Alex Wetmore is always busy with something...

A little bit of progress on everything

AlexWetmore — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:38:00 GMT

I have nothing finished to show, but I have progress on the deck, cargo bike, and my bicycle jig.

The deck is half done. We were hoping to finish it this weekend but the 90F weather kept us off of the roof. We're also waiting on 5 more boards to be delivered. The new decking is Tigerwood (from Ecohaus) and I really like how it looks so far. We're using hidden fasteners called EB-TY. It took us a little while to figure out the best way to build the deck (especially because we are doing it in sections so that it can be disassembled), but now it is going pretty fast. Hopefully we can finish it up next weekend.

I'm embarrassed to show these photos of the cargo bike and fixture in progress because they show how much of a slob I can be about my workspace. The basement is a disaster, but I never feel like stopping work to tidy up.

The CAD drawing has been updated. There are a few changes and I switched the drawing to much easier to work with software (TurboCAD, I was using QCad).

/P>

Real progress on the cargo bike is occuring on two fronts. The first is building tooling that will be used on any frames that I built. I have most of the front triangle fixture completed. I'm building my fixture around a milling table that is 9 inches by 36 inches with 3 T-Slots running the length of the table. This table is accurately machined flat (not as perfectly as a surface plate, but well enough for bicycle frames) so I can also use it as an alignment table. Everything will be modular so that I can use the same base for building forks, rear triangles and other things.

Here is the table setup as a front triangle jig:

The bars under the seat tube and head tube are made from pieces of 80/20. They have T-slots in them too and are connected to the table using some brackets that I made. The brackets connect to the 80/20 using T-Nuts that 80/20 sells and to the T-Nuts for the milling table. The milling table T-Nuts are setup for 1/2-30 bolts that are huge, but I bought some reducing bushings from McMaster-Carr that let me use smaller bolts. I can adjust them to any angle (using a protractor to check the angle) and then lock them into plate.

The tubing is held in these towers which are also primarily 80/20 with tube holding cones that I made on the lathe. I got the idea for these towers from a bicycle jig on Instructables, but changed the setup to be height adjustable. I shouldn't need to adjust it once the whole thing is dialed in.

The bottom bracket is held in place with a vertical post and cones which sit on it. This is sort of an exploded view, with the top cone loosened. Everything is clamped in place with two clamping collars.

The other progress is on the cargo bike itself. As you can see in the first photo the donor frame has had it's paint stripped (where I need to braze to it) and the headtube and downtube have been cut off.

The cargo tube on the cargo bike has some really tricky mitering. I built a fixture to do this miter (and others) on the lathe. This is what the mitering fixture looks like: (I'll take some photos of it in use next time I'm using it).

It mounts to a T-Slot in the lathe's compound slide. I can set the angle to on the compound slide to my miter angle and then use a hole saw to make the cuts. That block was made on the lathe and boring a 1.75" hole took a long time. I'll be able to use it for other tubing sizes with some reducing bushings that I need to make. The mitering fixture works really well, but I need to tweak it a bit to get it better centered. Right now the miters are about 1mm off of center.

In that photo you can also see one of my test joints (I've made three of these and cut the other two apart). I'm pretty happy with the brass penetration that I'm getting, but the brazing looks a little sloppy and will require cleanup work. I'm getting better with practice, these big joints are a lot different than the little ones that I make for racks.

The joint is neat because the smaller tube completely pierces the larger one. When looking at it from the end you can see light coming around the smaller tube:

Hiking in Salt Lake City

AlexWetmore — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:29:00 GMT

After my couple of days in Spokane I visited Salt Lake City and Tuscarora, NV with my mom (who lives in DC). That was a great trip and I'll write about Tuscarora in a future blog post.

I was more impressed with Salt Lake City than I expected to be. The city itself wasn't too attractive to me, with huge superblocks downtown and a what seemed like car centric shopping areas that we farther than walking distance from most housing (even in the Sugar House District). It was flat and compact though, which would make it great for bike based life.

What I was really impressed with was the complete lack of suburbs because the city is literally right next to the mountains. In 10 minutes I could drive from the Sugar House District to Mill Creek Canyon (which appeared to offer the closest hiking) and get in a hike. My flight out was hours later than my mother's, so on my last day I did exactly that. I bid farewell to my mom after breakfast and headed east towards the mountains. I parked the car around 10am.

I did a loop where I started going up Thaynes Canyon. The hike up was in moderately dense forest right up a canyon. Not much in the way of views, but lots of climbing and it felt good to be exerting myself after a few days in the car. When I hit snow (yes, I hiked to the snow line 15 minutes from downtown SLC in June) I turned around and took a spur trail trying to find better views.

