Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for almost 10 years and have been working on the same campus for 12 years.I thought I had explored all of the good options for my bike commute home.

On Tuesday I was heading towards the intersection of 140th and 40th where I always turn right and thought “let’s see if the dead end street ahead is really a dead end”. I climbed a short but steep hill and saw a sign telling me that there were no options forward but three driveways. I kept going and found a little side path between two houses and out to 134th.

It was a nice way home for a muddy day when my favorite route is a bit slick. I won’t ride it every day, but I’ll probably ride it a couple of times a month.

Having lots of options keeps my daily commute fresh. My mixed-modal commute gives me lots of options, from taking the bus the whole way to a 25 mile ride over I90 or the Burke Gilman Trail. This new route is another variation on my favorite — roughly7 miles of riding followed by a 10 minute bus ride and another 3 miles of riding. I tried to count my commute routes yesterday, but realized that there are dozens or hundreds of variations that I take depending on my mood, the weather, traffic, and the season. Lots of bus, no bus, or some bus. Lots of dirt, no dirt, or just a short dirt cut through like this one. Going home via shopping to pick up groceries for dinner or riding home through old residential neighborhoods and enjoying the well landscaped yards. Every day is new.

How do you keep your commute fresh?

Racks

Andre and Lee visited a few weeks ago to build a couple of porteur racks. They were finished a few weeks later. Andre’s rack is for a 700C Kogswell P/R fork which he installed onto a Surly Long Haul Trucker. Lee built a rack for his Surly Pugsley.

Andre’s rack on the Kogswell fork:

Lee looking Surly on his Pugsley with the porteur rack (there is also one of me riding the bike):

Head shot of the Pugsley rack showing it’s asymmetric design (remember, the dropouts are not centered):

The Pugs handles pretty well with the big load, those 4″ tires have a lot of pneumatic trail. On the same day Andre proved that the Pugsley tires don’t fit onto standard 559mm rims (even Sun Doublewide) — they require a rim with a deep drop section.

Lathe project for the aquarium

We have a moderately large (60 gallon) planted aquarium in our living room. For a long time I’ve wanted a way to watch the water temp as we fill the aquarium. Our normal method involved one person adjusting the valves on the sink and the other feeling the water coming out of a hose 25′ away.

I used the lathe to make this simple aluminum tube with hose barbs at each end. A liquid crystal thermometer is stuck onto it. It gives instant reading of the fill water temp and didn’t take long to make. This photo isn’t great, but the thermometer reads 76 degrees (the green block in the middle).

And back to Racks…

Finally a picture of how I jigged a Rene Herse style fork crown mount while brazing. This went onto the rack for my Pass and Stow bag that I recently blogged about. A Kant Klamp is clamping the U shaped piece to a bit of flat stock, and that is leaning in the vise.

One of the coolest booths for me at NAHBS 2008 was from Pass and Stow. Matt Feeney has designed a nice porteur rack that can fit on almost any fork and which has a good size platform (not huge, not tiny) and which can hold panniers too. He also worked with Freight Bags to develop a bag for the rack, and came up with a really clever attachment system based on “Lift the Dot” fasteners.

I bought one of the bags that was at the show as soon as I could. It arrived on Saturday and I quickly assembled this rack for it:

It looks a lot like most of the racks that I’ve made. It has one unique feature, which are the lift the dot studs on the bottom of the rack. There are four for them, one for each corner of the bag. The bag has four matching mounts and they click together like this:

This mounting system makes it very easy to install and remove the bag. It is a big improvement from bungie cords.

The bag itself is wonderful for commuting. It is large, much larger than a Ostrich or Berthoud bag. It is built like a messenger bag with a waterproof liner on the inside and a rough Cordura fabric on the outside. There is one large main pocket and a smaller front pocket that secures with velcro. The shoulder strap is made of seatbelt webbing and the bag is comfortable to wear as a messenger bag even with it’s unique proportions.

A cool feature that I missed at the show are “long flap” straps like the ones on a Carradice. This lets you overstuff the bag and ride with it wide open while having a secure load. I’m sure this will come in handy when stopping by the grocery store after commuting home.

There are compression straps on the side which let you cinch down the bag when it isn’t full. This is how it looks with my normal load:

The bag is a little wide for 42cm drop bars (I doubt that it was designed with drop bars in mind), but the width makes it possible for my (smallish) laptop to fit. I think it will be a more comfortable fit with 44cm drop bars and may switch.

