Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

Rory came over this morning and built the platform for a rack an upcoming bicycle.I used the lathe to make the piece of metal which the bag hooks onto.It centers the bag on the rack and is a slip fit over the 5/16″ rack tubing. I like his compound bends and lowered front stay formaking the bag sit flat even though the hooks sit a little below the bottom of the bag.

This afternoon I worked on my canti boss brazing fixture. It is built around a80/20extrusion using two of their stanchion holders. I make dummy axles on the lathe and asupport for the cantilever bosses using my new mini-mill.

The dummy axles are made from steel. There is a common spacer to adapt them to the 1″ diameter hole that is made from aluminum:

The canti boss holder is made from aluminum.I milled slots for holding the canti fixtures. I have a lot to learn about using the mill:

Here is the mill (a Sieg X2), it was a birthday gift to myself:

I’ve posted the rest of my photos (about 25 new ones)and added annotations to almost all of them. The best way to view them is to go to the gallery and click “Journal” on the style button in the upper right. Then you can see the photos with annotations.

Pass and Stow is the company making the productionporteur racks and bags. Their website is up.

It sounds like next years show is in Indianapolis. I’m sorry to hear that it has moved from the west coast, but I’m glad that others will get to see it.

alex

I took the train from Seattle to Portland on Thursday. The train was fast, comfortable, and worked great with my folding bike. I wandered around Portland on Thursday (visiting the expanded Clever Cycles was a highlight) and have been at the show since then.

I posted 177 photos on my smugmug site last night.

Yesterday was the Industry Day. It was really nice to have a lighter traffic day and it gave me a chance to meet and talk to many builders. I expect today to be super busy in contrast. As someone who is learning how to build it is really nice to have this open forum to meet builders and talk to them about bikes and not bikes.

I think that the bikes this year are generally better than last year. Some highlights:

Engin seatpost meets dynamo taillight in this custom seatpost from Bilenky. Nice idea, smart.

Rebolledo is building some really nice bikes. Good asthetics, nice designs. I hope to ride one someday, I think we’ll be hearing more from him. The builder and his wife are also incredibly nice people.

Sycip went for weird show bike stuff instead of practical. Disk brake on the crank instead of the wheel on this fixed gear.

Meeting Peter Weigle was definately a highlight of the trip. His booth was always busy, so it was hard to get good photos, but this bike is a stunner.

I expect this will be the buzz of the BOB list. Tony Pereira built this for BOB list member Jon Muellner. Big tires, cool detachable lowrider racks, really nice build. I bet Jon will love this bike. I feel guilty for seeing it at two shows when he hasn’t seen it yet.

A tied and soldered bike from Villin Cycles. I wonder how it’ll hold up. He says it was tons of work to mask and paint.

Frances brought this neat front loading cargo bike. Cable steered, nice design.

ANT brought this nice commuter. The racks are a little more beefied up than previous ANT bikes that I’ve seen, and I like the colors and asthetics.

Sweetpea has the nicest women’s bikes that I know of. In photos they look like normal bikes,in person you see that everything is perfectly scaled down.

This photo doesn’t do this bike justice,I’ll try to get another one today. Click for more details.

Neat belt drive Rohloff commuter from Curtlo.

Super cool porteur rack by Pass and Stow. It fits on most forks, has a great QR system for the optional bag, and lets you use panniers too. It’s a smart design, I hope we see more from them. I’ll update this post with purchasing info later on.

Lugged Ti bike from Bruce Gordon with a cool stem.

A new Rene Herse with integrated LED lighting, switch on top of the stem.

This just scratches the surface, there is a lot of great stuff here this year.

Many cyclists have heard that Sheldon Brown passed away this last weekend.

I only met Sheldon once (at the 2004 Interbike), but he’s been a constant and important part of the online cycling community for as long as I’ve been involved. I was getting serious about cycling in 1996 and that is around the time that he started his famous website and glossary (the glossary started in summer 1996). I didn’t like any of the books out there and ended up using some of his articles frequently when learning my way around a bike. I learned a lot from Sheldon’s website.He was very generous with his information and never asked for anything in return.

It’s an incredible loss.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Rack Building Basics entry, but I still have some in the queue.

Today’s photo series is about making the eyelets that connect the rack to the fork or frame. There are a couple of ways of doing this, but this series focuses on doing it with brazed in tabs made of flat stock. This is similar to how dropouts are made.

The first step is making a slot in the end of the tube for the tab. I draw the slot and then use a hacksaw and a thin file to make it:

Now we need to cut a piece of flat stock to fit. I purchased 3′ of 1″ wide 4130 which is perfect for this purpose. You only need to make a single cut. I use the tubing as a gauge to how wide it should be.

