If your front basket blocks your fork-crown mounted dynamo light (and how could it not?) you might be able to mount the mount directly to the basket. Two fender washers to sandwich an intersection of the basket wires, an M6 bolt and a cap nut.
Might work
So my first shot at the Coffeeneuring Challenge was actually challenging.
This “oh, that looks like a nice cafe” cafe is now closed down. Apparently it didn’t look nice enough to entice me through its doors in time to help keep them open…
“My Friend Joe” Coffee – shuts at 6:00 on Sundays. The girl was dragging the sign inside as I rode up. Note the “Open” and “Closed” signs both being on. Also note the badass ’70s typeface of “Bagels & Croissants.” Whatever it is, it’s the next-most-’70s font to Cooper Black.
Cafe des Croissants. Sure, I could use an almond croissant and an espresso. Too bad they close at 4 on Sundays. The guy loading the truck was totally willing to sell me a croissant, but couldn’t fire up the espresso machine. I should have bought the croissant.
So I just went two blocks back to Mendocino Ave., and stopped at the bizarrely located Peet’s. I guess it serves the city/county admin buildings across the way. Twelve ounce Americano with plenty of room. It was good.
I actually saw my wife zip by on her Vespa on the way back from her shopping, and I took the rest of the coffee to go. She beat me home by a few minutes. In McMinnville, we used to race home from 3rd St., bike against scooter, Max on the back of the scooter. It was usually pretty close, especially if you counted the winner by “first into the house,” instead of “first into the driveway.”
This March, my friend’s bike was stolen out of my back yard. That sucked. I had fixed it up from its moving-beating (the movers bent some stuff that shouldn’t oughta get bent), and I put on some new bars, and replaced the shifters, and before I’d even cut the (brand new, full pop retail)* cables to length, someone stole the fucking thing out of my yard! My yard. Solid black dog, giant Swiss dog, three mean-ass cats, and they still walked away with it. I guess the advantage of stealing transportation is that it aids its own theft.
Anyway, shame and irritation long gone, Swiss dog replaced with a newer model (Requiescat in Pace, Nadia; welcome, Rosie), seasons have changed, and the other night we took a nighttime trip to the CVS to get some drugs for a possible UTI**, not a fun outing. Walking into the store, I check out the bike that’s abandoned*** out front. “That’s a well-sorted hobo bike… THAT I TOTALLY RECOGNIZE. No WAY.” I took it by the horns and rolled it over to the car. Women were exiting the store, chatting about Michelangelo, and to them I must have looked like someone putting my own bicycle into my own car, because that was how I felt. Snip, snap, into the boot, slam the trunk, and I went shopping.
I kind of cruised the store, with an eye out for someone who might have been a bicycle thief (or a duped grandmother with no other transportation), but didn’t spot any candidates. It wasn’t until we got home that I was like, “Hey, remember when Lisa’s bike was stolen out of our yard?” and Angelina’s like, “Oh my god, yeah, that was horrible,” and I got to say, “well, it was parked*** in front of the CVS, and now it’s TOTALLY IN OUR TRUNK!”
The bike now needs another bout of attention, and the brand new Rivendell proto-Dove bars I got at their garage sale are scratched to hell, because the new owner adjusted the shifters three inches down the bar without using a screwdriver to loosen the clamps. Yeah, they weren’t the classiest shifters, but they worked, which was the whole point. I think I’m going to revert to the flat bars it used to have, and donate the cast aluminum 1985 Suntour (Shimano?) shifters from my first mountain bike. I’ve passed along nicer bits from that bike (WTB Greaseguard hub?), and its Salsa stem still lives on the Quickbeam.
The nice fat slicks are gone, replaced with knobbies, which is what makes me want to set this up with the original flat bars, so Lisa can ride Annadel, 1990 style. Since, actually, there is no higher purpose to a bike than to ride in Annadel. Maybe she needs a basket for Belle, so she can bark at everyone they meet.
andy, wade, joseph,et al., originally uploaded by BikeTinker.
“Damn you, cycledefrance!” Every single shot is amazing.
If you like beautiful photos of bikes in interesting places, there’s more where this one came from.
