Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

Christine and I met her sister Janet and brother in law Paul in Jamaica for Thanksgiving.  We went to Negril, which is on the western tip of Jamaica and stayed at a small resort called Catcha Falling Star.

I didn’t know what to expect of Jamaica and actually didn’t do much research on it beforehand.  Christine organized the whole trip.  The day before leaving I looked up Catcha on tripadvisor and discovered that everyone who visited the place loved it.

We arrived on Sunday and found Paul and Janet in the line at customs.  We made it through and found our way to the taxi area where a van was waiting for us.  The drive out to Negril was long (about an hour and a half), but the scenery was interesting.  Buildings in coastal Jamaica seem to be designed for hurricanes and are either basic concrete structures or seem almost disposable.  There were many structures that appeared to be abandoned.  Poverty is severe in Jamaica (33% of the population is unemployed) and this was clearly visible when driving around.

Catcha Falling Star was wonderful.  We got in around noon, explored a little bit, and went for a swim.  It is on the West End Road section of Negril where there are ocean side cliffs instead of beaches.  Swimming at Catcha involves a short jump into the water (around 5′) and you are in 20′ deep water.  If you want more of an adventure there are places to jump from around 15′ and 20′ into the water.

After checking in we walked outside to visit the little grocery store across the street.  This was my first exposure to public roads in Jamaica and I was immediately identified as someone who might buy something.  A guy walked over to me, started talking to me (in a friendly manner, welcoming me to Jamaica, etc) and then tried to sell me a bracelet (which I refused, but only after he started trying to tie it onto my wrist).  After this experience I learned to be more forceful in saying no.  Everyone that we met in Jamaica was really friendly, but I was happier when they weren’t trying to sell me something.

During our time there we snorkeled a lot (a future blog entry will be written just on this subject), took a great day trip up to Mayfield Falls (another blog entry),ate at a few nice restaurants,and explored both the beach and swam around the west end cliffs.  Christine and I rented a scooter for the last couple of days and drove around the hills south of Negril and visited the beach on the far north.  It was a very relaxing trip.

Catcha was a really great place to stay while we were there.  The staff was very friendly and gave us (and all of the guests) a lot of personal attention.  On the first day everyone learned our names.  Every morning we’d walk down to the bar/restaurant and order breakfast from Ordia.  They’d deliver it to the little veranda/porch in the front of our room.  In the evenings we’d usually return from whatever we’d been doing for the day and would watch the sunset from our veranda.  After dark we’d head down to Ivan’s (the bar/restaurant) for dinner and to hang out.  The resort only has about 10-15 rooms so it was easy to get to know people there.  A guy named Kevin ran the bar in the evenings and kept the music flowing (often singing along) and everyone entertained.  I don’t normally hang out much at hotels, but this was a great experience.  Sunsets at Catcha were amazing.  Since it is on the western tip of the island you just look out on an expanse of sea as the sun descends.

We’ve been back in Seattle for a couple of days now.  Looking back on the trip I remember the great swimming, really friendly people, and nice food.  I don’t normally relax on vacations, but this trip was really relaxing.  I also remember the poverty and large divide between the haves and have nots.  While scootering around the hills we found a massive mansion with 4 or 5 luxury cars sunning themselves in a huge sea of manicured grass.  Half a mile away there were tiny shacks that were barely staying together, but which were lived in.  It was an odd extreme.  I’m also reminded of how hurricanes knock everything out and it is rebuilt time and time again.  Our hotel was rebuilt after Ivan and then lost all of their landscaping again after Dean.  It’s worth being persistent though, it really is a wonderful part of the world.  I look forward to visiting again.

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.

On Saturday morning Alistair and I met at my house and biked down to Seattle Amtrak station.  We were heading to Portland for the Oregon Bicycle Constructor’s Association show.  Taking bikes on Amtrak was great, Alistair just rolled his bike into the baggage car and I folded my Tikit it and stuck it in the baggage closet at the end of each car.  Tickets weren’t too expensive ($55 round trip per person, $10 for Alistair’s bike) and it was much more enjoyable than driving.