The tab is the same width as the tubing:

Brazing just the tab in is probably strong enough. Note that I filed the end of the tube to slope the tubing towards the tab:

I like to fill the whole end of the tube with a “plug” of brass. To do this you heat the whole end of the tube and draw the brass around below the tab. I’d do a few tests first and cut them apart to see how well you do at pulling the brass in. It is a bit hard to see in this photo, but the whole end of the tube has brass in it.

After removing the flux I doa little work with a round file (12″ round which is about 10mm or 3/8″ in diameter) to make a nice clean scallop. The tab has also been bent to match the angle needed for this rack:

A bolt hole is drilled and a file is used to ease off the edges:

A final photo showing where this tab is used on the rack. It connects the stays to the fork blades:

At the start of the entry I mentioned that there are other alternatives. A nice and easy one is to braze a piece of tubing perpendicular to the stay and run the bolt through it.5/16 x 0.035 tubing is a nice fit for an M5 bolt. This is an especially good idea if you need a spacer to clear part of the fork blade. In this example the tubing is extended on the inside so that the rack can clear the fork blade even if the fenders aren’t installed. This is from the first rack that I built:

Another option is to simply flatten the tubing in a vise and drill a hole through it. I think that this looks a little less refined, but it is strong. Sorry, I don’t have any photos of this approach.

This was taken after I collectedmy stuff from the BikeShack’s homebrew tasting benefit party on Sunday. It was a great event and raised a good amount of money for the Shack. They were broken into a few months ago and many of the valuable tools were stolen. Their rent also went up quite a bit recently. The benefit was raising money to help with both issues.

A pretty heavy full size cooler up front, three homebrew kegs (one mostly full, two mostly empty) in the trailer. Total load probably in the 100-150lb range.

I’m guessing that Bike Friday wouldn’t approve, but the setup handled great.

This load is nothing compared to Remi, Lee, and Kelly from point83 moving Remi by bike from Lynnwood to Roosevelt in the rain and snow. You can’t tell from this photo, but that is a full size mattress on the trailer closest to the house.

I’ve had a few chances recently where I’ve needed to figure out the right stem to buy for a bicycle. In the past I’ve always drawn out the existing stem on graph paper and then marked where I’d like my handlebars to be and used that to figure out what new stem would work. Here is an example:

In this case I was trying to figure out the right stem for my RB-T. I had a 9cm stem on there with a 96 degree angle. I wanted 2-3cm more rise and about 1cm more reach. So I graphed out the existing stem, then drew a point 2.5cm higher and 1cm farther out and figured out what would work. It turned out that an 11cm stem with a 17 degree angle worked well. The line shows the top of the headset, in both cases I used 3cm of spacers.

This works great, but computers can make things easier. I also wanted to figure out how to generate graphics on the fly from a webpage, so I made a new tool. Here is the same thing done with that tool:

It uses the word “spacers” but you can think “exposed quill” if you are working with quill stems. The default page shows how one might replace a Technomic style quill stem with one that has a little rise to have less exposed quill:

You can find the tool here:

http://alex.phred.org/stemchart/Default.aspx

It shows off my normal terrible design skills, but gets the job done.

When we moved to our current house I thought the basement was huge and would be a great place to work. 4 years later and feels crowded and out of control. For the past 6 months I’ve been thinking about different solutions to that problem.

My initial thoughts were to build a second building in our backyard. My original design was a garage because this seemed like it would make the most sense for house resale and I liked the roof top deck:

Christine was understandably upset about me taking over one third of the yard. The project would also be very expensive, and I wasn’t sure that a garage was necessarily the best shape.

Version 2 of this plan was still an outbuilding, but one with a smaller footprint and higher ceilings. The tall ceilings would give me plenty of storage (hanging bicycles from the ceiling) and the footprint would be large enough for me needs. It wouldn’t be huge, but it would be okay. That plan looked like this (in cut-away fashion):

Last weekend I made the bad (for me) discovery that the maximum building size without a permit was 120sqft, not 150sqft. 120sqft is really too small to be a good workshop. I’ve also been trying to simplify, and I needed to consider that building a new structure wasn’t really simplifying. This week I’ve been drawing my current basement in Visio to see if I can come up with a better layout.