The spur that I found hit the jackpot. There were great views across Mill Canyon to the mountains on the other side. I hooked up with Desolation Trail and was able to take that all the way back to the car.

By 12:30 I was back in town eating lunch and enjoying a beer. At 2pm I was at the airport getting ready to fly back to Seattle.

I'm always jealous of my friends in Olympia and Spokane because they have great rural road cycling just minutes (by bicycle!) from their urban houses. Now I'm jealous of Salt Lake City for having great hiking and mountain biking so close into town as well.

Saturday morning by bicycle

AlexWetmore — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Last Saturday was my favorite kind of Seattle Saturday morning.

I left the house around 8:30 armed with a moderate sized shopping list and a bike trailer. In the next three hours I visited an interesting garage sale (noted because they listed a lathe in their ad) where I bought some useful tools at reasonable prices. As I biked down Stone Way I found this interesting cargo bike hanging out by a clothing shop. I'd noticed it before, but this was the first time that I got to stop and really check it out. It's somewhat similar to the cycletruck that I'm building:

Onto the hardware stores where I bought fasteners for my frame jig and the deck that we are building off of our bedroom. Seattle is blessed with some great hardware stores including Stone Way Hardware and Hardwicks, both of which I visited on Saturday. Stone Way Hardware was absent it's bike rack, I found out that it had been knocked off of the sidewalk during a car accident. I emailed the city and they said it would be fixed in a month or so.

My final stop on the ride was the farmer's market. There I ran into a few friends and bought some fresh salmon, pork and steak for Christine, fresh eggs, strawberries (Seattle has the best strawberries anywhere, even in an off season like this one), salad makings, and of course a pastry.

This is what the trailer looked like when I got home (after unloading most of the pershables...but I had to put the strawberries back in for the photo). This would be a good load for the cycletruck once I'm done with it.

Unloaded it and made my normal Saturday morning omelette. In the afternoon Alistair Spence stopped by for a quick visit and I made some progress on the cycletruck and frame jig. In the evening Christine and I went for a nice dinner and visited yet more hardware stores picking up the last items for our deck. I wish I could have relaxing but busy days like this every day of my life.

Badger Lake S24O -- Spokane

AlexWetmore — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:47:00 GMT

I'm visiting with John Speare for a couple of days and last night we did one of his favorite S24O's out to Badger Lake. It's a great ride, with the way out having a mix of gravel and paved rail trails and old dirt/grass roads and the way back having other dirt/grass roads and a nice just barely downhill descent back into town. A tailwind and tiny descent really makes one feel fast. The climb back up to South Hills along some unnamed dirt trails makes you feel slow again.

We passed through lots of neat scenery and some of the normal long straight rail trail stuff. We passed through Turnbill Wildlife Reserve which had nice ponds and lots of birds.

The camping was nice. Quiet, good views of the lake, good places to hang hammocks. It's one of those places that makes you glad to have a hammock...I didn't see any good spots for a tent.

Now we're prepping for the 6pm BBQ. If you live in Spokane then stop by at John's (apparently the bike folks know where it's at).

Tomorrow I'm off to Tuscarora Pottery School in Tuscarora, NV and hanging out with my Mom.

More pictures.

Deck (or lack thereof)

AlexWetmore — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:11:00 GMT

We're replacing the roof deck that is off of our bedroom. It's about 15 years old and most the cedar was starting to rot away. This blog entry is mostly to show that I'm sometimes busy with something that isn't a bicycle.

This is what it looked like when we bought the house:

Removing the deck might end up being almost as much work as putting the new one in. You can't see them too well, but there are 3 planters on the left. The middle one was about 4 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 2 feet high. It was full of golden bamboo which had become incredibly root bound. I cut (with a Sawzall) the soil up into cubic foot chunks with the bamboo still intact. The roots were so intertwined that this wore out 3 or 4 Sawzall blades. That took hours. We sidewalk recycled the bamboo and kept the plants from the other two planters.

Once we got those planters off and the built in seating that went 1/2 way around the deck we were able to get the decking itself off. That went reasonably quickly. Many of the sleepers were rotten through and you could just pry the boards apart and have the screws pop out.

This is what the remains looked like down below in the back yard. We had to be careful not to take out our neighbor's cable when dropping lumber.

And here is our clean roof:

We're talking to a roofer to make sure that our roof is in good shape before building the new deck. We'll be building the new deck in 4 sections so that it can be removed if we do need to work on the roof later. The decking itself is ordered, we went with Tigerwood from the Environmental Home Center.

