Aug 24, 2019
Dust Mite helps me modify an elderly fixie/singlespeed into one that’s got disc brakes & the option to have a rear derailer.
—orc Sat Aug 24 00:18:31 2019
Aug 20, 2019
Picking up a bottle of oxygen before starting a whole bunch of brazing.
—orc Tue Aug 20 20:57:17 2019
Aug 16, 2019
Dust Mite goes shopping
—orc Fri Aug 16 22:30:47 2019
Mainly for frame 11.5 (a pair of r-o-r chainstays, a 6/9 seattube, crown, and BB casting) but also for my coupled travel frame (another pair of r-o-r chainstays.)
One of these days I need to braze & sew a specialized tubing basket to attach to the rear triangle so I won’t have to lash tubing to the toptube (which works, but my upper legs scrape against the tubes when I’m coming back from the shop.)
—orc Fri Aug 16 15:16:31 2019
Aug 14, 2019
A train catches up to me @ Interstate & Russell
—orc Wed Aug 14 18:34:06 2019
Aug 11, 2019
Ozy is large enough to make the sofa cushions sag when he’s napping.
—orc Sun Aug 11 16:35:16 2019
Aug 10, 2019
As soon as I get a couple of coats of paint & clearcoat onto it. This is for an Endpoint Hunter-Gatherer with a q/r fork (which for some completely unknown reason has a different geometry than the through-axle fork for the very same machine) and it’s going abroad along with the Hunter-Gatherer frame it’s going on. The light mount is a separate piece just for this reason; I don’t know how tight the clearances are going to be in the box with the frame, so I didn’t want a fixed light mount that could snap off if the box was abused in the process of shipping.
—orc Sat Aug 10 23:57:32 2019
Aug 09, 2019
Guarding my collection of Biopace chainrings
—orc Fri Aug 9 23:54:23 2019
Aug 06, 2019
The Zooliner sits at the top (and now only, unless Metro can be convinced to reopen the line down to Washington Park) station after finishing a short run out to the old turnaround loop just NE of the Zoo.
—orc Tue Aug 6 23:22:04 2019
Aug 04, 2019
When I was returning from Henry Higgins yesterday I was stopped by a southbound trolley, so I had to take a picture of it as it approached the crossing.
—orc Sun Aug 4 23:07:17 2019
Aug 03, 2019
Thor guards the living room rug (by sleeping on it)
—orc Sat Aug 3 12:11:05 2019
Aug 02, 2019
Dust Mite has a little snack
—orc Fri Aug 2 23:09:50 2019
A small (no tower of groceries & toilet paper) shopping trip over to Trader Joe’s. I still had to fill the rando bag (a 5 pound bag of oranges that I could have fit onto the trailer, but didn’t want to tear the bottom out of any of the bags) and the wine bottle carrier (a bottle of vin ordinaire which I bought because it has a picture of Josephine Baker on the label), but for me it was a light load.
—orc Fri Aug 2 21:22:43 2019
The front triangle of the disco travel bike, mocked up before I drill the bottle boss mounts & fly-by-wire ports, adjust the lugs to fit, and tweak the miters to fit. As it sits right now (with extra headtube that I’ll cut off before I glue everything together) it’s 1360 grams, so it will be a little over 2kg when I get all the pieces brazed together.
The planned features of this thing are
- flat mount disc brake on the rear wheel (the front wheel is just going to be ISO mount because that’s the fork I brazed together.)
- SON SL (connectorless) dynamo wiring.
- S&S couplers, of course (I melted them out of a Rodriguez that I traded a rack for; the rest of the frame is sitting forlornly in my living room waiting to be chopped apart for the tubes.)
- O/S tubing (7/4/7 tt, 7/45/7 DT)
- fly-by-wire 2x11 (an 11-34 cassette if I can get them in MTB width, otherwise an 11-36, and either 46/28 or 48/36 biopace double chainrings – 37 or 43t maximum, which will be riiight up at the limit for a GS rear derailleur (I have a 11-42 pieplate, and a 6870 GS dangler can shift it without being drawn completely taut, so I’m guardedly hopeful that I can at least do 37t chain pull without trouble)) in my standard kitbashed mix of 6770 & 6870 parts.
I think that I’ll live dangerously and paint this one (in BRIGHT PURPLE) before I put it together and ride it instead of my traditional riding the thing for a few thousand km before stripping it and painting it.
—orc Fri Aug 2 00:49:09 2019
Jul 31, 2019
It is very convenient that sour cherry season more-or-less overlaps my birthday.
—orc Wed Jul 31 19:21:54 2019
… but not for peds & bicycles
—orc Wed Jul 31 19:10:43 2019
Jul 26, 2019
Dust Mite keeps everything under my cap
—orc Fri Jul 26 23:21:30 2019
I got a commission to unmangle a frame that had a car back into it (newly purchased bicycle + garage == bad news) and severely bend the rear triangle, so picked up up on tuesday, unbent and aligned it (fortunately the process of unbending it fixed the alignment, because it’s a pretty ancient machine and I’d worry about popping some of the brazes if I actually had to apply the 2x4 of cold-setting justice to the rear triangle), then loaded it up and took it back to the bike shop this afternoon. When it came home it was just lashed to the bob yak trailer, but I took my Thule fork clampy thing off the xtracycle and moved it to the yak before I took it back.
It’s easier to carry a frame when it’s actually fastened down than it is when it’s merely lashed into place.
—orc Fri Jul 26 15:59:58 2019
Jul 20, 2019
Jul 19, 2019
Les pêches (et les acariens de la poussière) est arrivées!
—orc Fri Jul 19 23:29:36 2019
An african junglefowl wanders through our neighborhood
—orc Fri Jul 19 22:00:19 2019
—30—
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