Saturday afternoon we went to Strawberry Cycles for a gathering of builders.  I talked to Dave Levy (TiCycles), Sacha White (Vanilla), John (a builder in Ashland), Tony Pereira, Andy Newlands (Strawberry) and many other interesting folks.

Joe Broach and his wife Rachel met up with us a few hours later and the four of us went to a good Arabic restaurant for dinner.  Joe and Rachel very nicely guided us back to the apartment where we were staying (I think we would have been able to find it, but not nearly as quickly) and we spent a couple of hours hanging out with our hosts before heading to bed.

In the morning we had a nice breakfast at The Paradox (a veggie breakfast place) with a few of Alistair’s friends, then met up with Joe to ride to the show.

The climb up to the show through Washington Park was great.  I’d love to have a climb like that in Seattle.  Alistair remarked that it was like Interlake only much much longer.  I’d agree.  Oddly (especially for bike centric Portland) we only saw one or two other cyclists heading up there, most people took the MAX (light rail).

We arrived at the show at about 11:30.  It was in a pretty small room and very tightly packed.  The lighting was pretty dim, so I didn’t take as many photos as I’d have liked.  Most of the day went by in a blur of talking to interesting folks and looking at great bikes, but here are some of the highlights.

Bike Friday was there showing off some really nicely made Tikit and other bikes as well as a custom tandem.  The bike that got the most interest was a very lightweight Bike Friday (15lbs) built by Rob English,but I was more attracted to the fillet brazed frame made by Eric (one of their brazers).  It has a little front rack,steel Wald fenders, and a cool homemade seatpost.  The tandem was also incredible, it just had a lot of small details and one off pieces.  I’ve met Bike Friday folks many times, but it is usually the sales force.  It was great to talk to the guys involved in manufacturing the bikes.  I think they have some of the more interesting jobs in the bike world considering how unique the designs are.

Tony Pereira was showing off a few new frames that hadn’t been painted yet.  I really liked the 650B Randonneuring bicycle.  It had a great custom twin plate crown, subtle manipulation of the chainstays to fit wide tires, and excellent workmanship.  I look forward to seeing this bike in person once it is built up.

Jeff Lyon was showing off a collection of road, cyclocross, and randoneeuring frames.  I really like his front racks, especially the one shown here that was made of 1/4″ tubing and chrome plated.  He also has the best headlight mounts out for his front racks.  Jeff is a great guy to talk to, I wish the show was a little less busy so that I could have spent a little more timing hanging out there.

Ahearne always has some interesting bikes.  At this show they had an unpainted bike with a porteur rack, Rohloff hub, and some interesting chainstays.  It was a really stout bike and would be great for dirt road touring.  They also had Joseph Ahearne’s personal camping bike complete with a Ti Spork headbadge, a collection of great racks, and a nice fork built for the Surly Pugsley wheels and tires.

The last builder that I’ll highlight is “m.a.p. cycles”.  Mitch is just starting out but has already built two impressive bikes.  I love the rack on his porteur, I just can’t imagine mapping out of all the twists and turns in the rack deck.  He also built a really nice mixte with a Tubus Fly-like (or maybe a modified Tubus Fly) rear rack.

I have dozens of additional photos, and they are mostly well tagged.

I don’t know if Oregon BCA will become an annual event, but I hope that it does.  I’d like to see it grow to include other NW builders from Washington, Idaho and Montana.  The Oregon/NW focus (compared to the international focus of NAHBS) seemed to allow a wider breadth of experience levels and exposed me to smaller builders that I’d never heard of.

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.

I’ve always thought that the Bike Friday Tikit should have an internal hub gear. The range with the derailleur is less than most 7sp and 8sp hub gears and the hub gear is cleaner and better protected from the environment, all good things on a commute oriented folder. I expect that Bike Friday released it with a derailleur because the hub gear would have added a couple of hundred dollars to the cost.

