Sep 30, 2015
Well, except for the encrustations of stops,posts,and other implements of destruction that I need to have to hang cables/lights/shifters off the machine.
—orc Wed Sep 30 18:39:15 2015
Sep 29, 2015
Needs seatstays+cable stops+brake bridge+chainstay bridge+canti posts+pusher braze-on+taillight mountpoint+pump peg because why not?
—orc Tue Sep 29 18:53:09 2015
Sep 26, 2015
Half of the kit bike (the headtube + seattube are tacked together; the BB is dry-fitted because I don’t have a jig for the rear triangle made up yet,) with the mountainhack looking on suspiciously in the background.
—orc Sat Sep 26 19:51:32 2015
Sep 25, 2015
Inspected by #Mite
—orc Fri Sep 25 23:35:40 2015
And now the only problem is the torch operator :-) (defects; (1) the NDS canti stud is crooked; gotta melt it off and rebraze it, (2) I don’t have complete brass penetration at the back of the fork crown+fork leg joint, and (3) there might be a place on the steerrube+fork crown joint that doesn’t have complete brass penetration.)
I need to set up a basin so I can set this thing in it to soak for a hour or so; it will look a lot better when the slag-filled flux is washed away.
—orc Fri Sep 25 17:51:19 2015
Sep 24, 2015
The fork, partially brazed (I bought a new bottle of acetylene, and when I attempted to use it today the valve didn’t work – sigh, back to Airgas to see what’s going on with it – so I fired up the teeny bernzomatic to see what I could do. “What I could do” ended up being the dropouts before it ran out of oxygen) and waiting for me to get some firegas before I glue the steertube+crown+legs, canti studs, and rack mounts.
The french-style low curve on the fork legs is an artifact of using a conduit bender to rake them. ~45mm offset, which should be enough for rando work.
—orc Thu Sep 24 23:09:44 2015
Sep 22, 2015
After sucking up a lot of oxygen fillet brazing the mountainhack’s rear triangle, I’m not planning on using the teeny bernzomatic torch to heat the lugs on the kit bike. But I’d run out of oxygen on the big torch, so I had to run over to Airgas to pick up some more poisonous corrosive gas.
Fortunately, the Trek’s sensor-searing red paint doesn’t actually affect anything other than cameras.
—orc Tue Sep 22 14:10:31 2015
Sep 19, 2015
This is almost a clone of the mountainhack with notes from the last few months of riding it around. The gory details of this frame are:
- lugged, because I had them lying around and I’m lazy
- 72.5° headtube
- 73.5° seattube
- ~585mm effective top tube (the TT has a ~2.5° slope)
- 480mm C-C seattube
- 430mm chainstays
- ~55mm BB drop
- 25.4 TT, 28.6 ST, DT
- 130mm rear axle spacing, maybe?
- 650b with, hopefully, room to fit up to a Pari-Moto
- 3 sets of bottle mounts
- DT port for electrical wiring
- NDS chainstay port for electrical wiring
- canti studs or centerpull brake studs. Probably canti studs, because I’m happy with V-brakes + travel agents, but if I can find centerpulls that actually stop a bicycle I’d be all ears.
- mount for an NDS chain/seat(?)stay taillight
Should I glue in disc mounts? I don’t know how long I’ll be able to scrounge for rim-brakable 650b rims, and I’m NOT going to spend $100/rim for something that will erode away in 20,000 miles.
I’m going to make a fork for this thing, and I was thinking of drilling the steertube for completely internal wiring, but the lure of carpet fiber forks is not to be ignored and if I fabricate this frame with the assumption of a steertube port I’d be unhappily draping wire around the frame if a carpet fiber fork fell into my lap.
—orc Sat Sep 19 19:36:59 2015
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 13, 2015
Stratovolcano & cyclocross racers south of Boring, Oregon
—orc Sun Sep 13 22:27:44 2015
Sep 12, 2015
And after 22-ish years, I think that as of today there is no streetcar/interurban construction in the Portland metro area.