I’d never done a bike s24o, until the Rivendell Grin Fundo. I didn’t own a sleeping bag, or a lick of gear, but I jumped at the Grin Fundo the same way I jumped at the Quickbeam when they arrived, “shut up and take my money!”
Gear: I bought a closeout REI bag that stuffs down to the size of a casaba melon, but weighs about the same as a basket of strawberries, poured some leftover TJ’s two-buck Chuck into a steel bottle, and put that in a big ziplock baggie. I took my toothbrush, and the almost-done Tom’s cinnamint I put aside for the occasion, and my asthma medicine. Fat wool socks and lightweight Carharts and another wool tee shirt for sleeping in, and the ride down. That was about it. No pad, no cooking gear, and two power bars.
I was going to bring a pillow, but forgot. “Whatever, I’ll just put my extra clothes in the sleeping bag stuff sack, and use that.” Which was a good plan, but the “extra” clothes were the ones I’d just changed out of, and they were soaked with sweat from the climb up Diablo. Ew. I used my spare top and a shoe for a little height. It worked fine.
It all fit inside a borrowed Large Saddlesack. That’s a cool thing. Harry gave me some zip ties, and I zipped it to the rack, and cinched it to the saddle and post. I just put my sleeping bag, loaded shoulder bag and Carradice saddlebag right into it.
Bike: Borrowed Rivendell Hillborne. I would have liked to ride my Quickbeam, but I didn’t want to be the last one up and the last one down. My two geared bikes aren’t very Rivendelicious, but would have worked fine with some clever strapping. Basically, I wanted to have the full experience, albatross bars and all.
Keven arranged all, and Harry set the saddle height. Perfect. A bit more upright than I’m used to, with Albatross bars and cork grips. There were also big sharp Silver bar-end shifters pointed at my knees. My geared bikes have a single right shifter, or stubby Suntour bar-ends, and all of my bikes have flared drops. I said, “I’m a little worried about the shifter stabbing my knee,” and Grant said, “it might happen.” Huh. Better ride around a bit more and learn to tuck the left knee over the top tube on tight turns…
Harry:
Keven also roasts his own coffee beans, which he turned into an Americano for me, complete with organic heavy cream from Trader Joe’s.
Keven:
I bought some stuff (green tape and a King cage) with my $25 Fundo credit (a surprise to me), and we each got a “special prize for filling out the waiver form,” which was a Grin Fundo patch. Totally cool. People came and went, including Manny’s crew of hard men, bound for a bandit camp higher on the mountain.
The Ride Up: When Grant arrived, we rolled out across Walnut Creek to the base of Mount Diablo, and started to climb. My hands sweat a lot, and on the bare metal of the albatross bars, I didn’t have the grip confidence to “pull through” on the climb, so I just geared down and spun.
Diablo to the Junction is a significant climb.
We met Manny’s crew a little below the Junction, and I chatted with Brencho and took some pictures.
One fellow had a beautiful hardtail singlespeed with a single ornate lower head tube lug. The rest of the bike was fillet brazed or TIG’d, with a matte pewter finish. I asked the owner what kind of bike it was, and he said, “A mountain bike.” Ha! I’ve heard of those. Grant later said the lower head lug was the dumbest lug to pick, if you were only going to do one lug, since you need a different one for every size. On the other hand, it acts as a gusset, looks beautiful, and you save money eliminating all the other lugs…
Camping: We dropped down from the Junction, and then down a dirt road to a camp with about 10 spots. We took the “host” site when we found one of our reserved sites was taken by a family. We didn’t want to make them shift their tents and kids, which seemed like a hassle. Also, the host site was much flatter.
I was at a loose end after setting up my site. I flopped the bag on the ground, laid on it, moved it sideways nine inches so that my hip would fall into a natural depression, laid on it again to make sure, and parked my bike next to it. Done!
We ate lots and lots of Cowgirl Creamery “Mt Tam,” which is brie-ish, with a subtle crackle of lactose crystals (according to Nick (“El Duke Degreaser”), who is a food scientist). There was another Cowgirl* cheese, and plenty of dark chocolate, and nuts, and other paleo-ish fare chosen to keep eaters in ketogenesis. Alain brought some Oban whisky in a flask, which was extremely well chosen. I’ve been to Oban, but never had the whisky. He also hipped me to Yamazaki, which I’ll try to find.