Yesterday I built a Tikit rear wheel with a SRAM S7 hub. It was probably the most annoying wheel that I’ve ever built…there are 36 very short spokes (around 6″ each) in a tiny little rim. A Park spoke wrench just fit between each of the spokes. It was very comforting to finish it. I chose the SRAM S7 over the Shimano Nexus 8 for a few reasons:

• A LBS (Aaron’s Bike Repair) stocks the SRAM S7 and spare parts. I’ve overhauled SRAM S7 hubs before and they are pretty easy to dismantle and put back together. I probably won’t need to, but it is nice to know that I can.
• The Nexus 8 is pretty hard to find right now (specifically the shifter is hard to find right now).
• The SRAM S7 has a similar gear range to the Nexus 8sp.
• I prefer the clickbox to the shifter cable arrangement on the Shimano Nexus hubs.

This morning I put the rest of the bike together:

The hub gear makes the bike look a lot cleaner. There is no derailleur hanging down low to pick up dirt and road grime. You might ask how I got away without a chain tensioner since the Tikit has vertical dropouts. The answer is that I was lucky — the stock 53t chainring and the SRAM 18t cog work perfectly with the chainstay length on this Tikit. They also give good gearing: 27″, 32″, 38″, 47″, 58″, 70″, 82″. I’d like something in the 60s between the 58 and 70, but this is good enough and the range is exactly what I wanted.

I bought the drum brake version of the hub and removed the stock V-brake. The drum brake should work well in this application and will allow the rim to last nearly forever.

I wanted to experiment with some other flat bars, so I ordered a pair of “Origin-8 Space Bars”. They are sort of a hybrid between Moustache bars and Albatross bars, hopefully it is a combo that works well for me. The make the folded bike smaller than drop bars and work more easily with the hub’s rotary shifter. They also have some rise,so I’ll probably need to cut down the stem mast a little bit.

The bike folds to about the same size as the stock Tikit:

I spent all day working on projects,so I didn’t get to give the new setup much of a test ride (just a few laps around the block). I’ll report back on how the bike works in this configuration. I think it’ll work very well.

Portland had a bicycle accident on Thursday that resulted from a right turning cement truck hitting a cyclist who was going straight in the bicycle lane. This has prompted a response from many of my favorite blogs.

Beth Hamon wrote a great piece questioning the use of bicycle lanes on very busy arterials. This resonated with me:

Striping West Burnside — one of Portland’s busiest streets — with a bike lane is a bad idea. Allowing bicyclists to occupy a driver’s blind spot (alongside the car) means they run the risk of getting hit if the driver doesn’t see them. This is not a question of fault. This is a question of poor planning that can and should be fixed. Lose the bike lane, post a lower speed limit and instruct bicyclists to *take the lane* in front of or behind the motor vehicle so that they can be seen. If this doesn’t work — either because cars and bikes won’t play nice there, or because West Burnside eventually becomes the higher-speed backdoor to Beaverton known as Cornell Road, then reconsider the function of such higher-volume, higher-speed roads. Bikes belong some places better than cars do. Cars belong some places better than bikes do. This isn’t rocket science. It’s planning, and until there are no more cars in the world that planning has to work both ways.

Portland is in a unique position (for a medium/large city in the US) of having bicycle lanes everywhere. Perhaps they have too many? Does it do a disservice to cyclists to try and isolate them from all car traffic? I’d argue that it does — cyclists need to understand how to safely get through intersections. Bike lanes don’t help here.

Kent Peterson followed up with an entry coining the term suicide slot:

If you look at Michael Bluejay’s spot (and I really hope I’ve convinced you to take the time to look at it), you’ll see that several of those ten common crashes involve the cyclist being where the driver isn’t looking and/or being in the driver’s blind spot. I call this the “suicide slot”, being to the right of a right turning car.

Now you may say “suicide slot” is a loaded term, that I’m blaming the victim, that the driver should see the cyclist. Well, we can talk about what drivers should do, but as near as I can tell not everybody does what they “should” do. So even even they “should” look to the right,I’m thinking some won’t. And if I’m off to their right anyway,well that strikes me as suicidal. But maybe it is a loaded term. Loaded like a gun. And like a gun, it can kill you.

