Our Ventana ECDM S&S MTB Tandem with Rohloff hub has arrived

Our new Ventana El Conquistador de Montañas S&S MTB tandem has arrived.

We ordered the bike from Alex Nutt at mtbtandems.com in the USA and had it shipped to Switzerland. The bike was ordered at the end of April, it shipped mid July and we took delivery at the end of July.  Our bike took a fair while to make as apparently the Ventana ECDM S&S tandem frames are only fabricated by the owner of Ventana Sherwood Gibson – and we ordered our bike at the peak bike building time (who knew).

My wife and I are pretty short (5’8″ and 5′) so we ordered the smallest frame possible (17/14″). The stand over on the stock 17/14” El Conquistador 26” S&S frame is 30”.  Because the S&S steel frames are custom built Ventana were able to drop the standover height a little more to 29″.  The rest of the spec is as follows: Rohloff hub (40×16), White brothers loop dual crown fork, Fox RP23 rear fork & Hope V4 brakes (203mm vented front and 203mm standard rear)

The coupled bike comes with two hard cases.  The frame can be split into 3 pieces and packed into the cases to make travelling with the bike easier.  The bike is shipped fully assembled and not packed into the travel cases as I expected – Alex said this is because it is much easier to reassemble the bike if you disassemble it yourself.  I have not taken the bike apart yet.

From this:

Delivery boxes for Ventana ECDM and the two S&S cases

To this:

Ventana El Conquistador de Montañas S&S with Rohloff hub

More pictures of the delivery.

I had some input from various people on different forums.  The posts can be found at mtbr.com, singletrackworld.com and the Double Forte mailing list.