There was a lot of ketogenic diet talk, which was interesting to me because I like to hear esoteric knowledge shared by passionate nerds. Random fact: A single brazil nut has 100% of your daily dose of selenium.**
Random assertion I am interested in confirming: Cancer cells cannot replicate in a ketogenic environment.
The Ride Down: Steep huff up out of the hollow we camped in, and a little regroup on the dirt climb to the dirt descent. Grant gives a short primer on descending on dirt, and realizes he’s left his glasses at the campsite. No big deal. They’re the green safety glasses Rivendell used to sell. Optically correct, and stylish in a no-style way. Made in America, but they don’t make them here anymore. He’s had them for 20 years. Mark asks if the way down is easy to navigate, and Grant says there’s one fork, and you just keep right. Mark turns around and drops back down the trail to get the glasses.
Nick opts to go out early, because he has two young kids to take care of, and Alain does the same, carefully picking his line down the steep fire road on the Ebisu. We faff long enough that Mark returns with Grant’s glasses. They really are pretty nice.
Lots of descending steep rough steepy roughness, and riding along a ridgeline where you can look into two valleys at the same time. I heard Puck had never ridden offroad, but he aced it on a borrowed loaded road bike. At the bottom, where the exposed ridgeline turned into shady mellowness and stream crossings, Grant said, “I’m surprised nobody crashed. I really thought someone would.” Huh. I like the matter-of-factness about the possible risks of worthwhile behavior.
Chatted with Grant a bit about Oregon and Santa Rosa and people we knew, as we found our way through streets named after Indian tribes. Had another Keven Americano, some more cheese, and said goodbye.
The Drive Home: Whoops. Trying to get into Sonoma County via Vallejo on a race weekend is bad. Having time to listen to music and think is never bad, though.
I had no idea this was in Lincoln Nebraska. I saw the picture, and thought, “that must be Bicycle Odyssey.” Because, you know, 10 years ago they had a Cunningham hanging in the corner.
I don’t think the 400th post is a “thing” in the blog world, but in any case, here it is.
The Bike Snob mocked the Tire Pressure App on Tuesday, right after our big update.
The update is visual and usability. The underlying function is the same; it should just be easier to get at. Here I am putting all my bikes in order.
This overlay shows the list of bikes. The free version lets you make two bikes, the paid version as many as you want (we know you have seven). In the future, this screen may show pressures, as a quick reference.
If you Add a New Bike, it will clone your selected one. Most people have slight variations of the same bike, just like they do jackets, so it’s a convenience.
This is the Quickbeam, showing pressure, with me weighing 245. That’s 40 lbs of pizza and beer. Mostly beer. Say, 32 lbs of Bridgeport and Sierra Nevada strapped to me at all times. Hence the superwide tires I like.
To get the right pressure (15% tire “squish,” for low rolling resistance and comfort), you need to know the width (actual, by measuring) of your tires, the weight of the bike, and the weight of everything ON the bike (you, your bags, etc.). You can’t trust any damn thing the manufacturer puts on the side of the tire. You are allowed to lie about your weight, though, since it’s an inexact science.
The inexactitude doesn’t stop there. Tire casing plays a role – if you have handmade tubulars, or the equivalent, you can add 10% more air. Do the math in your head, it’s good for you. If you have terrible heavy utility tires, you may not care what the pressure is, but you can probably run them lower.
So you measure. I actually have a monkey wrench I use for this operation. The giant wrench fits over the tire, it’s adjusted snug, and then you measure the gap in the wrench’s jaws.
In the app, you input the width, choose the style of bike (different bike geometries have different fore/aft weight distributions), and tell the app how wide your tires are. It does the math for you, with an equation that fits against measured tire drop.
Pump it up and ride away. This app may shock you – if you weigh 220 lbs and are running 23mm tires, you are going to see that you’re over-weighting your tires, and pumping them up to 120 psi front and back is still way under inflating them. They’re rock hard, so you don’t have any of the advantages of riding on a pneumatic cushion, and you’re still deflecting them for more rolling resistance than you want. Lose-lose. You should have 153 lbs in the rear, and 98 in the front. So 120/120 is overinflating the front, underinflating the rear.
