Mar 30, 2013
The midlifecrisisobile rests at Ripplebrook Guard Station on the return leg of a fast (8h54) run up to Ripplebrook today.
—orc Sat Mar 30 20:17:42 2013
Mar 29, 2013
Look out, Dust Mite has gotten into the allen wrenches!
—orc Fri Mar 29 23:10:48 2013
Mount Hood around 8:30 this morning as I rode sluggishy up to Estacada.
—orc Fri Mar 29 22:34:26 2013
Mar 28, 2013
Mar 27, 2013
An ancient wooden coach, which had been converted into a diner, then buried inside new construction. Tri-Met wants to put a substation here, so they bought the building and started to tear it down, only to be surprised when this railcar appeared.
Alas, it sounds like they’re going to scrap it after the local rail historical societies strip all the movable parts out of it :-(
—orc Wed Mar 27 22:16:46 2013
Mar 26, 2013
The handlebars were too high to be mustachy, so I replaced them with the old Ava bars I had lying around in the basement. Still much too high, but at least now there’s one deep enough position to ride in.
—orc Tue Mar 26 18:13:43 2013
Mar 24, 2013
I used a bunch of parts in the basement to make another bicycle. This one’s a 2-speed fixie (42×15 and 40×18) so I can see how it feels to ride a fixed-gear bicycle. It doesn’t feel different from any of my other bicycles so far, with the notable exception of the “if you’re moving, you’re pedaling” syndrome.
—orc Sun Mar 24 17:23:48 2013
Mar 23, 2013
A P&W freight approaches as I ride down highway 30 towards Portland.
—orc Sat Mar 23 23:12:36 2013
Mar 22, 2013
Dust Mite calibrates my truing stand.
—orc Fri Mar 22 16:34:06 2013
A fixed gear (flip-flop, but fixed on both sides) drivewheel for the GT Talera, built according to my “don’t spend any money if I can help it” goal for this bike. Velocity Synergy riml from Russell’s Kogswell (a front wheel that was replaced with a dynohub), a fistful of spokes from the Zac19 wheel set I bought so I could get cheap and robust rims for the Murray Baja Experience!, and the flip-flop hub from my parts bin.
The only thing I did wrong on this build was that I got confused about which way to turn the Spokey when I was working on the right side of the wheel, so I accidentally put way too much tension on one of the spokes next to the valve hole and snapped the nipple in half when I realized what was going on and tried to back the tension out. Normally I’d just curse, snip the spoke, then lace in a new spoke, except I don’t think I’ve actually got any spare spokes in the 272-273 size range. Oh well, I’ll just leave it be for now and scrounge in the basement to see if I have any other spokes this size.
—orc Fri Mar 22 12:12:53 2013
I have a high-flanged fixed-fixed hub that I’m planning on stuffing onto the freebie GT Talera I’m building up. But I don’t have money for spokes. I was thinking of disassembling my spare Velocity Synergy wheel and lacing the fixed-fixed hub onto that, but the spokes are 277 mm and the fixed-fixed hub
wants spokes that are 273 mm.
Hmm. What to do?
So I was looking around my bike mess to see if I had any packets of 273mm spokes lying around when my eyes spotted the 700D Sun CR18 wheelset that’s currently under the GT. Now, one of the problems with the Sun wheelsets is that they’re oversized for 650b (but I can still fit 650b tires on them), and it struck me that this might solve the problem. And it would; the fixed-fixed hub to the CR18 needs 277 mm spokes, so I could unlace the Velocity & Sun wheels, then take the spokes from the Velocity qnd lace them into the CR18.
It’s pretty sick and horrible, but it uses parts lying around the house!
—orc Fri Mar 22 00:43:16 2013
Mar 21, 2013
I’m building a rack for a Rawland Nordavinden, and wanted to test-fit the stays before gluing them into place. I don’t actually have a Nordavinden, so I mocked up the fit using an Electra Ticino fork with water bottle bosses duct-taped into position (and the, to add insult to injury, I duct-taped the rack platform to all of the stays.)
—orc Thu Mar 21 23:57:42 2013
~~~~
can you bring up
the graphing calculator from the dresser int eh dining rm
2 pieces of paper
my phone so I can call you and ask you to bring things up
cue Stayin' Alive
yr adoring family
~~~~
Unfortunately they sent it via gmail, so it took about 15 minutes to make it to pell, and by then they’d lost patience and came down to get the stuff themselves :-)
—orc Thu Mar 21 23:40:24 2013
Mar 18, 2013
An unconventional view of the rear wheel on the Murray Baja Experience!
—orc Mon Mar 18 17:05:58 2013
Mar 17, 2013
After a period of several months (eight, to be precise), Discount has been shoved up to version 2.1.6 with the correction of a handful of bugs and nonstandard behaviors, and with the new addition of using styles to style tables instead of align=, and, as an experiment, being released under a 3-clause BSD-style license instead of the 4-clause license (the one the FSF doesn’t like because, boo-hoo, it means you need to give attributions to someone else.)
It’s new, it’s marginally improved, and it gets a few bugfixes out of the queue before I merge in some contributed code and rework the list parsing to make it hew more closely to the standard.
It shouldn’t blow up, but if it does will you let me know?
—orc Sun Mar 17 23:35:09 2013
Mar 16, 2013
I was curious to see what the midlifecrisismobile would look like with the spare wheelset installed.
