This Space for Rent

Jun 25, 2019

Dozing

Mavis naps in the dining room window

—orc Tue Jun 25 11:56:18 2019

Jun 23, 2019

Taking a modified frame (new chainstays, ISO disco brake tabs, relocated rear brake cable port in the TT) up to the wilds of St Johns. I can’t do a Kiki, so I had to strap the frame to the mountainhack and row it across the city.

—orc Sun Jun 23 23:35:45 2019

The city keeps on building itself up

New construction obscures the pretty building on the NW corner of Burnside & MLK

—orc Sun Jun 23 18:09:44 2019

Jun 22, 2019

Frame #8.5 is now a bicycle

Hiding in the shadows after a short test ride

—orc Sat Jun 22 15:37:29 2019

Jun 21, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Wiring up the traditional randonneuse between batches of frame & rackbuilding.

—orc Fri Jun 21 23:33:20 2019

Jun 20, 2019

The teenaged cat

Mavis makes her self comfortable on an office chair.

—orc Thu Jun 20 21:29:19 2019

Jun 19, 2019

A lightweight rack, mocked up

~95 grams as it sits right now, but it’s got temporary rack tabs so I can do the final adjustments and then braze together the tabbed lugs I’m going to actually be using. The carbon fiber tubing I’m using on this has all the fibers running longitudally, so it’s very strong in tension and compression, but I’m worried that if I put a heavy weight on it I’ll crush the tubes. So it’s going to be a rando-only rack (I’m going to build another one out of 7mm tubing for general use, and I’ll wrap the tubes with a single diagonal wrap of fabric to reinforce it) until I forget and destroy it.

The bicycle this is going on is going to be a di2 machine, so the right rear interior rail lug is extended far enough to hold a couple of threaded eyes to attach a di2 battery or regulated power supply.

The main structure of the rack is stainless steel (lugs) & carbon fiber tubing. The backstop is lightweight aluminum (this is why it’s not a tombstone; the aluminum is sturdy enough to handle the bag if it’s a fairly low & wide semicircle, but a tombstone is narrow enough so that if the bag starts slithering around it it will start bending. But in any case I’m going to use rubber cement to fit the backstop onto the deck, so if I am wrong I’ll be able to extract it and replace it with a new one made of stainless steel or carbon fiber.

—orc Wed Jun 19 19:18:56 2019

Jun 15, 2019

Railroad (and trolley) picture of the day

I had stopped to take some pictures of this northbound P&W train when a northbound interurban popped over the top of the bridge over the P&W’s Oswego branch.

—orc Sat Jun 15 21:57:31 2019

Jun 14, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite gets ready for bed.

—orc Fri Jun 14 23:53:22 2019

Framebuilding tool time

A chainstay dimpling tool for chainstays that are inconsiderately attached to the bicycle and can’t be set in a vice for dimpling. It’s made from the backside of a golf club (an iron?), a 3" clamp, and either a 1⅛“ or 1” (depending on what sort of chainstay I’m dlimpling today) tubing block. The tubing block isn’t attached to the clamp, but the golf club part is; there are 2 m5 holes tapped into the back of the club part, and I notched the sides of the clamping face so when I bolt them together the club part won’t drift during a dimpling.

It takes a while to cut the back off a golf club head when all you’ve got is a hacksaw. Fortunately club heads aren’t made of a super-tough aerospace alloy but are just stainless(?) steel.

—orc Fri Jun 14 00:25:33 2019

Jun 13, 2019

Dozing cat

Thor naps

—orc Thu Jun 13 22:38:31 2019

Jun 12, 2019

Cargo

Taking a bike frame down to the closest UPS branch for shipping out east. It was either 96 or 99 freedom degrees this afternoon, so that was a very long and tiring 2 mile round trip.

—orc Wed Jun 12 21:23:20 2019

Jun 08, 2019

Frame 9.5

Soaked to remove the flux, then sanded/wirebrushed/filed/ground to clean up charred flux fragments & blobs of brass, and waiting for me to (sigh) go back and put the fender eyelets on the rear dropouts that I forgot to do when brazing everything together & to poke all the voids with a pin to see if they are actually voids (which will need to have more brass flowed into them) or just where the brass got sucked deeply enough into the seam so I can’t see it.

And then I write “RADIATION HAZARD”, “FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY”, “PROTOTYPE”, and “BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD” on it and mail it off to the rider who volunteered to be a guinea pig/test pilot for my frames.

(Frame 8.5– my traditional randonneuse – is sitting in the corner of my bike mess waiting for some free time for me to finish the front rack, fabricate some wiring harnesses, and assemble everything, and Frame 7.5 – my xtracycle replacement – is waiting for me to set up a jig for the rear triangle so I can finish brazing it together.)

—orc Sat Jun 8 23:56:45 2019