I’m unlikely to over-inflate 60mm Big Apples.
In other news, I set my Strava personal best on the Tin Bar Stage Gulch climb this week, riding the Gravel Roadster with 60mm Big Apples. The bike snob tells me there’s now a “Gravel Racer” category of bikes. My 12 year old ate sushi and really liked it (mostly he eats fries), and I’ve been walking my dogs twice a day instead of riding to work. I Strava that, too.
lake ilsanjo, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.
I rode 20 miles, got a little sun, and a flat tire. I had a little epiphany on the trail. I was resting in the shade on a fierce uphill, thinking about work in pretty negative terms. Petty stuff. I started thinking about how my late friend Seth always seemed to have encouragement and joy in life, and I thought “I should be more like that.” Renew my efforts to smooth out the friction points, but more to the point, DEFINITELY not lose out on enjoying the ride.
Friction shifting nine speeds with a seven-speed bar-end shifter was pretty ragged. I’m looking at 13-32 7 speed cassette so I can use the indexing. Especially important if I’m going to loan this bike to my brother in August.
Untitled, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.
I was headed out of the park, and stopped for a minute at the top of Steve’s Trail. I was sitting on that picnic table, thinking how nice it was, when I heard something like water rushing through a pipe, which seemed weird. Turn my head, just the sound of bugs. Turn it back, SSSSSSSSSS. It’s coming from that rack thing the bike is on.
It’s coming from my bike!
I panicked a little. If I was home right now, I’d already be getting the stink eye for staying out so long. Roll down toward the Lake. No! The parking lot is a better bet. It’s closer, and maybe I can catch a ride, or borrow a phone.
flat tire!, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.
I rode down until the back end got too squirrley, and then just walk/ran the bike. A guy on an older carbon hardtail asked if I needed anything. I said, “A patch?” He stopped, and started tearing a duct-taped bundle off his seat tube. He pulled out a new tube, handed it to me, and said, “Do you need anything else? Tools?” I was like, “Thanks, brother!” (I’ve never called anyone ‘brother’ in my life) “I’ll definitely pass this on.”
“That’s what you do. Do you need any tools?”
“No, I can mount this tire with my hands. I’ll borrow a pump from someone when I get this seated.”
He handed me a CO2 cartridge and a mini regulator dealie. “This should be good for two tubes, but I used a full one my first time. ” Wow.
I got everything situated, and the tire soft but rideable (sure enough, the cartridge was empty), when a woman stopped and asked if I had everything I needed. I said, “Thanks, I’m fine,” and she said, “Are you sure?”
That struck me as a good foll0w-up question, to break through people’s initial resistance to help, and to kick-start their mind to really assess the situation. I’ll use it in the future.
“No, I actually just now finished up, but thanks a ton for asking. Have a great ride!”
I’m grateful to my Samaritans for turning a good ride with a long walk into a stellar ride and a fun interaction.
“It’s not a contest. Enjoy the ride.”
– Seth Vidal
I rode down to the Bike Peddler on the Bontrager, with the stuck-cog ENO Eccentric hub in my handlebar pack. Truth to tell, I chose the Bontrager because I bought it from NorCal Bikesports back when it was called “Dave’s,” and I thought I might have a better chance with my weird request if they recognized a bike they’d sold. Ten years ago half the employees at both shops had owned one of these closeout Privateers.
When it was my turn at the repair counter, I produced the hub, with the cog and lockring still attached, and said, “What I have is in the nature of a challenge. Is it possible to remove this cog? And… how much would it cost?”
The mechanics laughed, and said, “you’re supposed to remove this before you cut out the spokes!” I told them I bought it, and they said, “I hope you didn’t pay too much.” I said, “It depends on how this goes.”
Untitled, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.
It went well. Two guys, four tools and a vice. As one of the attending mechanics said, “It’s easy if you have the right tools.” He looked at the setup in the vice, “Or in this case, the wrong tools, used appropriately.”
