This Space for Rent

Jun 28, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Surly hoverrack & Dust Mite

Checking the alignment of a rack before brazing a crown stay onto it. It’s sitting way below the crown because this is a Surly fork with absurd tire clearance and the end use for it is 700x38c tires + fenders.

Jun 26, 2019

The towering inferno

An enthusiastic fire

The charcoal was running low when I grilled steaks last night, so I built a bed of apple & sweetgum wood to start & supplement it. Wood burns much more enthusiastically than charcoal does.


Shopping

70 pounds of kitty litter, because our cats go through it about as fast as they go through food

Bringing home a bucketload (65 pounds, with 5 bonus pounds of catfood) of kitty litter from the local pet store. Taking the 3-speed, because why not?

Jun 25, 2019

Dozing

Window cat

Mavis naps in the dining room window

Jun 23, 2019

Frame delivery

Bike frame transport

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.


The city keeps on building itself up

The scribbly building peeks down an alleyway

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

Jun 22, 2019

Frame #8.5 is now a bicycle

After ride#1/

Hiding in the shadows after a short test ride

Jun 21, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

The electrician

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

Jun 20, 2019

The teenaged cat

Mavis naps

Mavis makes her self comfortable on an office chair.

Jun 19, 2019

A lightweight rack, mocked up

Final mockup

~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.

Jun 15, 2019

Railroad (and trolley) picture of the day

A P&W train races an interurban to the Springwater Trail bridge

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.

Jun 14, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Bedtime for Dust Mite

Dust Mite gets ready for bed.


Framebuilding tool time

The Dimpler

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.

Jun 13, 2019

Dozing cat

A basket full of tortoiseshell cat

Thor naps

Jun 12, 2019

Cargo

Sending a frame off to the wilds of Ann Arbor

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.

Jun 08, 2019

Frame 9.5

Cleaned up and ready for one last look for gaps in the brazing (and to put fender eyelets on the rear dropouts)

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.)

Jun 07, 2019

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

A little something before bed

A Dust Mite’s eyes are bigger than their stomach.


Where am I and why am I in this handbasket?

Impossibly cute

Thor is back in the basket

Jun 06, 2019

Professor Cat

Professor Cat

… on his lectern

Jun 02, 2019

Stratovolcano picture of the day

Mount Hood looms distantly over Bridger school

Mount Hood & Jim Bridger school

Jun 01, 2019

cargo

Cargo bike?  Bike cargo?

Returning home (with a tiny section of cobblestones) with a puzzlebike I’m proxy buying for a friend in the midwest.


Trolley photo of the day

An airport-bound train approaches the Rose Quarter station

An airport (“Red Line”) train comes off the Steel Bridge

—30—

Obéir c'est trahir, Désobéir c'est servir
orc@pell.portland.or.us

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