Oct 31, 2015
Smiling out into the torrential downpour
—orc Sat Oct 31 18:03:41 2015
3 pumpkins and a bunch of candy, purchased just before the skies opened up and started dumping rain.
—orc Sat Oct 31 16:26:48 2015
Oct 30, 2015
Dust Mite is almost exactly the same size as a tool roll, but not nearly as useful for fixing flats.
—orc Fri Oct 30 22:50:27 2015
A light load of groceries to weigh down the Yak after taking a load of recyclables to the Big Big Store.
—orc Fri Oct 30 22:01:53 2015
Oct 29, 2015
A Park Ave-bound train accelerates out of Tacoma St station (and under the Springwater Trail) towards the bridge over the P&W’s Oswego branch.
—orc Thu Oct 29 18:40:32 2015
Oct 28, 2015
(A pair of reshaped 700c VO Zeppelins)
I scrounged a pair of well-used VO fenders from my bike mess, reshaped them, and put them on this morning after nailing a tarp to the stupid roof. Not the best fit on the rear wheel, but good enough for now (the rear fender is wider than the chainstays are at the fender bridge, so it’s just wedged into place. This is not an optimal situation, so when I eventually get around to buying some new fenders for this thing I’ll make a little riser piece that bolts to the fender bridge, and then the fender will be bolted to it far enough up so that it won’t foul the chainstays. I need to pay for roof supplies first, so I’m stuck with these fenders for the forseeable future – thank goodness they don’t totally suck.)
—orc Wed Oct 28 14:17:55 2015
I went up onto the roof last night to replace the failed fascia, but discovered that it wasn’t just the fascia that was failing when I fell through a rotten spot in the roof. Alas, it was getting late so all I was able to do in the repair department was to rip the hole open back to the rafters, then nail some 1x8 planking in to fill the hole (primarily to keep squirrels out, but also to hopefully keep the rain out until this morning when I could go out and get a slightly less temporary fix.)
Well, it did keep the squirrels out, but it wasn’t so good about the rain. It rained fairly heavily last night and all of that rain came right through the roof and into Silas’s room. So my patch was to first nail a foam sleeping pad over the patch, then run to the hardware store and get a tarp, which I nailed over everything (and for 6 feet uphill on the roof) and then calked the upper edge to cut down on water infiltration (I also took some flashing and nailed it at an acute angle above the tarp to divert rainwater to one side.
Now I’ve got to figure out how to sell a bunch of racks before springtime so I’ll have the ~$5k I need to buy sheet metal roofing + vapo(u)r barrier + plywood and lumber + odds and ends not mentioned here so I can go up there, rip all of the shingles off, and put on a roof that will last until I am safely mouldering in my grave.
—orc Wed Oct 28 09:35:39 2015
Oct 27, 2015
I’m repairing our rotting roof (the joys of home ownership; either I do it myself or we spend thousands of dollars having professionals®©™ do it. It’s fortunate that we’re poor because I would hate to pay out that sort of money for something that I can do (modulo falling off the roof and breaking every bone in my body, that is) myself.)
In case you’re wondering, no, the Trek isn’t ridable with this load. But the hardware store is 4 blocks from home and the Trek makes a very good cargo sled when I’m not riding it.
—orc Tue Oct 27 19:16:40 2015
Oct 26, 2015
… just in time for a band of rain to come in. Sigh; I’ve got a pair of VO Zeppelin fenders that I rerolled to 650b, but they (obviously) aren’t on the machine yet and I was kind of hoping that I could put off putting them on until after I’d gotten the frame/fork/rack/stem/fenders powdercoated.
—orc Mon Oct 26 17:21:38 2015
Oct 23, 2015
Purple rando bag, dust mite colo(u)red Dust Mite
—orc Fri Oct 23 23:23:48 2015
Oct 22, 2015
A southbound train (SD600 + Type 1) approaches the crossing at 17th Ave & Pershing St, at the north end of the industrial area around (what used to be) Brooklyn Yard.