I consider this rack a “prototype” because I experimented with a few things on it. I tried two different methods of making brazeons for the “Lift the Dot” studs. The studs themselves are threaded #8-32 with brass (pretty soft) bolts. The better mount that I made for them just consisted of a very short section of 1/4″ x 0.058″ tubing mitered and brazed to the bottom of the rack. After brazing I drilled out the center with a #29 drill bit and tapped for the #8-32 bolt. I also tried drilling 1/4″ holes in the rack and using a longer section of the 1/4″ x 0.058″ tubing, but that was fussier to keep aligned and required more work.

I also played with different methods of attaching the rack to the frame. I made a lug for the left stay by drilling out the center of 3/8″ steel rod to a 5/16″ hole (the same diameter as my rack tubing). I then filed down a tab to mount to the frame. My brazing on this is pretty ugly, but the lug looks nice and wasn’t hard to make. I think I’ll do it again:

I copied the Rene Herse fork crown mount and I’m pretty happy with how that came out:

That is a 180 degree half circle of 5/16″ x 0.035″ tubing. Mitered at the halfway point is another section of 5/16″ x 0.028″ and a M6 stud (long bolt with the head cut off) is brazed into that sleeve.

The backstop on the rack is brazed onto the back of the rack instead of the top, which gives it kind of a nice flow. It is a bit annoying to get all of the bends to line up correctly though, and my backstop isn’t exactly square with the rack. It’s fine for a prototype:

Great bag, good enough rack. You can order the bags through Matt and Pass and Stow.

Most blog readers probably know that I host/run bikelist.org, phred.org, and many of the bicycle-related mailing lists associated with them such as Internet-BOB, Framebuilders, and Touring. Many years ago I wrote a crude system for searching the archives. It is based on Index Server and IIS and has many limitations such as not knowing what a message thread is, being difficult to backup, and frequently breaking. It was time to rewrite it.

About 3 years ago I started writing a new archival system based on SQL Server and their full text indexing system. I’d work on the new archives for one or two weeks worth of bus rides, then put the project away and ignore it for a year. Amazingly I did make actual progress working this way. For the past two weeks I’ve been putting the final touches on the system. You can see it live at http://search.bikelist.org/beta.

The goals of the new system are:

• Having agood schema that can properly represent discussions instead of just single messages.A thread is all displayed as a single page to make it easier to get context.
• Using an easier platform to innovate on. With the new system it won’t be hard to add features such as posting through the web interface (that isn’t there yet, but likely will be in the next year or so).
• Having a much nicer interface.

Ultimately the goal is to have a clean, simple, fast system for finding all of the great content that has been posted to these lists in the last 5-15 years. I still have a small amount of work to do completely replacing the old system, but I wanted to setup a preview so that people could see how it looks and provide feedback. The internet-BOB and framebuilders lists are being loaded into the system today,so there is a lot of content to explore. Please leave comments here or send me email telling me what you think.

A fun side effect of rewriting the archives is that I often get side tracked by all of the interesting old messages out there.

I know the calendar says spring starts in about a month, but it feels like spring has already sprung in Seattle.

A young sunset on tonight’s ride home (the long way of course, we don’t get many warm sunny days in Feb in Seattle!):

The views from Queen Anne looking towards Magnolia and the Olympic Mountains on Sunday morning:

The photos don’t tell you how warm it is, but it’s been in the upper 50s. The mountains look inviting for some early season cycling or late season xc skiing.

NAHBS wasn’t my only destination in Portland last weekend. On Saturday Christine drove down from Seattle and we met up with our friends Nate and Sam to head up for a weekend of snow on Mt Hood. We had a great mix of cross-country skiing (Trillium Lake), downhill skiing/snowboarding (Timberline), board games (Scrabble), and cooking (salmon one night, chili the next, waking up to omlettes and oatmeal).

Timberline was a great ski area for a barely sorta intermediate snowboarder such as myself. The green runs were too slow, but the blue ones were perfect and long. The ski was grey with a thin band of orange letting you see all the way down towards Bend.

The lodge is probably cooler than any other ski lodge in North America:

The Trillium Lake trail had the right mix of hilly and flat terrain and enough stuff to explore. I’m still figuring out this xc ski stuff and had to walk down and up the first hill, but Christine did it all the right way on her skis. The loop is around 4.5 miles. Portlanders are lucky to have so much great snow all about an hour away from the city by car.

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.