I started by drawing only the bike part of the basement, but I realized that I needed to consider the whole basement to really make sense of what I have. Here is what I have now:

My real problem with the current basement isn’t the lack of square feet (it is around 450-500sqft), it is with the layout. I have it split into four major areas, two workshops (bicycles and woodworking), laundry, and storage. Both of the workshop areas are too small for the individual goals and they can’t easily be combined due to the layout of the basement. You can see that the bike area is tiny, I can hardly turn around if I have a bike setup on a stand. The bike area needs to be close to the back door for ventilation.

Last night I rotated the storage room by 90 degrees and came up with a much more workable plan:

The key thing here was combining my workshops into a single space. That space is 15ft x 17ft,plenty big for any of my projects. There are two posts in the way,but I can’t do too much about that. The storage room is slightly smaller but has about the same amount of shelf space. My stuff won’t clutter up the laundry area. Bike storage was moved out of the workshop area, reducing clutter there.

I’m excited about this plan. It’s not expensive (especially when compared to building a new structure) and should make the space much more useful. I’ll probably put some of my brazing projects on hold this winter to build out the space this way.

I made a Visiostencil with hanging bicycles and bicycles sitting on the floor for those who want to figure out their workshop space.

November is normally very wet in Seattle, but this weekend was dry and unseasonably warm (mid-50s). I spent much of it outside.

Saturday morning Christine and I started finishing the new doors that go out to the bedroom deck. This is a project that we put off for years and it is great to finally have new doors that open and close and that we can see through (the old doors had cracked seals in almost all of the windows). To protect them properly we had to seal the wood with polyurethane.

Saturday afternoon I took off on my bike for some errands. My first stop was Free Range Cycles where I saw Kathleen’s nice Jeff Lyon city bike and picked up a jewelry like but inexpensive Origin-8 stem. Her bike looked great, I was at the Seattle Bike Expo when he delivered the frame to her and it was great to see it all put together. I liked his headlight mount and thought Kathleen’s use of an old purse as a saddlebag was cool too. I was also really happy with the bargain that is an Origin-8 stem, no $30 stem should look this nice. They come in a variety of lengths and angles and I expect that I’ll use them again.

After Free Range I headed over to Alistair’s house where we nice conversations (as always) about bikes and other matters. On my way I stopped at the View Ridge PCC and discovered that they now carry Ten Spoon Winery from Missoula, MT. I met the owners of the winery last year at my friend David’s wedding, he served their wine and I went over to the winery to buy it for him. The cherry wine is dry (not sweet like most non-grape wines) and was really complex, I look forward to opening this bottle.

(I love this photo because we only see bikes on the road…the cars are on the sidelines)

This morning I woke up nice and early and met up with about 20 members of point83 for a breakfast ride. We met at Top Pot Doughnuts, then rode downtown and across I90 to Mercer Island. We spent a long time there in “Waffle Park” enjoying real and fake bacon and some nice beverages before riding back to Capital Hill for another breakfast. I tore off before the final breakfast and rode back to the U District to meet Christine for breakfast at one of our local places.

After my third breakfast of the day I went over to the Bike Shack to hang out and work on the RB-T. It got some shiny new stainless fenders and I checked out Lee’s huge Pugsley wheels and helped some folks. The Bike Shack is a fun place and I think I’ll try to swing by more frequently. I left them my old SKS fenders and picked up some MKS Sneaker Pedals to try out.

This evening Christine and I walked down to the Neptune (movie theater) to see Into the Wild. I read this book non-stop when I first picked it up, it is a very consuming story. The movie was similar. It’s interesting that I remembered all of the details the Alaskan part of Alexander Supertramp’s journey, but had forgetten the two years that led up to it. I’ll have to read the book again. Walking down to the Neptune and back was refreshing too, I always forget about how walkable our neighborhood is. I’m quick to jump on the bike when I’m solo and probably too quick to jump in the car when I’m with Christine.

I wish all weekends could be this nice. Got stuff done, had fun with friends,and got in a few miles on the bike.

Two years ago my Bridgestone RB-T was my daily commuter. I took it apart (needed the parts for other bikes) when I got the Kogswell P/R. I loved the RB-T though, it was one of my best riding bikes.

Two months ago John Speare offered me a low trail (high rake) steel fork for the RB-T. I jumped on it, pulled the frame out of storage, added a few more of my own brazeons and then sent the frame, fork, and one of my racks off to powder coating. They came back on Tuesday and I finished assembling the bike last night.

It’s great. Really really great. Like meeting up with an old friend who you haven’t seen in a long time.

Typical Alex build — Nitto Noodle bars, wide range double drivetrain, canti brakes, fenders, front rack. Some details will change (rear tire, stem, headlight),but the photo gives you the idea.