This Space for Rent

Mar 30, 2013

Out on the line

Ripplebrook low-trail NDS midlifecrisismobile

The midlifecrisisobile rests at Ripplebrook Guard Station on the return leg of a fast (8h54) run up to Ripplebrook today.

Mar 29, 2013

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite and implements of destruction

Look out, Dust Mite has gotten into the allen wrenches!


Stratovolcano picture of the day

Mount Hood looms ghostlike on the horizon

Mount Hood around 8:30 this morning as I rode sluggishy up to Estacada.

Mar 28, 2013

Finished one; started one

Ready for paint

Another 9x9 rack platform

Mar 27, 2013

Look what Tri-Met found!

Ancient wooden diner

An ancient wooden coach, which had been converted into a diner, then buried inside new construction. Tri-Met wants to put a substation here, so they bought the building and started to tear it down, only to be surprised when this railcar appeared.

Alas, it sounds like they’re going to scrap it after the local rail historical societies strip all the movable parts out of it :-(

Mar 26, 2013

Tweaks

I didn't have enough patience to put up with high sparrow bars

The handlebars were too high to be mustachy, so I replaced them with the old Ava bars I had lying around in the basement. Still much too high, but at least now there’s one deep enough position to ride in.

3 comments

Mar 24, 2013

Triple Triangle/Sweet Fixie/650b/low trail crüe

Needs lockrings

I used a bunch of parts in the basement to make another bicycle. This one’s a 2-speed fixie (42×15 and 40×18) so I can see how it feels to ride a fixed-gear bicycle. It doesn’t feel different from any of my other bicycles so far, with the notable exception of the “if you’re moving, you’re pedaling” syndrome.

Mar 23, 2013

Railroad picture of the day

A P&W freight on the Astoria branch

A P&W freight approaches as I ride down highway 30 towards Portland.

Mar 22, 2013

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Truing a dust mite

Dust Mite calibrates my truing stand.


Recycling

Sweet Fixie(tm) wheel

A fixed gear (flip-flop, but fixed on both sides) drivewheel for the GT Talera, built according to my “don’t spend any money if I can help it” goal for this bike. Velocity Synergy riml from Russell’s Kogswell (a front wheel that was replaced with a dynohub), a fistful of spokes from the Zac19 wheel set I bought so I could get cheap and robust rims for the Murray Baja Experience!, and the flip-flop hub from my parts bin.

The only thing I did wrong on this build was that I got confused about which way to turn the Spokey when I was working on the right side of the wheel, so I accidentally put way too much tension on one of the spokes next to the valve hole and snapped the nipple in half when I realized what was going on and tried to back the tension out. Normally I’d just curse, snip the spoke, then lace in a new spoke, except I don’t think I’ve actually got any spare spokes in the 272-273 size range. Oh well, I’ll just leave it be for now and scrounge in the basement to see if I have any other spokes this size.


Fun with wheel building

I have a high-flanged fixed-fixed hub that I’m planning on stuffing onto the freebie GT Talera I’m building up. But I don’t have money for spokes. I was thinking of disassembling my spare Velocity Synergy wheel and lacing the fixed-fixed hub onto that, but the spokes are 277 mm and the fixed-fixed hub wants spokes that are 273 mm.

Hmm. What to do?

So I was looking around my bike mess to see if I had any packets of 273mm spokes lying around when my eyes spotted the 700D Sun CR18 wheelset that’s currently under the GT. Now, one of the problems with the Sun wheelsets is that they’re oversized for 650b (but I can still fit 650b tires on them), and it struck me that this might solve the problem. And it would; the fixed-fixed hub to the CR18 needs 277 mm spokes, so I could unlace the Velocity & Sun wheels, then take the spokes from the Velocity qnd lace them into the CR18.

It’s pretty sick and horrible, but it uses parts lying around the house!

Mar 21, 2013

Now that’s quality!

9x9 rack mockup (1)

I’m building a rack for a Rawland Nordavinden, and wanted to test-fit the stays before gluing them into place. I don’t actually have a Nordavinden, so I mocked up the fit using an Electra Ticino fork with water bottle bosses duct-taped into position (and the, to add insult to injury, I duct-taped the rack platform to all of the stays.)


