This Space for Rent

Project of the weekend

Pentax Bag

There are a couple of problems that keep me from reliably lugging my *istDS around when I go rambling around east Portland on my bike; first, when I put it into the rack bag I carry supplies in on these short trips, it gets jounced around and anything that’s not tightly screwed in may become unscrewed (like the barrel front of the K50/1.2 lens which is now sitting forlornly in the “to be repaired when I can afford to pay for it or replace it when repairing it myself destroys it” cabinet), and secondly, when it’s on the rack the process of taking a picture involves not just stopping the bicycle, but twisting around to unzip and unstow the camera, and then doing the same thing in reverse when I’m done with the picture taking.

The means that unless it’s a trolley or something spectacular like a flight of Ivory-Billed woodpeckers, I’m likely to just keep chugging down the line instead of documenting my trip. (And this is not likely to change when I finish radicalising (a job that is almost done, now that I’ve ordered the 135mm wheelset + new cassette + new chain [the people at the LBS pointed out that the Suntour shifter I’ve got now will have to be run in friction mode to work with anything else, but my patience for indexed shifting is running low as the old gears and chain wear to the point where they start to require en-route adjustments to give me anything outside of (13,16,18)-(52,48) on my hypothetically 14-speed bicycle,] but I’ll deal with that problem if the new back end decides to become a single-speed transmission) the Trek, because dumping the camera into one of the Freeloaders would put it further back and down lower than the already inconvenient arrangement I’ve got now.

Fortunately, I’ve got a sewing machine, a workshop, and a huge stack of fabric from SCRAP and Trillium Artisans, and I’ve done enough sewing so that I have a fighting chance of being able to cut and piece a bag that actually looks baglike. Thus this little bag; it’s not finished yet (I need to form a wire harness that loops over the top of the handlebars and velcroes (via another SCRAP find) to the stem, then bolt that to the plastic backplate and sew the rest of the assemblage together,) but it’s just the right size to fit my *istDS, a spare lens, my keys, the little gps thing I use for distance and velocity recording, and a cookie bar or two.

And it’s home-made, so it’s free™ and if I end up hating the idea of a handlebar bag marring the pristine beauty of my battle-scarred decades-old bicycle, I can get rid of it without dropping US$90 for the privilege of doing so.