This Space for Rent

Oct 31, 2014

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite & chain whip

I went out for a ride this afternoon and found a nice prop for dust mite blogging :-)

Oct 26, 2014

Cargo

My eyes are larger than my porteur bag

~60 pounds of pasta, chai, and other dense groceries.

Oct 24, 2014

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite & Buckeley

Cat & Mite

Oct 21, 2014

water water everywhere but not a drop to drink

Hundreds of spokes

When I disassemble a bicycle wheel, I don’t generally just cut the spokes out and discard the scraps, but instead unthread them and lay them aside for later reuse. This has been moderately successful in the past (I’ve got 3-4 wheels laced with reused spokes, including the wheels on both of my allegedly rando bikes) but today I wanted to lace up a dynohub for my newly discified sweet fixie and discovered that out of these hundreds of spokes I’ve got several wheels worth of >274mm spokes, several wheels worth of <270mm spokes, but nothing in the 271-273 range, which happens to be the spoke length I need to lace a Shimano 3-series dynohub to a disc rim.

Bother. It’s not that it’s that expensive to buy new spokes ($12.80 + shipping for 32 14/15/14ga spokes from Danscomp) but it’s annoying to have to live with a bottom bracket generator for the additional week it will take to have them shipped out here from the decadent midwest :-(

Oct 20, 2014

Production

Two & seventh-eighths rack

Two rando racks and one endpoint rack, (almost) ready for shipping out east.

Oct 18, 2014

Trolley photo of the day

A pair of S70s approach Division St station

A pair of downtown-bound S70s approach Division Street.

Oct 17, 2014

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite in the furnace

Dust Mite in the furnace.

1 comment

Oct 14, 2014

Winter is, alas, coming

First fire of the year (with flash)

… so it’s a good thing that I replaced the cracked fireglass in our fireplace insert and we can now fire up the fireplace again.

Oct 13, 2014

Cargo

Stealth Cargo

Today it was 80 pounds of kitty litter, which was almost invisible until I hit a hill.

Oct 10, 2014

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite & Vegan Berger Cookies

My friend Stasia made me a dozen vegan Berger Cookie clones as a birthday present; most of them are gone now, but Dust Mite is attempting to keep me away from the remaining ones for another day or so.

Oct 09, 2014

bicycle photo of the day

The GT, with the new crankset & a Union BB dynamo

The GT after I stuffed a Union BB dynohub (from my random junk pile; I got it cheaply from a friend a couple of years ago as part of a set that came with a halogen (which immediately was converted to led) headlight I wanted, and only now needed to use it (because I don’t have any disc dynohubs, but need to be able to ride this bike when it’s dark outside) and defrenchified the crankset after the BB started to creak (on the cheap; the 386 crankset here cost me less than a new square taper BB would have cost – so now the Stronglight TS-3 is sitting back in the basement while I decide whether I want to put it onto the Trek instead of the 38/48 cargo double that I’ve got on it now).

I still haven’t brazed the rear brake mount on; that has to wait for me to recase the brake levers and put drop bars (lauterwasser bars are nice, but THEY AREN’T PROPER DROP BARS) onto the machine like G-d Himself Intended.

Oct 08, 2014

Two australian racks

Two Australia-bound racks

An 8×9 rando rack (demountable) and a 11×11 porteur rack, all painted and ready to be shipped about 3/8ths of the way around the world (halfway puts it in the Southern Ocean about 300 miles east and a little north of the Crozet Islands, which is not a particularly useful destination). All I need to do is go to the post office and buy a 15" cube box, pack everything, then spend a king’s ransom on postage.

Oct 03, 2014

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

A tight squeeze

Dust Mite is messing around in my workshop.

—30—


orc@pell.portland.or.us

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