2025 Tandem Repaint

I first heard about R+E in the mid-90’s when Virginia Felton had great things to say about getting a bike fitting there from a guy called “Smiley.”  In about 2003 I bought Odette a bike from them and she had many of the same things to say about Smiley.  In about 2005 we bought a used Burley Duet and began a pattern of regular service at R+E since they were clearly the tandem place in Seattle.  In about 2010 I bought Will a travel bike from them and then when my Fuji got mangled I bought a similar bike for myself..  We bought our new tandem from them in 2011.  It was their ultra-light steel frame set up with a 56T big ring.  We immediately replaced the wheel set because the alloy nipples kept breaking.  We never really had any serious mechanical failures on it after that, but we were pretty compulsive about maintenance.

We rode it a lot and had a lot of good times.  As we marked its 10-year anniversary in 2021, I started thinking about some more significant work.  At the start of the pandemic I ran into issues with R+E (related to the Ibis) that made me think I needed to find another bike shop.  I had G&O Family Bikes replace the cranks (and convert to a smaller big ring) because they were conveniently located and claimed an expertise with “long bikes.”  They didn’t know from tandems and the issue was settled when they stopped servicing any bikes they hadn’t sold and  went out of business shortly thereafter.  I sent John Lehman at R+E an email saying that I wanted to replace the wheels where the free hub body had exploded and also get the bike painted – probably $5K worth of work / parts – and never heard back from him.  (At that time I figured I’d spent 50K with R+E over the years and was a little salty about communication or the lack thereof.)  The guy who replaced Lehman as the chief mechanic wouldn’t make a service appointment for me less than 90 days out and even then said he didn’t want to make a commitment to a date because he wasn’t sure what they were going to be doing then.  I went to The Polka Dot Jersey for a new wheel set and my next several tune-ups, despite having a bad experience on my first service (the Ibis again) when it took much longer than they expected.    Even though they didn’t know anything about travel bikes and sold me a disc wheel set when I wanted rim brakes with a disc drag, I accepted their work because I didn’t see any good alternatives.

In 2023 we lost the front brake spring in Portugal and the replacement I got from Paul’s Components worked but didn’t seem to coil properly.  I was in the U District one afternoon and overcame my pride to stop in to R+E to buy a pair of springs.  The guy who answered my questions (and correctly suggested that I had reversed the Paul’s springs) was Alder Threlkeld who had been the most junior guy in the shop when I was going there regularly.  That fall we went to Denmark and put another dent in the frame.   (It joined a list of trips memorialized by dents and scrapes – starting with the ones left by a curb in Scotland.)

(If you zoom-in and look at the top tube just in front of Odette’s leg, you can see the Denmark dent.)

In Denmark we also had a mightly struggle changing a tire that came from The Polka Dot Jersey with a long history.   Back home, I spent some time on the R+E website and verified that they still advertised bike painting services.  I toyed with the idea of just buying a new tandem, but what I wanted was a Litespeed and the few listed on Ebay were the wrong size and/or overpriced.    In October I called Alder and told him I wanted to get a tandem painted and, after trading a few e-mails and photos, he gave me a quote.

I removed the bottle cages and other accessories and dropped the tandem off at R+E on the first day of November.   I asked for a new paint job with the same fade as before plus a stay protector on the underside of the Stoker’s top tube and maybe new tires.  I didn’t ask about a body float or fork braze-ons or drag brake cable stops.  Alder said it would only take until the end of November.  He mentioned that painting wasn’t the bottleneck but rather the fact that he was now the only employee in the repair shop.

I emailed on the 10th of December just to get an update about how things were going.  The reply was that the dents in the frame were worse than expected but that they were done and the primer was completed and  painting was the next step.

I waited until the 10th of January to check in again  and Alder said that he was “just about ready to put the bike in the stand.”  It took ten days to get an update, but eventually it got assembled and just needed a test ride and then the status changed to “will be ready for pick-up tomorrow” – January 22.

I got a ride from Odette over to R+E and Smiley and Alder were there with the bike.  It really did look good.  The kandy-apple red on the front was darker than before and the Trillium script was black instead of silver but both changes made it better.  All of the dents seemed to have been filled or pulled out and the tubes were like new.

Alder said he understood my complaint about the tires better after wrestling with them himself, but he wasn’t able to find anything that fit those wheels better.  He recommended a bead jack (which I already had) but that wouldn’t help much in un-seating the bead, which was where I had the biggest problem.  He said he’d replaced the other set of brake springs but that the disposables (chain & brake pads) were still in good shape.  I noticed that the drag brake cable was looped around where the stoker’s knees would travel,  but figured that was on me since I hadn’t asked him to redo that housing.

I paid (remarkably close to the estimate considering the unexpected dent repairs) and headed for home .  As I turned onto Ravenna I realized that something was wrong as my feet unclipped at the bottom of each stroke.  I thought that it was just that the saddle was set too high and I ended up standing all the way home where I discovered that the stoker saddle (with it’s thud buster) was mounted in front.   It’s kind of hard to make that mistake unless you don’t work around tandems much.  Combined with the unfortunate drag brake housing run,  I suspect that Alder had someone helping him in the shop who wasn’t experienced in the tandem part of the business.  (I’ve always benchmarked bike shops against R+E when it came to things like travel bikes or Rohloff or tandem specific stuff – It’s kind of ironic to find that they can be way off the mark themselves.)

I took some photos with Odette (I’d saved a place on the rides log for a photo of us with the newly painted tandem since I’d expect to have it back before the end of 2024) and swapped the saddles around.  I regret not having taken more “before” photos.

The next day I replaced the bottle cages and pump mount.  I replaced the inner cable on the drag brake and added about 6 inches to the housing so that it could follow the contours or the frame again.  I used double-ended housing connectors so that I didn’t have to rewrap the stoker bars.

Finally, I mounted the rear rack.  It turned out that I hadn’t disassembled the rack, just disconnected it – and that made the remount process much easier.  I took some final photos:

A quick reckoning puts us at 37,500 miles on the bike when we got it repainted.  Perhaps more impressive is eleven flights to & from Europe plus a trip through the Yukon,  an RSVP, and a variety of other rides that required travel.