Nice :-)
—orc Sat Mar 16 21:43:53 2013
Three more rack platforms, all brazed together and ready to have the fork leg & crown struts brazed on.
—orc Sat Mar 16 20:19:21 2013
Swobo Del Norte rims laced to a Shimano dh-1n70 (front) and a White Racer X (rear) – 3× front, 3× DS, 1× NDS rear (due to screwing up the spoke length and having to scrounge 16 spokes for the NDS after moving the original NDS spokes over to the DS.
These wheels are intended mainly for if something happens to one of the Archetypes that are currently on the mlcm, but there’s no point in not taking advantage of these lovely red rims while I’m at it.
—orc Sat Mar 16 00:50:59 2013
Mar 15, 2013
Mar 14, 2013
The Murray Baja Experience! needed a dynamo hub, and, happily, I had one lying around not being used. It’s a SON28 (that was on the midlifecrisismobile until the front rim wore down to the point where I didn’t want to ride on it anymore), so I needed an matching rear hub, and I had one – an old Ultegra hub that was lying around from the days before I bought the Angry Bee – so I ordered a fistful of spokes from Danscomp and laced up the new wheelset today (rear is 3× DS, radial NDS; the SON28 is not approved for radial lacing, so the front is 2× instead)
The SON28 cost about 25× what the Murray Baja cost. Fortunately I didn’t have to buy it before I built it into a wheel.
Now all I have to do is resist going out and spending money I don’t have on a eDelux headlamp for the Murray :-)
—orc Thu Mar 14 23:19:25 2013
Mount Hood sits under a very high overcast.
—orc Thu Mar 14 20:12:57 2013
Mar 13, 2013
A Swobo Del Norte at the Seven Corners New Seasons this afternoon. I’ve got a Del Norte stem (only ± 6°, though) and a pair of Del Norte rims, but nothing else. I’d love to get a Del Norte fixed/free hub for the GT, but, alas, fixed hubs, particularly ones spaced to 135mm, are hard to find on the used market.
—orc Wed Mar 13 22:47:12 2013
Mar 11, 2013
Well, it was bound to happen, and it has – Silas is starting to look like a (small) adult, albeit one with a full head of hair (unlike the slowly receding hairline of his aged father.)
—orc Mon Mar 11 23:21:14 2013
Mar 10, 2013
I’m glad I decided to take the trek on this shopping trip.
—orc Sun Mar 10 19:04:06 2013
Mar 09, 2013
Mount Hood looms distantly over the berry fields south of Boring.
—orc Sat Mar 9 22:09:19 2013
Mar 08, 2013
Dust Mite wishes the battery would recharge faster.
—orc Fri Mar 8 20:00:59 2013
Mar 04, 2013
Not stripy, but this is an acceptable substitute.
—orc Mon Mar 4 18:36:21 2013
Mar 03, 2013
The midlifecrisismobile rests in front of the Vernonia Shell station during the return from Longview this afternoon.
—orc Sun Mar 3 23:49:46 2013
Mar 02, 2013
We were out of soy milk and low on seaweed, toilet paper, and paper towels. So I took the Trek over to Trader Joe’s and loaded it about as full as I could fit it. It’s not nearly as heavily loaded as when I brought the torch back from Irvington, but this is one of the bulkier loads I’ve ever wedged onto it.
—orc Sat Mar 2 18:30:24 2013
For some bizarre reason, Shimano doesn’t seem to publish these dimensions, either online or on the printed documentation that accompanies the generator hub. So, fine, I’ll publish them myself:
| dimension |
mm |
| left flange ø |
57 |
| right flange ø |
57 |
| center to left flange |
30 |
| center to right flange |
29 |
| spoke hole ø |
2.5 |
—orc Sat Mar 2 10:14:53 2013
Mar 01, 2013
Dust Mite inspects a box of donuts.
—orc Fri Mar 1 23:06:56 2013
I made another pass at the seattube this morning, and after only about 3 hours of reaming away I finally got about 7 inches of the seat tube reamed out to 27.2mm. And then I cut down an old scrap seatpost (the original seatpost on the Trek, which had the seat clamp nut strip and which now has a regular nut and bolt holding it together) so that I could get the saddle height to about the same as the saddle height on the midlifecrisismobile, put the junky Cutter saddle onto it, and installed it instead of the steel seatpost and vinyl Murray saddle that I’d put on last night. I hand-fitted a crankset onto the super-wide bottom bracket (I’m going to have to replace it with a narrower one, but for now it will make a good chainline for a fixie build) and carried it upstairs to compare it to the mlcm.
In a lot of ways, the geometry is a clone of the project bike – it’s gonna be way too long to use mustache bars on, and I may have to put the Ava (or Gary) handlebars on to get it to fit properly.
I’m waffling over whether to keep this threaded super-low-trail Ticino fork (needs to be cut off, and I’d need to cut apart the existing quill so I can rebuild it to -17° ) or to just plunk the Long Haul Trucker fork I got last year under it (would also need me to cut the steertube, but the LHT fork has midfork mountpoints for a proper front rack) so I’ll probably just leave the machine unridable until I get the wheels laced up (which will require finding a track hub for fixie purposes.)
—orc Fri Mar 1 19:26:52 2013
—30—
![[rss feed]](/~orc/feedbutton.png "Atom + RSS feeds available here"){kind=small}