After our seatpost issue on our spring cycle tour, we switched to our near 30-year old Longstaff tandem. After a few modifications (most notably fitting 32mm tyres), we’ve ridden this tandem exclusively over the summer. One peculiar issue was that after an hour or so riding, there was an irritating clicking sound. We couldn’t quite place it, but it seemed to be associated with a saddle.
We’ve always found it helpful to fit a suspension seatpost on the rear of the tandem, as the stoker can’t always see what’s coming along the road. We have a Cane Creek Thudbuster on the Thorn touring tandem (it was the non-suspension post that snapped) and we had an ancient ITM suspension post on the Longstaff tandem. I can’t personally vouch for the effectiveness of suspension posts, I’m not actually the user - I’m relying on feeback from my stoker on these matters of comfort.
It turned out that the ITM post was causing the irritating noise. After some considerable effort involving the use of an enormous adjustable wrench,I managed to extract the post from the tandem. I had spent some time looking over suspension seatposts before making the choice of an alloy ee-Silk+ from Cane Creek. Based on the experiences with the Thudbuster leaned me towards another Cane Creek suspension post, but I thought that something less massive than the Thudbuster would be more appropriate for the more svelte and lightweight Longstaff tandem.
The ee-Silk+ seemed a sensible choice with a similar design to the Thudbuster. As with the Thudbuster you can fine-tune the suspension by changing the elastomer block, though the seat post only comes with a single elastomer.
Fitting the seat post, and the saddle to the seat post, was straightforward if a little fiddly.
We have ridden the tandem on several rides of up to 64 miles since fitting the ee-Silk+ seatpost, and I can report that (a) the irritating clicking noise has now gone, confirming it was caused by the old seatpost and (b) that comfort is very good, judging from comments from the stoker.
Over the summer we've been using the Longstaff tandem in preference to the Thorn tandem, which is suited more to the long-haul touring purpose for which we bought it. The Longstaff is far lighter and, despite being rather "old-school" with its triple chainset, 7-speed freewheel and cantilever brakes, is a much nimbler and responsive bike for day-long rides. The combination of the ee-Silk+ seatpost and the 32mm Continental GP5000 tyres at 85psi has made the riding experience much smoother than before.
With autumn proceeding rapidly towards winter, it's likely that we'll be hanging up the Longstaff tandem until the spring. In the meantime we'll revert to riding the Thorn. Complete with its replacement seatpost.
I bought the seat post from sigmasports.com at £204.69. I think additional elastomers are around £10, but we didn't need to order a replacement.