—orc Sat Sep 12 21:08:47 2015
Shockingly good. Hard SF, if you consider magic as SF. Hard magic otherwise. Written from the POV of a sorcerer who came into magic in a great hurry and was tossed into an experimental apprenticing program, with an appropriate amount of complete and utter bafflement as the training progresses (so when this sorcerer’s cohort starts doing terrifyingly powerful magic it’s both unexpected and obvious.) There’s not much in the way of action!, but what there is clicks along and left me shuddering with horror about the time when the problem was resolved.
Definitely worth a Hugo nom. And, happily, I can nominate it.
—orc Sat Sep 12 00:50:30 2015
Sep 11, 2015
Some light reading
—orc Fri Sep 11 23:46:47 2015
Sep 10, 2015
Avocado flavo(u)red ice cream. *Shudder*!
—orc Thu Sep 10 19:03:39 2015
A cargo net makes up for a teeny rando bag in the bagel-lugging department
—orc Thu Sep 10 15:09:51 2015
Sep 07, 2015
Apparently I hit the shutter release while I was pulling my CBC out to take some trolley photos.
—orc Mon Sep 7 16:54:57 2015
Sep 05, 2015
Bicycles are considerably smaller than switch engines.
—orc Sat Sep 5 19:42:19 2015
Sep 04, 2015
Sep 03, 2015
After a day and a half trapped like a rat on Windows I snapped and went into a spasm of hardware shuffling to get one of the dead macbooks operational. Fortunately one of the white 13" macbooks came back to life after I put a hard disk into it (after first prying out the rubber rails, which had come loose and were wedged around the SATA connectors at the back of the disk bay) and taped a power cable to the side of the case (because one of the less desirable misfeatures of macbooks is that if they sit unused for a while the batteries explode – the battery pack on this (or my other dead 13" ‘book; I’m not sure which one I pulled it from) had not ruptured, but was starting to look quite a lot like Mr Creosote) so that I could use it without having to sit absolutely still for fear of dislodging the magnetic connector.
The teeny detail that I no longer have any usable USB ports is something I’m going to have to deal with later today, but in any case I’m sitting in front of a Unix machine (with a decent GUI instead of Echh-11.) Thank goodness that one of the 4 corpses could be brought to life again, at least for long enough to keep me away from windows until my bigger macbook returns home.
—orc Thu Sep 3 14:57:48 2015
Sep 01, 2015
I took my macbook into the local apple store to get the case fixed before Applecare ran out (it runs out on the 12th, just in time for the new trolley line to open) and when I got home I discovered, to my intense dismay, that of the three old macbooks (a first-gen intel Mac Pro, two first-gen Macbooks) I had lying around I had approximately zero that actually worked (well, it’s possible that one of the macbook works – it can’t find the hard drive, but I don’t have any lying around that are already formatted) and all I had was an old Compaq/HP running Windows 7.
The fonts are nice on Windows, but other than that boy is it horrible. It’s not Unix, so I don’t have my usual crop of command line tools, it doesn’t have a remote desktop that interoperates with the mac remote desktop server, so I have to use VNC, which is amazingly fragile (it drops the connection if there’s any sort of latency on the wire(less), but it drops the connection in such a way that leaves a stack of orphaned remote desktop processes spinning away in the background; after a few instances of this there are a stack of processes sucking the machine away and increasing latency to the point where VNC can’t even get to a login screen), I’m stuck with Google Chrome as a web browser because IE on this machine is larded up with a whole stack of HP adware (thanks, Carly-era HP for combining the worst of HP with the worst of Compaq!), and now that I’ve set up the entire local network to use zero-conf networking I’m stuck with a head that doesn’t do zero-conf and I have to resort to using IP addresses to talk to all of my MacOS servers.
Yuck.
3-5 days is what the people at the Apple Store told me. I’m hoping for 3, because I don’t know if I can deal with Windows for much longer than that.
—orc Tue Sep 1 23:07:41 2015
Silas left his lunchbag at home, so I had to (any excuse for a ride :-) go up to Da Vinci to deliver it.
—orc Tue Sep 1 20:07:01 2015
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