As a quad-tandem bike gains speed going down a mountain, several factors are working against it...and it's riders.
The intermittent braking causes the disc on the disc brake to get very hot. The other night, as we ripped down Blueberry-Paulson pass, our disc got so hot, that it melted all the plastic components of the brake.
The pressure on the rims from the speed and the weight combined, is enough to cause the rims to buckle...sort of like a pancake. Since our bike is very unique, there is not a huge market for rims that can support 800 pounds of man and bike. As a result, we are stuck in Cranbrook with 2 cracked rims, and no replacements.
With a lot of help from the people of Cranbrook, we will be able to get back on the road tomorrow. Since we will be riding out of here on heavy duty rims built for a single person mountain bike, and not a four man road bike, we will have to be very, very careful.
Because of that, we can't go through Banff to meet our friends at lululemon. This is something we were very very excited for, and feel sorry that we can't ride up through Kootenay National Park, through hot springs and glaciers, and then down the rolling highway riding the quad-tandem into Calgary. Instead, we will attack it from the bottom up, taking the number 3 highway through the crowsnest pass, and then north towards Calgary. We are on a mission to be in Calgary for a fundraiser on the 20th, and we will get there.
Riding through the mountains on this bike has been an adventure. There was no way we could have predicted the kind of difficulty that we were to face. Actually, no one could have predicted the kind of difficulty we were to face. No one has ever done this before.
www.thetandemtour.com
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