Dec 31, 2013
EPT #100 sits on the McBrod Ave lead at the south end of Portland Traction’s Milwaukie line.
—orc Tue Dec 31 19:47:50 2013
Dec 29, 2013
Ripplebrook, after a delay of 40 days (this fall has been pretty terrible in the bike riding department), on a cold winter afternoon after a s-l-o-w creep up the hill.
Discoveries on this ride:
- fog is really really cold when I’m out of shape enough to not be able to generate enough heat to keep the freezing cold mist away from my skin.
- pea soup fog is really fun when there’s oncoming traffic at night – headlights diffuse and make the air into an opaque milky mass. I ended up rerouting my return twice because of this fog; first I switched from Eagle Creek Road down to 224/211 so that there’d be an actual bike lane to ride in instead of hoping that oncoming traffic would see me, and then after 6 miles of absolute terror every time a car approached I rerouted the return through Boring and the Springwater Trail because they don’t have oncoming traffic like Barton Ferry Road + Springwater/Clackamas River Road have.
- Amisigger Road still sucks dead bunnies through a straw in the climbing department.
- The tubeless tires on the born-again Trek worked out without a glitch; I ran into one tube-eating pothole somewhere along the line and all that happened was the front tire burped a couple of psi and a thimbleful of sealant, which I noticed some time later when I saw a flash of white on the sidewall as I climbed up to Pipeline Road from 224.
- I think I prefer the born-again Trek to the Midlifecrisismobile. I’ll have to glue up the tubulars and see if they push the mlcm back into the primary spot.
—orc Sun Dec 29 22:38:53 2013
Dec 28, 2013
I had to cut this freewheel hub in half to recover the spokes from the wheel it was laced into (the freewheel had corrosion-welded itself to the hub,) but that meant I had something else to make into a candleholder.
—orc Sat Dec 28 23:19:34 2013
So. Last year we got the best a macbook pro as a christmas present. This year, two days after christmas, the hard drive in that mac pro does not appear to be driving any more.
Guess how long the warranty lasted? 365 days, which ended two days before christmas. Yay, Apple, you’ve almost got your hardware ttf down to exactly one minute after the warranty expires.
At least we’ve got a solid state drive (bought to replace the hard drive on her old macbook pro, which also had the hard drive die, but which then had the video chip delaminate in the window between ordering the ssd and having it arrive in the mail (I’d put a temporary hard drive into the thing to keep it functional while waiting for the ssd to arrive)) lying around which I can stuff into the machine tomorrow morning and, hopefully, restore her system onto it.
—orc Sat Dec 28 01:04:55 2013
Dec 27, 2013
Dec 23, 2013
114 feet of tubing (100×5⁄16 , 10×1⁄4 , and 4×5⁄8 ) so I can go into business making racks in January. I still need to buy some oxygen (go to airgas, I guess, and get the tank on the regular torch so I don’t spend hundreds of dollars buying bernzomatic bottles; having a [functional] large enough torch to braze up frames is lagniappe) and, eventually, clean up the garage so I can put in a workbench and move all the crap from the basement out to there) but I can continue with my routine of running back and forth to the basement for now.
—orc Mon Dec 23 16:11:49 2013
Dec 21, 2013
A United Streetcar Astra-clone works its way through traffic on a busy shopping day.
—orc Sat Dec 21 22:41:43 2013
Dec 20, 2013
Dec 16, 2013
Okay, so this time it might actually count as precision engineering, because I actually designed it and went to the hardware store to get the structural materials instead of scrounging through the basement for parts.
This is, obviously, a jig for brazing the legs onto a front rack. It doesn’t have enough reach to go down to the dropouts on a fork that doesn’t have rack brazeons (but in that case it doesn’t matter because by the time you get down to the dropouts they’ll be all over the place and it will need to be custom-fitted onto the bicycle) but it will reach lowrider mountpoints, riv/rawland rack mounts, and everything in between.
I should be able to just clamp a rack to it, lay the fork leg struts down against the rack, and then braze them together with only a minimal restraining bar to keep them from being knocked out of the way by the force of the torch flame.
I still need to mount a protractor, plus mark it for the location of various rack mount brazeon locations, but it’s workable now and after I braze up a couple of racks with it I’m sure I’ll think of other things I need or did wrong.
—orc Mon Dec 16 22:47:22 2013
Dec 13, 2013
Dust Mite makes off with the holiday candy.
—orc Fri Dec 13 22:17:20 2013
Dec 09, 2013
I’m using the old gaspipe frame as a jig to make the prototype for a run of tiny (6.5" × 9.5") front racks. You may now avert your eyes in horror.
—orc Mon Dec 9 23:48:40 2013
Dec 08, 2013
I’m not sure how I managed to (a) do it, or (b) not notice it for so long (I laced this wheel up last spring, and have done four tire changes on it (Confrerie->CdlV->Hetre->CdlV) in the ~2000 miles I’ve ridden it this year, ) but I somehow laced this wheel backwards.
I can’t imagine that it’s going to do wonders for the durability of that wheel, but at least it’s hung on this far without exploding on me. And, hey!, it certainly improves the bracing angle on the thing!
—orc Sun Dec 8 22:45:16 2013
Dec 06, 2013
It’s not a very large snowman, but it didn’t snow very much.
—orc Fri Dec 6 17:51:20 2013
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