We love our roof deck. It doesn't get too much shade and is great for container gardening. The cats liked it too.

My new bike project -- Cargo Bike

AlexWetmore — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:34:00 GMT

A year or two ago I drew up this design for a 20" front, 26" rear wheeled cargo bike and posted about it on this blog. This basic design is often called a cycletruck after the classic Schwinn sold around WW2.

The idea is that a smaller front wheel leaves more space for a big rack over the front wheel. The nice thing about this design is that the wheelbase is normal (so I can easily store the bike), but it has a pretty large hauling capacity. James Black extended this design in his cycle truck (built by David Wilson) by using a large boom over the front wheel to support the rack and 20" wheels front and rear to allow for a low rear rack too. His cycle truck is probably the best of the compact cargo bike designs that I've studied or ridden.

One of my planned brazing projects has been to build a cycletruck of my own. I wanted to keep it simple, so I'm starting with a donor MTB frame. Yesterday I was going by Recycled Cycles and found the perfect frame on their free rack -- a ~1990 Trek 800 in my size. To most people this is pretty junky, but for this project it's exactly what I needed. The tubing is unbutted, so I can cut off the head tube and braze on a new one without worrying about where the tubing gets thin. It looks like it has already lived a good life, so I don't feel bad chopping it up. I also have an old Bike Friday 20" fork that will work nicely for the front wheel.

Here is the CAD drawing of what I plan on doing to it (click for big if you want to read dimensions):

The plan is to braze on a new head tube which is longer and steeper (73 degrees vs the 71 degree HTA on the bike today). Then I'll run a 1 3/4" x 0.058" tube from the seat tube, around the head tube, and sticking out over the front of the bike. The original downtube will miter into this (or I'll make a new downtube that goes from the BB to the base of the head tube). A roughly 18" by 20" rack made of 1/2" tubing will sit over the front wheel.

It'll be challenging for me, I haven't done anything on this scale before. A few of the tricky bits are going to be making a nice through hole in that 1 3/4" tube for the head tube and fixturing it to keep the frame well aligned during the brazing process. I'll need to build tooling for some of that and plan on documenting my progress as I go. I have an aggressive goal of having this finished by the July 4th Cargo Bike Ride, but if I miss that target I won't be surprised or feel too bad.

What shows up on a Cargo Bike Ride?

AlexWetmore — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:12:00 GMT

I've blogged about many of the Seattle Cargo Bike Rides. They happen on holidays and usually involve 20-30 people loading up their bikes with BBQ equipment, food, and beverages and heading out to a park for an enjoyable afternoon. They happen rain or shine, winter or summer. Yesterday was the Second Annual Memorial Day Jamboree, organized by Ro.

When this ride started it was almost all XtraCycles. Last year as a joke I brought a second bike with me (in a trailer) to have an "extra cycle" since I didn't have an XtraCycle. In the last year the ride has diversified. There are more normal bikes and more varied cargo bikes. Here are some of the things that were on the ride.

Porteur/basket bikes:

Ro's photo is a nice transition into the trailered bikes:

Then you get into the big cargo bikes:

Rounding out the collection there are a variety of "more normal" bikes and some fun bikes such as this really pretty tallbike:

I'm looking forward to the next one on July 4th. The people make the ride and the Cargo Bike rides always have a great group of folks show up.

Seattle Framebuilding Chat

AlexWetmore — Sun, 25 May 2008 15:53:00 GMT

(photo by Alistair Spence, from his flickr site)

A couple of weeks ago I posted a message on the framebuilders list inviting amateur and hobbyist builders to come over to my house for some beers, chips, and to talk about building bikes. Yesterday was the day and Alistair Spence, Dan Boxer, Joe Dube, Mark Bulgier, Eric Bailey, Colin Stevens (who helped friends move by bike earlier in the day) and myself met up at my house. A couple of others were interested, but couldn't make it this month.

Mark brought a bucket full of lugs (sadly I didn't take a photo) which we spread out on the table and which triggered a lot of conversation. He also had a couple of cut apart joints from some of his earlier bikes. Eric brought two forks and racks that he had been working on. Dan rode over on a bike that he had built, and Alistair had his highly modified Rivendell Porteur. I showed a bottom bracket post that I was building for my alignment table. Joe and Mark brought a lot of interesting stories about welding and we talked about Ti, brazing, lugs, dropouts and lots of other things.

Almost 5 hours, 15 or so beers, a bag of chips, much cheese and hummus later we parted ways. Everyone had a good time and we agreed to do it again in August. We're going to rotate shops and will meet at Joe's next time. Seattle isn't Portland when it comes to the number of people building frames, but there is still a lot of interesting stuff going on here. By getting to know each other I think we'll all be able to better share knowledge and develop our craft.