—orc Thu Oct 22 16:18:27 2015
Oct 20, 2015
The adventure is going to be seeing whether the stem I just built for the kit bike will be sturdy enough not to snap while I’m rowing the machine around town over the next few days.
—orc Tue Oct 20 19:07:43 2015
Oct 17, 2015
Red/Blue crosses under the Portland-Milwaukie interurban viaduct at Harbor & Harrison.
—orc Sat Oct 17 15:55:28 2015
Oct 16, 2015
An Oak Grove-bound train crosses over McLoughlin Blvd before heading up the ramp to the 99e & Park Ave terminal
—orc Fri Oct 16 19:30:00 2015
Dust Mite & candied citron
—orc Fri Oct 16 13:27:51 2015
Oct 15, 2015
Extra goodies to go along with bag & rack orders.
—orc Thu Oct 15 13:51:20 2015
The Sellwood bridge (1925) and the Sellwood bridge (2016?).
—orc Thu Oct 15 13:39:03 2015
Oct 13, 2015
I disassembled the IQ Cyo that used to be on the midlifecrisismobile in preparation for having more fun with carbon fiber (probably to make a hanging light mount; I need to make some sort of decorative heatsink to replace the one that it was using up until about 30 minutes ago because I want to have more surface area to bleed heat from.)
It’s a nice tidy little case, but I can make it even smaller if I lock the light switch into always on, ground it through the mount/heatsink, and embed a banana plug socket into the case instead of threading a wire out.
—orc Tue Oct 13 23:45:51 2015
Oct 11, 2015
A beautiful sunset, except that it was happening at 6:45 :-(
—orc Sun Oct 11 19:25:25 2015
Oct 10, 2015
Mavis checks out a practice stem
—orc Sat Oct 10 19:07:49 2015
Oct 09, 2015
Dust Mite wants to travel or write a letter, I’m not sure which.
—orc Fri Oct 9 21:49:57 2015
Oct 06, 2015
I’m not sure (I can’t see any joints) but I believe that the DT<->HT braze has failed, because those two tubes should not be able to flex at the lug. Time to drop the fork and fire up the torch, I guess? Nope, I think the headset + crown race seat are mismatched? I replaced the crown race, put the fork back together, and bunny-hopped the machine down the block without any creaks or joints breaking apart, so I’m less convinced that I messed up the brazes. Time to scrounge through my pile of 1" headsets and see if any of them are either (a) unthreaded or (b) can have the threads ground out to become unthreaded.
—orc Tue Oct 6 17:53:08 2015
Oct 04, 2015
The kit bike didn’t turn out exactly as I’d planned – some of it was my inability to make things square (the fork is a little warped as a result of the fork jig not being completely square – a discovery I made AFTER I brazed the fork together) and some of it was the happy accident of mismeasuring the toptube, which turned out to give me an ETT of ~605mm instead of ~585.
Not bad for ~$200 (I got them a long time ago, but I think the tubeset was about $100 and fork parts were about $50; add $35 for firegas, and another $15 for the braze-ons; my labor is free, of course, because the framebuilding process didn’t drag me away from building racks or bicycle frames for other people.)
—orc Sun Oct 4 20:31:46 2015
Oct 03, 2015
The SW-1 has been running, mainly on Portland Traction rails, for 63 years. The kit bike has been running, not on any rails, since about 5:20 this afternoon.
—orc Sat Oct 3 20:50:41 2015
This train of S70s is not moving nearly as fast as this Traction Action Photo© claims.
—orc Sat Oct 3 01:38:00 2015
Oct 02, 2015
Dust Mite contemplates the other tubeset I had lying around in my bike mess. Perhaps a gravel™ bike?
—orc Fri Oct 2 18:25:09 2015
Oct 01, 2015
Wheeled & saddled so I could verify that none of the brazes would spontaneously debond when I sat on it.
—orc Thu Oct 1 22:27:09 2015
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