This Space for Rent

Test ride

I glued together a fork then threw a bunch of parts at this frame so I could take it out for a NOBR AKES ride up and down the street. It didn’t disintegrate & I didn’t die, so that’s good enough for me to start gluing on the various stops, guides, bosses, and bridges that it needs to be a working bicycle.

—orc Sat Sep 28 19:36:19 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Building up a frame for a test ride (as soon as I glue the actual fork together.) The gearing it’s got right now is somewhat eccentric; it’s a CK singlespeed hub in back with the top 3 sprockets from an 11-27 cassette (21/24/27?) and an alpine double up front. So it’s a 6 speed with 9-speed spacing and really low gearing (48→25 gear inches) which will be fine for looping around the block seeing whether pieces fall off, but terrible for any sort of actual riding.

Needless to say it’s a little big for a Dust Mite.

—orc Fri Sep 27 23:58:01 2019

Framebuilding (frame #11.5)

Most of a frame (still need to glue in the seatstays, bottle bosses, cable stops, and whatnot) after 3 days of very slothful work.

—orc Wed Sep 25 22:03:03 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite looks over a frame that’s in the throes of fabrication

—orc Fri Sep 20 23:58:49 2019

Trolley photo of the day

A southbound train pulls into Milwaukie station

—orc Thu Sep 19 19:39:13 2019

The clouds roll in, the clouds roll out

The late afternoon sky as I headed home from Airgas.

—orc Wed Sep 18 22:34:05 2019

I went shopping, and on the way back home a free pile called my name.

I went over to Airgas to pick up a new bottle of firegas (and a couple of pipe clamp vise-grips (cheaper than aluminum frame blocks, alas!) and when I was almost all the way home I saw a free pile that had an elderly wooden chair perched on it. So I loaded the chair on top and came on home (the chair is in the garage right now; I need to strip the paint off, sand it smooth, then varnish it so it will look prettier than it does right now) very slowly so it wouldn’t rattle loose and tip the trailer over sideways.

—orc Wed Sep 18 18:05:04 2019

Picking up a frame for repair, plus scrounging some fenders to experiment on.

I went up to Tomcat Bikes to pick up a frame I’m going to try and unbend (the mixte tubes are bent near the headtube) and align, and when I got there there was a mess of fenders in the free pile out front. So fenders yay! I want to try and use a heat gun to reshape some plastic fenders to better fit smaller 650b tires, and free is a good price to pay for experimental parts. The mixte, on the other hand, looks like it’s going to be a fairly straightforward application of the 2×4 of delicate adjustment (unless there’s a crack somewhere that’s lurking and waiting to catch me unawares when I test ride it before returning it.)

—orc Tue Sep 17 16:22:34 2019

I think this fan may need to be replaced

I pried this fan out of Silas’s PC when his cpu fan started running so fast that it was shaking the house (went upstairs to see what the deal was, realized it was the computer, and when opening the access doors so it would cool down realized that (a) the fan wasn’t fanning and (b) that it felt really loose when I tried to spin it by hand. I knew it was probably dead, but I didn’t realize just how dead the thing could be.

—orc Sun Sep 15 00:00:37 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Helping test-fit some new dropouts onto a frame I’m modifying

—orc Fri Sep 13 22:55:02 2019

Backlit bicycle

In the middle of a longer test ride to shake out some of the bugs.

—orc Thu Sep 12 20:45:21 2019

Lighting experiments

Putting, for a change, the tail light under the saddle (thanks to the seatpost having a vent through the clamp so I could run the wiring through the frame and out the clamp) instead of on the bottom half of the NDS seatstay. This means that I will always have to have fenders on this bike if I don’t want the light covered with wheel filth, but (a) PNW and (b) rando bike, so I don’t think that will be a problem.

—orc Wed Sep 11 23:43:50 2019

Now I can paint my traditional randonneuse

I could have switched back to the emergency randonneuse but I wanted to experiment with disc brakes on (my idea of) a road bike, and now I can do that while stripping the traditional randonneuse down to the frame for painting.

—orc Sun Sep 8 22:28:00 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Splicing di2 connectors into regular two-conducter wire runs so we can wire up my disco travel bike

—orc Fri Sep 6 22:59:51 2019

More purple

Halfway through assembly; waiting on wiring, cabling, and realignment of the rear end (I misaligned it when I respaced the stays after brazing in the fender bridges and flat mount posts and now these 175mm cranks foul against the NDS chainstay.) I also need to verify whether the rack is level; the TT is very slightly upsloped, so the rack platform may be level but looks like it’s sloping downwards because of the relative masses of the front triangle vs the rack. And fenders! – I have a pair of hammered Honjos rotting away in my bike mess and this might be the perfect application for them.

—orc Fri Sep 6 22:53:03 2019

Purple

After a couple of days delay for various reasons, I’m finally painting the disco travel bike a chunk at a time (the fork is primered, the front & rear triangles have a couple of coats of grape purple, and I need to put together a rack tomorrow (which I’ll paint black) so I have a place to put the di2 battery & a headlight.

—orc Tue Sep 3 21:08:18 2019

In progress

The travel bike is now a frame & fork, modulo the cable stops/guides for the rear brake, the disc mounts for the rear brake, and the pusher boss. I should have had it ready for paint today, but I messed up the flat mount boss jig, so I need to modify it so I can reposition them before painting the thing.

Paint tomorrow, maybe?

—orc Sun Sep 1 20:20:22 2019