Oct 30, 2016
The front half of the fillet-brazed frame I’m (finally) building to replace the carbon steel SE Draft frame that’s currently holding the bits of my IGH project bike. The plan was to have matched HTA/STA, but when I had to trim back the overlong DT & TT I didn’t cut the TT quite far enough back, so the ST is .4° laid back from the HT. The BB is about 1-2mm offset towards the DS (it’s a 70mm BB, so I can just face that side down, but it’s still a bit annoying) and I somehow rotated the ST about 5° while brazing it in, so the bottle bosses aren’t quite centered (fixable by melting the bosses out, slotting the mounting holes, then fitting them into a reinforcing plate before brazing them back onto the machine, but before I do that I’ll just try out a bottle cage and see if it matters.)
Even though I fillet-brazed the mountainhack’s rear triangle and that survived a thousand miles of riding and being hit by a car (with me on it) I’m not completely confident that the brazes on this thing won’t spontaneously disintegrate as soon as I build it up and ride it around. Just as well that my plan is to have the thing be primarily a city shopping bike, because that way if it disassembles under load I’d only be a bus or trolley ride away from home.
—orc Sun Oct 30 18:21:52 2016
Oct 28, 2016
I’m afraid that it’s too big for a Dust Mite
—orc Fri Oct 28 23:09:32 2016
Starting on the front triangle for the replacement 3-speed project bike. The current one is built on a carbon steel frame and has a ridiculously low trail fork; so a crmo frame and a higher trail (but probably still lowish-trail, because (a) it’s 700c and (b) it’s going to be primarily a shopping bike at least until I’ve convinced myself that the brazes won’t spontaneously disintegrate under load.) Fillet brazed, 1" steerer, matched HT/ST angles (I’m planning on 73°) compact frame, and it’s going to be a triple triangle like the kit bike.
The DT is about an inch too long, so I need to cut it an inch shorter; if not for that I would have brazed the ST onto the rest of the triangle this afternoon. If I was braver, I’d do a seatmast, but instead I’ll just have an extended ST with a pretty lug from Framebuilder Supply which will let me use a short seatpost and fit electrical wiring into the bottom 2/3rds of the ST.
—orc Fri Oct 28 18:02:42 2016
Oct 27, 2016
A bronze beaver with an elegant maple-leaf chapeau
—orc Thu Oct 27 18:03:54 2016
Oct 26, 2016
A single-car train? Now that’s not something you see every day.
—orc Wed Oct 26 15:11:43 2016
Oct 24, 2016
When the Sellwood Bridge was replaced, the old Oregonian Rwy track under it (and a quarter to half a mile north, and a quarter to half a mile south) was ripped out so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the construction process. Now that the bridge is basically done (as far as I can tell the only thing left to do on the bridge is to finish the east end of the south sidewalk) the track is being replaced.
—orc Mon Oct 24 15:52:04 2016
Oct 21, 2016
Dust Mite inspects the adventure in irregularity which is my old bagman clone
—orc Fri Oct 21 23:48:03 2016
Before I fired up my first torch and started making racks, I fabricated a Carradice Bagman clone, which had several horrible deficiencies (not being square was one, but more importantly the base was so triangular that bags wanted to fall over to one side or another) and, after a few brevets and tweaks, ended up being set aside and lost in my bike mess.
Today I was tidying up and I unearthed it, but rather than putting it back down for later I took it to my workbench and reshaped it to be not quite so teetery and unsquare as it used to be, then brazed a crossbar on the back (to discourage twisting, plus to provide a bar to tie saddlebars to), cleaned it up, and painted it with a couple of coats of purple primer. It will need to have the primer sanded (obviously; the visible dripping is not what I have planned for the final product) and then I’ll need to paint + clearcoat it, but hopefully this will make it actually useful for a change.
—orc Fri Oct 21 18:50:56 2016
Sitting in a bush in our front yard this afternoon.
—orc Fri Oct 21 14:18:52 2016
Oct 20, 2016
Impromptu cat-cave
—orc Thu Oct 20 16:15:40 2016
Oct 19, 2016
Mucking about with the photo editor Prisma; not something I’d use everyday, but it’s a nice toy to fool around with.
—orc Wed Oct 19 22:08:28 2016
Green primer for a rack destined for an Elephant NFE – the primer is almost but not quite RAL 6021 (it’s a bit more saturated than FS green) so when the primer has properly cured (and had various drips and blotches sanded smooth & covered with another coat of primer) I’ll need to acquire a bit of FS green spraypaint and overpaint it to the proper colo(u)r.
—orc Wed Oct 19 16:51:05 2016
Oct 15, 2016
The Apple time capsule I’d set up in the basement to act as the backbone for our network smoked this afternoon during a windstorm – either the power surge when the power went out or back on again fried the disk controller (possibly the disk, but I can’t easily tell because it’s a big old server-grade 3.5" unit that draws more power than the USB port on my macbook can supply) and converted the thing into an inefficient space heater (I’m guessing the amber light of doom is because the disk controller failed, because that’s one of the two things people mentioned online as a reason for a pitiless unblinking amber light of doom and when I pulled the thing open and replaced the hard drive with a known-good notebook disk it still gave me the amber light of doom.)