The hub goes in the vice, the pin spanner* fits into two spoke-holes, and is held in place with vice-grips or locking pliers, so it can’t jump off the hub. Chainwhip goes on the cog, with a cheater bar for more leverage. The pin tool also has a cheater bar. Two strong men lean into it, and the cog spins off.
The mechanic picks up the cog and wipes down the threads, “Who wants to call it? $10?” Well worth it. Ten minutes, and 100 years of experience, vs two hours and something broken, if I’d done it myself.
*The pin spanner! This is the key element I didn’t see anyone online recommend. A cog-removing pin-spanner with several pins and a self-gripping feature would be a dynamite tool… Problem Solvers?
Or, “If you could have ten bikes, what would they be? ” For Bobby B.
My unbuilt White ENO hub with the evil 16t cog and the lockring is back on my table. I looked up how to remove a cog from a hub that isn’t built into a wheel, and found a good thread on possible fixes.
Suggestions include:
Other things I’m looking at in my workroom (toolboxes stacked on the floor of the shed):
Brake cables… could these be used instead of spokes? Thread them through the holes, wrap them around the hub shell, and affix them to a rim somehow? Run the cable through the spoke holes, and affix them by the pinch bolts to dozens of brakes and derailleurs?
The Bontrager. Put the hub in the dropouts, wrap the chain rotafix-style around the cog, get some leverage on the hub with… another cog on the freewheel side of the hub, and rotafixed with a second chain? My mental picture of this working out has twice as many stuck cogs, and a wheelless hub permanently jammed into frame, tied on with two kinked chains…
Off to the bike shop! Maybe they’ll have a Phil cog-based lockring tool…
The other day I mentioned that I was having trouble getting the full range of gear engagement out of my Shimano 7 speed bar-end shifters. The helpful folk on the RBW List pointed me to a fix for it, right there in the archives. I had ignored the thread way back in September, since gears aren’t my bag, right?
Since I now have two bikes with bar-end shifters, constituting 50% of my entire stable and all of my geared bikes, it behooves me to pay attention sometimes.
The basic problem is that if you take the shifter apart and fiddle with it, or buy it in separate pieces, or install it multiple times, you can end up with a shifter that doesn’t have enough “throw” to carry the rear derailleur all the way up and down the cassette. This apparently happens because the wound-up ratcheting springy magical thing inside the shifter gets unwound. To fix it, you need to wind it back up.
In an ideal world, I’d be able to buy (or make!) a special tool to wind up the slack, and reset the shifter. In practice, you can simply use the shifter pod itself to wind the shifter back up.
You are now ready to rock and roll. “Rock and roll” is biketinker for “adjust the limit screws on the derailleur so you don’t shift into the spokes.”
Every time you ratchet down, you’re taking slack out of the system. Or appeasing the tiny daemons that live in there.
Here I am, practicing my new videography skillzes.
I had a skate deck color request for “not quite chartreuse, not quite olive-y acid green.” I thought all my decks were black (with a sexy black band around them), but I had a rasta deck hidden away as well.
This seems more “not quite Juaritos limon soda,” but I really like the stickers.
I think I can make matched pedals by using pieces that match diagonally. Usually a pair is directly attached, where the left side of the deck becomes the right pedal deck, and vice versa. Just have to be a little more careful in the measuring…
Update: Success – the diagonal matching works! This whole deck is getting that treatment. I’m prepping more decks even now. They’ll go on Etsy, with cleats, at a dramatically inflated price.
This was an impulse buy. I should regret it, but I don’t. I’ve wanted an ENO hub for a long time, partly because it’s useful for fixing (“turning into fixies”) bikes with vertical dropouts, but mostly because it’s such a cool idea. I have a goal of putting White hubs on a couple of my bikes, but haven’t yet. I love hubs. I’m attracted to the shiny blingy ones, but I really like the ones that do weird things.
This hub has a center of rotation that is non-congruent with the axle ends. This feature lets you run a singlespeed or fixed wheel on a bike with vertical dropouts, because you can swing the hub backwards to tighten the chain. Before the ENO Eccentric, you would have needed to calculate a Magic Gear, in order to have a decent chain tension with a vertical dropout. So it’s cool, and extremely niche. In fact, secret knowledge is the essence of cool.
