Aaron Phillips for Expert Village and you're watching "Choosing the right bike for You." You might be looking at this and just going, what is that? Some kind of piddly freight train. It's a tandem bike. It's a great way for you, and a person with whom you have a good trusting relationship, to take a ride together. This tandem is a little bit older but it's still a pretty nice bike. It weighs in at about, oh maybe, forty pounds, maybe a tiny bit lighter and it's made out of aluminum from front to rear, it's a hundred percent aluminum. It's a lot different from a typical road bike. The closest relative of this bike as far as a single person bike is probably a touring bike, its got similar angles. If you look up front where the pilot is gonna be riding, the pilot sits here, the stoker sits here. The stoker is the person who's just stoking the fire and that comes from a term, actually I think from trains. The person who shoveled the coal basically into the engine. That's the stoker, they're just providing power, they're not navigating. The pilot here is navigating, is doing the shifting, is doing the breaking and is just responsible for steering that bike in a responsible direction. The front end of the bike, the fork is nicely situated so that it gives a nice smooth ride. This bike, when you're at speed, feels very comfortable, very solid. Its got this incredibly long wheel base, the kind of centrifugal force associated with spinning the wheels and having as much weight as you have on it makes for a really, really, comfortable and smooth ride, particularly on flats. If you do purchase a tandem, just don't expect to go too fast up the hills, tandems tend to slow down on the hills and speed up on the down hills. A lot of physics involved there but it's basically just a power to weight ratio and it's really difficult to get the power to weight ratio on one of these you get with a single person on a bike. Most of the people that ride tandems are couples and it's just a really nice way to make sure that you stay together all day on the bike. My wife and I did a hundred mile bike ride a few weeks ago on this and it's just wonderful to be able to chat, to point things out, to be kind of together and close all day and it's also a way to make sure your marriage is going okay. Like they say, where ever your marriage is going it's gonna get there faster on a tandem, be it a bad place or a good place, you're getting there faster on a tandem. So this is just a bike that's an absolute hoot, I can't recommend tandeming enough. There's a lot of things going on here that are interesting aside from the sort of relational aspect between pilot and stoker, you've got some mechanical differences here. You'll notice that I'm shifting all the way from here, as the pilot, and the drive chain on this bike is way back here."