This Space for Rent

Oct 31, 2020

End of the month, new rsc2m scan

578 on the Stillwater branch

578 pulls a freight north through Bayport (Minn), passing the site of the future Bayport Marina.

Oct 30, 2020

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Cargo bike mite

Wrenching

Oct 29, 2020

Idle hands? Well, no, but this gives me something to do during wintertime.

Fun with di2 repair

I bought a cheap Shimano RX dangler from ebay a while back, and it finally worked its way up to the surface of the project heap today. The reason it was cheap is because it had been wrecked in such a way that sheered off the di2 socket, which makes it somewhat less than useful for someone who isn’t a compulsive tinkerer.

Fortunately for me I’m a compulsive tinkerer, and I verified that the servo still works by using a couple of pins as probes (red wire==power, which went to the now-vanished power pin in the middle of the connector, and black == ground, which went to the base of the shield). This is not suited for road use – I’m going to have to source some waterproof sub-mini connectors, then cut off the remaining piece of the cover and fab a new one out of carbon fiber fabric so I can put it on a machine without worrying about the thing going offline after the first seam in the pavement.

Oct 28, 2020

Shopping

Shopping

After going to the drugstore and the grocery store. The rando bag is filled to bursting with a rotisserie chicken, a loaf of sourdough bread, and the baguette that’s jauntily perched on top, and the ob-bottle of wine is helping the Looney Bin bottle cage earn its keep.

Oct 26, 2020

Winter is coming.

fuck around and find out
This image was created (as best as I can tell) by Jeffery Pross

Oct 23, 2020

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Mite Weight

Weighing in

Oct 22, 2020

A slightly different 578

Key System 578 on a SF-bound train at Piedmont & 40th

Same road #, but a radically different machine; this is Key System 578 at the Piedmont & 40th stop in Oakland, CA, on a SF-bound train in 1936.

Oct 19, 2020

Painting pain

paint bodgery, #2

When your masking tape doesn’t want to stick to the previous coats of paint, it becomes a lot harder to properly do complicated mask work.

Oct 18, 2020

Shopping

Sitting under the 1,500,000 gallon rainshade

On the (indirect) way back from Trader Joe’s

Oct 16, 2020

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

This keyboard miiight need to be cleaned up

Dust Mite found an old PC keyboard

Oct 15, 2020

The game is afoot!

Iacta ālea est!

♪  I’m going to the courthouse and I’m going to be voting ♪ 

Oct 14, 2020

Consumables

killing a hole saw for jesus

I’m (fabricating parts for/building up for test riding) a handmade mini-longjohn (here I’m bringing it back home) and as part of the process I’m doing all the frame prep that the original framebuilder didn’t bother to do. One of the bits of prep the framebuilder didn’t do was to ream out the handlebar post (they’d put in vent holes that were about ¾" diameter, which isn’t quite big enough to fit a 1" steertube) so I had to dig out a hole saw and go to town.

I cleaned out the handlebar post, but alas, it did horrible horrible things to this Starrett hole saw. It started out as an 18 tooth saw, and it ended up as a 14 tooth saw. Sigh. It may still have enough teeth to properly notch tubes for the ST<->BB<->DT junction, but it most certainly doesn’t have enough teeth for anything more substantial.

If I win the lottery, I think that I’ll be getting some proper high-tooth-count cutters, but until then I’ll just keep using these disposable circular razors.

Oct 12, 2020

Floofs

CATS!

Ozymandias & Thor on a lazy monday morning


Quote tweet

Oct 09, 2020

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Shopping mite

Checking the shopping list to make sure we got everything we needed.

Oct 08, 2020

Gone shopping

Gone shopping

Sadly, there is no soup in my shopping bag.

Oct 07, 2020

RSC2m picture of the day

(Re)builder's photo of 578?

I believe this is a (re)builder’s photo of #578 at the Alco works in Schenectady. I don’t know for certain that it is, but if it was a picture taken by the Milwaukee Road it would have been taken at the Menomonee River shops, which don’t have that background no matter which way you look in the valley, the paint wouldn’t be quite so clean after being shipped across country to Milwaukee, and that strip of light-colored gravel in front of the track certainly looks like it was set down there to reflect a flash up into the undercarriage of any locomotive that was sitting there, and that wouldn’t happen unless you’ve got a lot of locomotives you want to photograph.

So my headcanon is that this is a builder photo, taken just after 578 was rebuilt into the platonic ideal of a diesel road switcher and before it was shipped back to the Midwest to make me into an Alco fanatic at an impressionable age.


Tweaks

New bar tape

When I built up the disco travel bike I goofed and wrapped one side of the bartape backwards, and after a year of thinking I needed to fix it I finally went out and bought some new (and oh so sedate) tape and did the deed. Not fluorescent pink, but still a very shockingly vivid pink verging on magenta.

Not camp at all, really, it’s quite sedate. Trust me.

Oct 02, 2020

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite Pizza

A little midnight snack

Oct 01, 2020

New month, new rsc2m scan

578 pulls a freight on the Stillwater branch

578 pulls a freight on the Stillwater (Stillwater<->Hastings) branch in August ‘69.

—30—

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