Happy Multi-Modal Commute Day

AlexWetmore — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:56:00 GMT

Today is Bike to Work Day in Seattle. However I didn't bike to work. I did my normal commute: bike about 3 miles to a bus stop, bus about 10 miles to a transit center, then bike another 1/2 mile or so to my office. I will be biking home over I90, about 22 miles. Yesterday I did the same commute in the morning, but rode 10 miles in the evening, then hopped on my employers Bike Shuttle to get across the 520 bridge (that bridge is what makes my bike commute a minimum of 22 miles instead of the 12 mile route that cars can drive).

The emphasis on Bike to Work Day is to get individuals excited about bicycle commuting. Mixed bike/transit commutes are probably the best way to do that because they allow you to phase in bike use. Start with a short bike and a longer bus ride and slowly replace more of your bus ride with more bike. Many commuters will probably find some hybrid (as I have) that has the right balance of bike and bus. A friend at work has been using this successfully during the last two weeks and has gone from biking 3 miles a couple of weeks ago to riding 25 miles into work this morning. It'll be his longest bike ride in many years.

The bus also allows me to keep my commute varied and interesting. There are about 10 different bike/bus routes that I use on a regular basis depending on my mood, the weather, and how quickly I need to get home. I rarely do the same route twice in one week.

The bus doesn't have to be the only option. Biking to a friends house and then carpooling can be an effective way to carpool with a friend who doesn't live next door. Using the train or ferry as part of your commute is a multi-modal option. If you live on top of a steep hill it might make sense to drive to the bottom with your bike and then ride in from there.

Up in smoke

AlexWetmore — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:34:14 GMT

Yesterday we had some friends over for dinner and put on a CD. A couple of minutes later the stereo let out a quiet pop and a large cloud of nasty dark blue smoke. It was nasty stuff.

I turned everything off and figured out a backup plan for listening to music that evening. Today I investigated using my workshop speaker. The left, right, and center channels were fine. When I plugged the speaker into the rear left channel (one that I've never used!) my speaker didn't make any noise, but it did glow like a light bulb. Not good!

Took the speaker apart and luckily it is just a slow blow fuse that died. I can replace that.

I took the receiver apart. I'm stuck with two options:

Replace it. This is sad because it was expensive and only about 5 years old.
Remove the surround amp board and continue to use it as a 3-channel receiver. Since we don't do surround that is okay, but I'm not excited about having something that let out a poof of smoke running a few hours a day.

So I guess I'm taking the first option.

I hate that it's 50lbs of metal, much of it semi-rare copper, and it's going to end up in the trash. It probably died because somewhere there is a 2 cent Chinese capacitor that failed. This guy was built in 2002 when many products were made with these timebomb capacitors. NAD (the manufacturer) doesn't have parts anymore, so I can't just replace the failed amplifier board.

New Lathe

AlexWetmore — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:26:37 GMT

I bought a 1949 South Bend 9" lathe. It came with a cool but large and heavy (400-500lbs) stand built by the previous owner. We couldn't figure out a way to get it into my basement until the seller thought of hiring a friend with this very useful knuckle crane.

The crane carried threaded the lathe and stand through my back yard, rolled it down a ramp into my basement, and delivered the package into my basement doorway.

This is a photo of the old lathe sitting on top of the new lathe just to give a size comparsion. The old lathe could turn material up to 14" long, the new one has a 36" bed. The new one is much more rigid and can take much deeper cuts in material.

The stand that I bought with the lathe is very nice. It has a large stock rack on the back for holding metal, 9 drawers for holding tooling, and an open area below for larger items.

Zoos and Gardens in San Diego

AlexWetmore — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:10:21 GMT

We've had a weekend of exploring the zoos and gardens. On Friday we went to the Wild Animal Park which is about 30 miles outside of San Diego. It is run by the San Diego Zoo and I think it is what many people think of when they are thinking about the zoo. We took the Photo Safari through Africa which was expensive but well worth it, you really get up close with the animals. It brought back memories of visiting Zimbabwe as a child since most of the same animals were on display. Of course in Zimbabwe they weren't so easy to find.

On Saturday we went to Quail Botanical Gardens, also north of San Diego. The gardens are pretty large (35 acres) and have a number of areas specializing in things like native California plants, South African plants, Bamboo, a nice herb garden, and cacti. It was a nice garden with a lot to see and explore.