Hazards of living in a computer-literate household

~~~~ can you bring up

the graphing calculator from the dresser int eh dining rm 2 pieces of paper my phone so I can call you and ask you to bring things up

cue Stayin' Alive

yr adoring family ~~~~

Unfortunately they sent it via gmail, so it took about 15 minutes to make it to pell, and by then they’d lost patience and came down to get the stuff themselves :-)

Mar 18, 2013

Bicycle picture of the day

Valve-hole view of a wheel

An unconventional view of the rear wheel on the Murray Baja Experience!

1 comment

Mar 17, 2013

New Code!

After a period of several months (eight, to be precise), Discount has been shoved up to version 2.1.6 with the correction of a handful of bugs and nonstandard behaviors, and with the new addition of using styles to style tables instead of align=, and, as an experiment, being released under a 3-clause BSD-style license instead of the 4-clause license (the one the FSF doesn’t like because, boo-hoo, it means you need to give attributions to someone else.)

It’s new, it’s marginally improved, and it gets a few bugfixes out of the queue before I merge in some contributed code and rework the list parsing to make it hew more closely to the standard.

It shouldn’t blow up, but if it does will you let me know?

Mar 16, 2013

Red

Shockingly red

I was curious to see what the midlifecrisismobile would look like with the spare wheelset installed.

Nice :-)


Racks

Three more rack platforms

Three more rack platforms, all brazed together and ready to have the fork leg & crown struts brazed on.


A spare wheelset for the midlifecrisismobile

New wheelset (2)

Swobo Del Norte rims laced to a Shimano dh-1n70 (front) and a White Racer X (rear) – 3× front, 3× DS, 1× NDS rear (due to screwing up the spoke length and having to scrounge 16 spokes for the NDS after moving the original NDS spokes over to the DS.

These wheels are intended mainly for if something happens to one of the Archetypes that are currently on the mlcm, but there’s no point in not taking advantage of these lovely red rims while I’m at it.

2 comments

Mar 15, 2013

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

The wheel builder

Dust Mite builds a wheel.

Mar 14, 2013

Wheels of destiny

New wheelset

The Murray Baja Experience! needed a dynamo hub, and, happily, I had one lying around not being used. It’s a SON28 (that was on the midlifecrisismobile until the front rim wore down to the point where I didn’t want to ride on it anymore), so I needed an matching rear hub, and I had one – an old Ultegra hub that was lying around from the days before I bought the Angry Bee – so I ordered a fistful of spokes from Danscomp and laced up the new wheelset today (rear is 3× DS, radial NDS; the SON28 is not approved for radial lacing, so the front is 2× instead)

The SON28 cost about 25× what the Murray Baja cost. Fortunately I didn’t have to buy it before I built it into a wheel.

Now all I have to do is resist going out and spending money I don’t have on a eDelux headlamp for the Murray :-)


Stratovolcano picture of the day

Mount Hood floats on the horizon

Mount Hood sits under a very high overcast.

Mar 13, 2013

It’s very red

Del Norte

A Swobo Del Norte at the Seven Corners New Seasons this afternoon. I’ve got a Del Norte stem (only ± 6°, though) and a pair of Del Norte rims, but nothing else. I’d love to get a Del Norte fixed/free hub for the GT, but, alas, fixed hubs, particularly ones spaced to 135mm, are hard to find on the used market.

Mar 11, 2013

Cute baby picture of the day

Silas tries to decide whether to go home or to go to Marsee Baking

Well, it was bound to happen, and it has – Silas is starting to look like a (small) adult, albeit one with a full head of hair (unlike the slowly receding hairline of his aged father.)

Mar 10, 2013

Cargo

Back from the store

I’m glad I decided to take the trek on this shopping trip.

Mar 09, 2013

Stratovolcano picture of the day

Berry fields and distant stratovolcano

Mount Hood looms distantly over the berry fields south of Boring.

Mar 08, 2013

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite watches Silas's iPad recharge

Dust Mite wishes the battery would recharge faster.

Mar 04, 2013

Conspicuous consumption

New Socks!

Not stripy, but this is an acceptable substitute.

1 comment

Mar 03, 2013

Bicycle photo of the day

Vernonia MLCM

The midlifecrisismobile rests in front of the Vernonia Shell station during the return from Longview this afternoon.

Mar 02, 2013

Cargo

When the trek is useful, it's /really/ useful

We were out of soy milk and low on seaweed, toilet paper, and paper towels. So I took the Trek over to Trader Joe’s and loaded it about as full as I could fit it. It’s not nearly as heavily loaded as when I brought the torch back from Irvington, but this is one of the bulkier loads I’ve ever wedged onto it.


Shimano dh-1n70 dimensions (for search engines)

dh-1n70

For some bizarre reason, Shimano doesn’t seem to publish these dimensions, either online or on the printed documentation that accompanies the generator hub. So, fine, I’ll publish them myself:

dimension mm
left flange ø 57
right flange ø 57
center to left flange 30
center to right flange 29
spoke hole ø 2.5

Mar 01, 2013

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Voodoo Dust Mite

Dust Mite inspects a box of donuts.


Using up some of the bicycle parts that were lying around in the basement

GT & Soma

I made another pass at the seattube this morning, and after only about 3 hours of reaming away I finally got about 7 inches of the seat tube reamed out to 27.2mm. And then I cut down an old scrap seatpost (the original seatpost on the Trek, which had the seat clamp nut strip and which now has a regular nut and bolt holding it together) so that I could get the saddle height to about the same as the saddle height on the midlifecrisismobile, put the junky Cutter saddle onto it, and installed it instead of the steel seatpost and vinyl Murray saddle that I’d put on last night. I hand-fitted a crankset onto the super-wide bottom bracket (I’m going to have to replace it with a narrower one, but for now it will make a good chainline for a fixie build) and carried it upstairs to compare it to the mlcm.

In a lot of ways, the geometry is a clone of the project bike – it’s gonna be way too long to use mustache bars on, and I may have to put the Ava (or Gary) handlebars on to get it to fit properly.

I’m waffling over whether to keep this threaded super-low-trail Ticino fork (needs to be cut off, and I’d need to cut apart the existing quill so I can rebuild it to -17° ) or to just plunk the Long Haul Trucker fork I got last year under it (would also need me to cut the steertube, but the LHT fork has midfork mountpoints for a proper front rack) so I’ll probably just leave the machine unridable until I get the wheels laced up (which will require finding a track hub for fixie purposes.)

—30—


orc@pell.portland.or.us

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