So out in the middle of the storm to the local Apple Store where I plunked down more money than I care to think about (and why doesn’t Apple set up their Airport/Time Capsule OS to use dnsmasq or some alternative so that the thing can do dhcp+dns and give me proper forward/reverse mappings like Postel Himself intended?) to buy a Shiny! New! 2gb Time Capsule that will hopefully last as long as this one did before it stopped functioning .
(At least I’ve got one of those Next Thing SBCs sitting in the basement so I can put dnsmasq on it and have it be my local dns+dhcp server.)
—orc Sat Oct 15 19:50:04 2016
Oct 14, 2016
Examining the ports for internally wiring a rack
—orc Fri Oct 14 23:49:31 2016
Oct 12, 2016
~1500 square feet? I think it’s a 20x30 footprint, but the roof impinging on the third floor + the stairwell will eat pretty enthusiastically into the square footage. Still a big enough house for a 3-4 person family (if the architect didn’t fall victim to the “must have a hyuuge Master Bedroom And Bath” syndrome.) Pity it’s in Portland; at current real estate prices you’re probably looking at a half-million dollar house.
The windows are kind of tacky, but that might be an artifact of the windowframes?
—orc Wed Oct 12 15:41:09 2016
Oct 10, 2016
Who knew traction orange could be a camouflage paint?
—orc Mon Oct 10 13:43:40 2016
Oct 09, 2016
I replaced the stem on the kit bike with a custom-painted 3t Mutant, and then took the machine out on a bunch of shopping trips, ending up with a damp squelch down to the Big Big Store for lunch supplies for the bears. The mutant is ~110mm while the old stem was ~100mm (it’s actually about 5mm longer) and it sits a little bit lower, so I will probably need to nudge the saddle forward 5-10mm to effectively rotate the bars up and restore my previous riding position until I can get that little bit of additional flexibility.
Note that I pulled the Garmin mount from the stemcap. Part of it is an artifact of the stem having a shorter clamp (I’d need to put a spacer under the stem to lift it to the point where a cap wouldn’t foul against the top of the expansion plug) but it’s mainly because the USB connector on my Garmin 200 failed and I can’t use it until I am able to solder in a new connector (a Lightning connector instead of USB, because it’s a sturdier reversable connector than the horribly fragile mini-USB plug) and modify the case to fit everything inside a waterproofish enclosure. Until then, the stemcap is a silver one resting on a 10mm black spacer to remind me that my version of matchy-matchy isn’t quite the same as everybody else’s.
—orc Sun Oct 9 22:26:13 2016
Oct 08, 2016
I ran over a nail on the way up to Sauvie Island this afternoon, and discovered that not only was my first inner tube flat but my spare inner tube was also flat and that the rubber cement in my patchkit had congealed (I was able to patch one of the holes in my first inner tube, but even if I had found the second one I couldn’t have patched it because I used up all of the tarry rubber cement blob getting the first patch to stick on.) So instead of riding up to Sauvie Island I took the bus+trolley home from metropolitan Linnton. Oy.
It’s going to rain tomorrow, but I may just go up to Sauvie Island anyway because it’s been almost a week since my last nontrivial ride.
—orc Sat Oct 8 19:13:50 2016
Oct 07, 2016
My giant rando bag makes a Dust Mite look small
—orc Fri Oct 7 23:05:12 2016
Oct 06, 2016
A northbound Cascades passes new development in the Pearl District
—orc Thu Oct 6 15:16:55 2016
Oct 05, 2016
I had a couple of yards of waxed canvas in my fabric pile, so I decided I’d use some of it up (and also use up the faux nubuck (I suspect it’s not real because I bought about 5 yards of it and there were no seams in the fabric. I suppose that this nubuck could have been taken from a oxskin if the corpse of the ox was chucked into a giant version of one of those automatic apple peelers, but I’m dubious about the effectiveness of that approach) that was in my ragbin) so I made a semi-historical-reenactment bag instead of an xpac one.
Approximately 10x9x9, so much bigger than the rando bags I’d made for the previous and much smaller rack that the kit bike used to use.
—orc Wed Oct 5 12:13:23 2016
Oct 03, 2016
… now to sew a rando bag to fit to this rack.
—orc Mon Oct 3 18:31:38 2016
It’s been a year since I first built up the kit bike and took it out for a “let’s see what breaks” loop. ~4000 miles (and one chain, and one bottom bracket, and one wheelset) later and I’m still waiting to see what falls off.
—orc Mon Oct 3 14:28:33 2016
Oct 01, 2016
The black rack uses standard-diameter tubing (though, really, I could have used quarter-inch tubing for such a tiny rack), the orange one (destined for the kit bike – the hideously steep HTA makes my normal-offset fork teeter on the edge of low trail, so a larger rack + bag might settle the high-speed shimmy it sometimes gets) uses oversized (3⁄8“) tubing.
It might be the paint, but it’s not immediately obvious that the O/S rack is made of larger-diameter tubing than 5⁄16“ standard tubing. It’s considerably harder to work, but that’s not immediately visible when I look at the final product.
—orc Sat Oct 1 21:49:55 2016
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