A couple of months ago John Speare posted a photo of a great sign in Redmond that tries to warn about the Suicide Slot:

I like this sign. It is better to have the lanes properly stripped (or not there at all), but this gets across the message in a easy to understand graphic. I don’t think that having this sign everywhere would help, but having it at a few key intersections will pass along some education in an easy to digest form. I’d like to see this sign at Eastlake and Furhman.

At work we have an internal mailing list that cyclists communicate on. Yesterday someone posted a slide deck from New York City showing their new bike lane plan. It puts parked cars as a buffer between the bike lane and car traffic. This is a common practice in some parts of Europe too.

I don’t like this design. It assumes that there are no intersections.

My first observation when I see this graphic is that the bike lane just before 18th is lining up to put bicycles in the suicide slot to the left of left turning cars. My second observation is that bicycles are completely trapped if they want to turn right onto 19th.

The deck says that NYC solves this problem with bicycle only signals. That is a solution that doesn’t scale. When you start having roads with this design intersect other roads with the same design you end up with twice as many signals. For every car signal (straight, turn only in each direction) you end up with a bicycle signal.

It isn’t practical to isolate bicycles from cars in most situations. Bicycle Paths (like Seattle’s Burke Gilman Trail) work because they are generally located on rights of way that already had few intersections and where most of the remaining intersections are at different grades (the bike path passes above or below the road). That isn’t something that can be built along every road.

Drivers and cyclists need basic education on how to ride safely on the same roads. Bike lanes need to be striped to avoid the suicide slot. Speed limits need to be enforced so that 30mph arterials don’t turn into 50mph highways.

Ride safely out there.

Basics

Selecting tubing for a rack is an important first step in building a rack. The number of options is fairly limited based on weight and the accepted standards to work with things like pannier hooks. Selecting tubing sizes will also help you decide which bender to buy.

The three basic outside diameters to choose from are: 3/8″ (about 10mm), 5/16″ (about 8mm), and 1/4″ (about 6mm). There are two wall thicknesses that I’ve worked with: 0.028″ (about 0.7mm) and 0.035″ (about 0.9mm).

I made this spreadsheet to help figure it all out. For these three sizes of tubing and two wall thicknesses it provides the weight of a foot of tubing and the deflection when there is 10 pound load on a cantilevered beam. That second measurement isn’t specifically useful by itself, but it gives an idea of the stiffness of the tubing. I hope that I got the deflection math correct, I didn’t do a test to verify it.

There are some interesting properties to note:

• The 0.035″ wall thickness tube of one size is close to the weight of the 0.028″ wall thickness tube of the next size up.
• Outside diameter has a bigger influence on stiffness than the wall thickness, but both matter.
• 1/4″ OD tubing slips nicely into 5/16 x 0.35 tubing, and 5/16″ OD tubing slips nicely into 3/8 x 0.028 tubing. This is very handy to know when you are splicing two sections of tubing together.
• The heaviest tubing is over 4x stiffer than the lightest tubing, but less than twice as heavy.

Handlebar Bag Rack

A handlebar bag rack is designed to support the bottom of a handlebar bag. It is smaller than the bottom of the bag. The bag isn’t tightly connected to it in most cases, so the rack doesn’t need to be designed for high lateral loads. They connect to the fork blades at the mid-point or higher, so there aren’t long unsupported beams. As a result of these design parameters they can be made with fairly lightweight tubing. So 1/4″ x 0.028″ tubing everywhere is probably enough. Some of the classic French racks are made with even smaller tubing (4mm outside diameter).

A standard sized handlebar bag rack has a platform of about 4×7″ or 5×7″. There is one cross member at the middle of the platform and two stays going to the fork blades. For a 5×7″ platform with 8″ stays this gives us a total of (5*2)+(7*2)+5+(8*2)=45 linear inches of material. There will be a little more for the backstop and fork crown mount.