This one has 135mm rear spacing, so it could be built into a 26″ wheel for the Bontrager, or a 29er wheel for the Gravel Roadster. I like the Bontrager as it is, and I just geared up the Gravel Roadster with a derailleur and cassette.
So I have a hub that’s begging for a new bike to be built around it. Oops. Maybe a Legolas or Black Mountain Cycles cyclocross bike? A Jones doesn’t need this, since it comes with an eccentric bottom bracket that does the same thing. Those are all unlikely choices, since I already spent my discretionary funds on this hub… oops.
The other “oops” is that it was cut out of its wheel before the cog and lockring were removed. I figured I’d lace it to a rim, to get some leverage on the cog, but it’s going to be hard to weasel spokes past the cog and into the spoke holes in the first place.
I won’t keep the cog on there. I don’t think I can build a wheel without removing the cog, and I don’t use 1/8″ cogs, anyway. Or lockrings (the Rotafix Method is fine). So… what’s the best method to remove a cog from a hub, if you can’t use the rim for leverage?
I bought a used 7 speed set of bar-end shifters in preparation for gearing up the Gravel Roadster. I also got a nice set of clamp-on downtube shifters for the Ross at the same time, but realized that I don’t have a cassette-able wheel that will work with the 120mm spacing it has now, after 13 years as a fixed gear. The Kogswell singlespeed hub I’ve got on there is only suitable for fixed use (and offroad fixed, at that), because the nut (or something) makes it unpossible to remove a freewheel with our normal Earth tools.
I digress, but the gist is, “hey I might have zero single-geared bikes by the end of the summer.” Unlikely, but possible. I might do it just to freak myself out. I have an automatic Sachs two speed coaster brake wheel and a Sturmey-Archer S3X three speed fixed I can put on the Quickbeam in about four minutes (that’s half an hour in biketinker time).
Back to the matter at hand. I did indeed install the cassette and (just the right) shifter on the Gravel Roadster, and I rode it 10 miles with some friends from work, on their normal road loop (Lakeville, Stage Gulch, Adobe Rd). If we were to judge on tire size, I was the clear winner, with 54mm Big Apples, to their 25mm whatevers (volume increases by the cube, too, so… yeah). If we were to judge on usable gears, though, I was by far the loser. I had two chainrings, but no front mech (that’s English for “derailleur,” which is French for “derailer“), they were only 4 teeth apart, and of the nine cogs in back, I had maybe 5, since I could only get 4 clicks out of the indexing. The smallest cog (biggest gear), and the top three (easiest) cogs were unreachable with the shifter. My hardest available gear was about perfect for the ride leader’s pace, which was steady, just shy of brisk. The cassette is by no means a tourist’s friend, or a mountain bike cluster. It might even be a straight-block (it’s not). The limited range cog set is the funniest thing about the bike, even counting the Cyclone derailleur and the pink fenders. It is a roadster, though, not a jeep.
So I was rolling along Lakeville, getting parched on Stage Gulch and spinning out on Adobe Road, with cogs ranging from 13 to 18 teeth on a 32 tooth ring. About 72″ to 54″ of development, WHICH IS THE SAME RANGE I HAVE ON MY FIXED BIKES.
I had a good time, and my only embarrassment was failing to call out a black foam-wrapped 2×4 laying across the bike lane. “It looked like asphalt! I never ride with people! Ride fatter tires! Geez… ”
But. For all the fun, and the adequacy of the gear, it wasn’t working like it ought, which irks my OCD, and I don’t see the point of having shifters if they don’t give you more range than you can get with a dingle setup.
Why didn’t the Shimano 7 speed shifters give me a full derailleur’s swing of travel? My full friction Suntours on the Bontrager give me all 9 cogs. My friends on the RBW (Rivendell) list told me how to fix it (and more interestingly, why it was broken), which is a post for another day.
(I’m learning a bit from Paul McGowan, not just about musical reproduction, but about blog posting. Set the stage., String the punters along, and give ’em their money’s worth…) ;^)