We spent this morning and early afternoon in Balboa Park, right in the middle of San Diego. In the morning we went through the zoo, starting with a gondola ride to the far end of the park and then walking back through the exhibits. The animal collection didn't have much overlap with the Wild Animal Park which made it nice to visit both of them. There were a lot of great birds on display in the zoo and we enjoyed the hippos and polar bears. Most of the animals were hiding in the shade because of the record heat, over 90F.

After the zoo we wandered around some other parts of Balboa Park, checking out the Museum of Photography (small but nice exhibits), the Botanical House (unlike Seattle they have to make shade here so that they don't cook the plants -- there is no glass to keep the heat in).

Lost in La Jolla

AlexWetmore — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:34:17 GMT

Christine dropped me off a little outside of Seaworld. My goal -- Ride to our hotel in La Jolla. I had no map, but it seemed like it would be easy since the bike routes were well marked and La Jolla was only about 8 miles north. As long as I kept the ocean on my left I'd be okay.

The ride started out pretty well. I followed a couple of other cyclists out to Pacific Beach, did some people watching on the very crowded beach (first hot day this spring/summer apparently). Just as I was getting sick of the thick crowds near the beach I found a bike route sign pointing to UCSD (near our hotel) and followed it.

I either missed a bike route sign or the sign took me up a road called La Jolla Mesa. I realized that I was lost when I had passed the same intersection at the top of La Jolla Mesa two or three times. It's really easy to lose sense of direction when surrounded by similar looking very expensive houses on roads with no right angles and fences tall enough to block the views of the ocean.

When I got to this view and could see my hotel hundreds of feet below I decided to check the maps available through my cell phone:

My hotel is down there, near the two white steeples in the upper right of the photo. The roads around me looked like this:

I was outside of Mount Soledad Park, about 800 feet above sea level. Not exactly what I had planned, but it was a fun descent down back into the La Jolla valley before the final climb up to my hotel. When I plotted my route out it looks like I went about 20 miles and climbed 1500'. Lots of great views, some good beach riding, and a fun climb. I was sad to check the maps, but I'd do it all again.

Balboa Park

AlexWetmore — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:03:19 GMT

San Diego has an interesting layout. The airport is right in the center of the city (literally a 10 minute bike ride from downtown). Balboa Park is also downtown. Standing at the corner of 6th and Laurel it feels like you can reach up and touch the landing gear on planes as they come in for a landing.

Balboa Park is huge. Not as large as Central Park in New York or Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, but larger than Discovery Park in Seattle. There are tons of museums, some nice gardens, a huge zoo, the velodrome, and lots of other stuff.

What brought me to Balboa Park this morning were trails. Flying into San Diego I was looking out of the airplane window and there were trails everywhere in the hills outside of the city. I don't have time on this trip to ride out to those trails, but I read that there were trails in Balboa Park too. I found them.

Folding bikes with 16" wheels aren't known for their offroad handling. These trails wouldn't be technical on any sort of mountain bike, or much of anything on a touring or cyclocross bike, but they were pretty challenging with 16" wheels. Trails here are much different than in Seattle -- you can look around and see where everything is instead of being buried in thick forest. The surface was sand instead of mud. The plants are flowering in early april, and falling might involve landing on a cactus. All good stuff.

If you are coming to San Diego and have a travel bike then I recommend bringing it. Having a few days of summer riding in the middle of Seattle's spring has been very refreshing. Tomorrow my wife arrives and we move farther up the coast -- I look forward to seeing what riding I find up there too.

San Diego Velodrome

AlexWetmore — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:48:21 GMT

I'm in San Diego this week for a conference and brought my folding bike. Yesterday morning I exploring town and the friendly folks at Mission Hill Bikes told me that the San Diego Velodrome has racing on Tuesday nights. I finished up work a bit early and headed over there.

The ride over turned into a bit of an adventure when my headlight decided that it no longer wanted to be attached to my handlebars and found it's way into a gutter. I pressed on in the twilight just pretending that I was extra invisible the cars. The velodrome itself was pretty hard to find too, but eventually I got there.

I got the see the last three races of the evening. The track here is a lot like at home -- much longer than normal and concrete. Lots of fixie folks hanging out at the track and having a couple of beers. On my way out asked the closest small group for directions (hoping to find a more direct way home). They suggested that I go out to the bar with them instead, so I piled into their van and five of us went to a place called the Whistle Stop. A few beers, a taco, fun conversation, and a little dancing later and it was already last call. Thankfully Joel and Amelia gave me a ride back into town and I got back into my hotel room right at 2am.

Mark, Javier, Amelia, Joel, Adam, Me

Cyclists and other folk in San Diego are very friendly. I'm really glad that I brought the bike (I almost didn't) and got to spend some time around town last night.