Using 1/4″ tubing we can build the basic rack (no backstop, no fork crown mount) in 4oz of tubing. Using 3/8 x 0.035″ tubing the rack would weigh 7.5oz, a pretty large weight gain since we don’t need the stiffness. Going with 5/16″ only adds an ounce,so that isn’t too big of a deal (especially if you don’t have 1/4″ tubing or bender).

Porteur Rack

A porteur rack is a much larger platform rack that is designed to have the load strapped directly to the rack. The rack is expected to work with loads of 50lbs or even more. The stays on the rack usually connect directly to the fork dropouts,so there is a longer unsupported span (from the fork dropout to the front of the rack).

On these racks lateral stiffness is important. We can get some lateral stiffness from smart design (good triangulation), but we also need to get some of it from the metal. The stays are over a foot long, and we wouldn’t want the rack to shift by an inch or more with a moderate side load (as you’d find when going around corners).

Porteur racks also have a lot more metal. I’ve been building them with 4′ rack circumference (this is a roughly 14″ by 10″ platform), 4 cross members (10″ each), and two staysper side (around 15″ each). That is about 148″ linear inches of metal. One made with 3/8 x 0.035″ tubing would have about 25oz (still under 2lbs) of steel.

You can optimize the weight be mixing and matching tubing. The circumference can be made with 3/8 x 0.028″ tubing and still handle most loads. 3/8″ x 0.035″ tubing makes sense on the stays to minimize side deflections. The cross members can probably be made with 5/16 x 0.028″ since they aren’t that long and each cross member doesn’t carry a lot of weight. By mixing and matching we can get the weight down to 21oz (4oz savings)without compromising the integrity of the rack.

Recommendations

• 1/4″ or 5/16″ for handlebar bag racks (5/16″ if you plan to zip tie a basket to the rack or carry heavier loads)
• 3/8″ for heavy duty porteur racks
• 5/16″ for cross members on porteur racks or lighter duty porteur racks

If I were starting out I think I’d get a 5/16″ tubing bender. 5/16″ is a good balance of being big enough to make moderate duty porteur racks and cargo racks (Bruce Gordon racks are 5/16″) and 5/16″ x 0.028″ is light enough to make a decent handlebar bag rack. The benders are cheaper too, a Ridgid 405 5/16″ bender is about $60, while the Ridgid 506 3/8″ and Swagelok 3/8″ benders are about $200ea (Ridgid also makes a cheaper 406 3/8″ bender, but I don’t know how well it performs with cromoly steel).

You can go too flexible. Rory and I built a handlebar bag rack for his bike out of 1/4 x 0.028″ tubing. The stays connect to the fork dropouts and the bag connects just to the rack. It works, but he says that it is pretty flexible with heavy loads. I think that we’d both use 5/16″ tubing if we were building it again. We’re going to build a couple of small porteur racks with 5/16″, and I’ll report back on how that works once they are done.

Tubing Sources

It’s hard to find tubing in these dimensions in the US. I know of two reliable sources, Aircraft Spruce and Dillsburg Metal. Aircraft Spruce has much easier ordering (you can order online), but Dillsburg is a bit cheaper, especially if you need high quantities.

I’m going to be away for about a week, so it’ll be a little while before the next entry. Leave comments or email me if you have any requests. I know this one didn’t have the interesting photos, next week we’ll be back to photo oriented entries.

I find the combo of vice grips (or other clamps) and spokes to be really useful for holding small brazeons in place. Today I installed mid-fork eyelets onto a fork, small guides for headlight cable routing, and a headlight mount.

Another favorite tool is the flat stainless stock that is used to secure Blackburn-style racks to bikes. This stuff is really handy for making temporary fixtures.

I used a fender stay here instead of an old spoke, but a spoke really is superior. Brass won’t stick to it and it bends more easily. These guides are cut for 1/4″ tubing, but you can also pull the rollers out of used chain.

Watch out for the vice grips, they can distort tubing pretty easily. Used with care they are very handy for temporary clamps.