Taking advantage of a sunny day
The weather forecast for today was sunny and 50°F (10°C,) plus the bears were going to spend the afternoon with my parents, so it was obvious what I had to do; go get more donuts!
41 km out, 41 km back, and the donuts were freshly out of the oven when I went in to buy them. And 41km isn’t that long anymore; this trip, including a stop in Pleasant Home to inhale a couple of bananas, a more leisurely stop in Sandy to eat donuts and drink some hot chocolate (“more leisurely”, in this context, was 45 minutes,) and a stop on Bluff Road to take a picture of Mount Hood, took me 4h45 minutes. I’m starting to get back to the speed that I was doing when the Trek was still a bobtail bike, and I’m getting that speed back on longish loops that include long stretches of hilly country roads.
Johnson Creek Blvd, on the other hand, is going to be filed under “where the wankers play” – when I came back along it, I had another fat gentleman in a car shout abuse at me for daring to ride a bicycle on a public road. That makes two times that people (both men, of course, and both fat) whined bitterly about me being on their roads, and one time when some idiot almost (fortunately for me) bodychecked me off the road because he forgot that I would still be there after he passed me in his stupid truck. The problem with Johnson Creek Blvd is that where it parallels the Springwater Trail there are 2 stop signs and a signalled light on the trail, as opposed to just one signalled light on the road. And the trail is pretty washboardy through there, while the road (at least the lanes in the road; the bike lane is full of sunken grates and never-swept road debris, so I ride in the lane where it’s safe) is regularly resurfaced, which makes it at least 5km/h faster than the trail. So it’s a bit annoying that that neck of the woods appears to be where the anti-bike idiots drive.
You’ll notice in the bike picture that the donut boxes are duct taped to the skateboard. This has proven to be the most effective way to carry objects on top of the V-racks. I’ve decided that the skateboard has to go. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to replace it with, but it’s a large heavy chunk of wood that never going to see a passenger on my bike (short wheelbase racy road bikes do not magically become monster cargo haulers with the addition of a Free Radical) and if I’m going to lug around that sort of weight I’d rather it be another lens or a tripod for my Pentax. I might take a piece of canvas and sew a couple of sidebars onto it, then use straps to clinch it onto the top of the V-racks (I’m doing that right now with the saddlebags: I’ve reversed the front and rear clips so that the saddlebags clip into the V-rack on the other side of the bicycle. This pulls the saddlebags tightly up against the V-racks and makes the whole assembly less flappy at speed. It makes it a little more difficult to load groceries, so I’m going to have to add opposite-sexed clips to the front and rear so I can clip across when the bags are empty, but clip to the same side when I’m out shopping.
(I wish I knew how to braze; I could see brazing up a nice Blackburn-style rack for a free radical that replaces the surfboard and V-racks, and then I could modify the saddlebags to fasten on as if they were a pair of abnormally elogated panniers.)
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The problem is that I’ve never soldered with a torch; The only soldering I do is electronics (with, decades ago, one soldered metal box for a middle school shop class) and I use teeny little irons for that. Torch soldering would be something new, expensive, and experimental – I guess I could just proceed directly to brazing and see what sort of horrible monstrosity I could create right off the bat.
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Hey, if you can solder with a propane torch you can braze. Same technique, just a hotter torch (acetylene) and a brass rod dipped in flux.