Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

Most racks have some sort of cross member, straight tubing that goes across the rack platform. They are pretty easy to build.

One of the tricks is getting the two miters to be parallel to each other. I find it simplest to put some scrap metal in the miters and then eyeball them for parallel. You want to check early and often because you do want to be parallel when you have the tube the correct length. In this case you can see that I’m a little off:

It is important to clean the inside and outside of the metal before brazing.To clean the inside of the tubing I make a simple bit for the drill. This is a piece of 1/4″(or smaller)tubing with a slot cut in it to hold a small piece of shop cloth. Scraps of shop cloth are always somewhere on the workbench.

Support the tube in a vise and put the bit inside of it. The sand paper will remove any deposits on the metal and make for better joint.

Once you have the cross members cut, mitered, and cleanedyou need to lay them out. I find that it is best to number which position each one is in and draw alignment marks on the cross members and the rack. I measure to get even spacing across the rack, but use my eye to determine when they are parallel to each other and the sides of the rack. The rack platform may not be a true rectangle and it’s more important that everything look good than that everything is perfectly measured and square.

The rack is parallel to the ground and held in the vise after the last step. With everything laid out I tack each of the joints with a small blob of brass. I don’t use any clamps or fixtures for this, the cross members stay in place on their own. This isn’t the only possible option — Alistair likes to position the rack vertically and use clamps to prevent the stays from sliding down. Once everything is tacked I rotate the rack in the vise and make sure that the valley of each miter is pointing down. This lets me use gravity to flow the brass where I want it to go and to get the best fillet.

Once you’ve brazed everything on one side you flip the rack and do the other side.

In this entry I’ll show how I build the fork crown mount for a rack. This is the part that goes from theback of the rackthrough the fork crown.

On a rack that is designed for very heavy loads I would recommend connecting the rackto the fork crown using two stays, one over each fork blade. This single stay setup is not as good at resisting high lateral loads. It does work with almost everyfork though, where thetwo stay method only works with forks that have extra eyelets on thetops of the fork blades.

I don’t have a lathe, so I use a bolt as the threaded stud that runs through the fork crown. This is a M6 bolt that I’m removing the head from:

The bolt will be held inside some larger diameter tubing. First I need to cut the tubing square. Note that to make sure that it is square I need to check the cut in two orientations 90 degrees from each other.

This is an exploded view of what is going on. I have a 6mm (close to 1/4″) threaded stud that will be inserted into some 5/16 x 0.035″ tubing. This is then inserted into some 3/8 x 0.035″ tubing. The 3/8″ tubing is bent and will be brazed into the fork crown. The 5/16″ tubing is pulled out from the 3/8″ tubing in this view, but when brazed together the 3/8″ and 5/16″ tubing will be flush. This creates a nice face to sit against the fork’s crown.

Everything is loaded up with flux and ready for brazing:

A view after the three parts are brazed together.

Here is a shot showing how I hold the piece in place while brazing it to the back of the rack. I’m using vice grips on the rack and a piece of scrap metal (PCI slot cover from a PC) to hold the piece in place. I checked with a square to make sure that the threaded stud is square with the back of the rack.

Here I am checking the angle. The bike that this is going on has a 73 degree head tube angle, so the face of the fork crown is also 73 degrees. I want it to sit flat (or close to it), so I need to angle my mount at 17 degrees (73 + 17 = 90). I’m using a simple engineers protractor to check the angle. My reference is one of the stays on the rack. I’m a little shallow here, but that is okay. It will make the front of the rack slightly higher than the rear, and that is acceptable.

The other option for doing this is to mount the fork crown mount into a fork and then use a fixture to hold the rack in place. The advantage of this method is that you can see how everything will look before it is brazed together. Alistair designed this nice little jig out of a test tube holder for holding the rack in place while brazing. I like the jig, but find that things are a little more secure using my method. Give both a try and see what works best.

The fork crown mount is half brazed onto the rack. I flipped the rack over to finish the brazing on this side.

All done

This is mitering for a basic 90 degree joint with 3/8″ tubing.

The tube directly after cutting with a hacksaw. It’s a little messy:

Make a notch in the centerline of the tubing using a file or hacksaw. This keeps the file centered in the next step:

File. A handy hint is that a 12″ Nicholson bastard file has a 3/8″ diameter, so it makes a nice miter into 3/8″ tubing. A 10″ file works for 5/16″, a 8″ for 1/4″ tubing.

Once filed you have a miter, but it’s pretty ugly:

Clean up the inside of the miter with production cloth wrapped around a piece of tubing:

Then clean up the outside with production cloth:

Check the miter. It looks pretty good to me:

This will be the first in a multipart set of blog entries with some basic information on rack building. I’m going to start by discussing tools. If you have any requested subjects please let me know in the comments and I’ll concentrate on them in future entries. The next entry will be about mitering tubing. I don’t plan on doing any entries around the use of a brazing torch, I think that you should learn that hands on from another person who is skilled in brazing.

My existing toolkit already had some of what I needed, such as a good vise and a hacksaw. However I also needed to buy a number of more specialized tools such as files, clamps, and machinists squares.

My most used tool is the vise. It supports tubing when I’m cutting it, mitering it, and brazing it. I have a pretty basic Japanese made vise that has 4″ wide jaws. I haven’t found the need for anything bigger yet when building racks, but this one is probably too small for mitering larger tubing used in frames. I often clamp rack sized tubing directly into the jaws of the vise, but it is better to make tubing blocks. You can see a homemade behind the vise. I have my vise mounted in front of the workbench so that I can access it from three sides. Framebuilders often have a vise mounted on a pedestal for 360 degree access.

My torch kit started out as a Victor Superrange II, but I quickly replaced a number of the parts. It would have been cheaper to buy a kit from scratch. I use Oxy/Propane (Oxy/Acetylene is more common). My welding shop swapped the stock acetylene regulator for a propane one. Propane doesn’t burn as hot as acetylene, but it is hot enough for brazing. It’s nice being able to use the same fuel tank as my propane BBQ. My oxygen cylinder has a 55 cubic foot capacity and that seems to last me about 6 months (maybe10 racks?).

I’ve upgraded the hoses to the Smith Kevlar hoses (around $50) and replaced the torch with a smaller and lighter Victor J-28. I primarily use a W-1J tip when making racks.

A great early project is a torch stand. This one is made from pieces of a BMX frame that I found in the trash. The stand lets me keep the torch turned on when I need to put it down for a minute and also holds short pieces of brazing rod andmy striker.

A lot of small tools are involved in making racks. I laid out some of them on my workbench. From left to right we have:

• Drill and bits
• Tubing bender
• Clamps (Kant Klamps are the specific brand)
• Pliers
• Shop cloth or production cloth. This is sandpaper on a roll and 1″ or 1.5″ wide. I buy 80 grit shop cloth and a roll seems to last a long time. Enco has it pretty cheaply.
• Sharpies are really useful for marking on steel.
• Machinists squares in a couple of sizes are useful for keeping things square. Enco has a small kit for $20 with 4 sizes.
• Vise grips are useful for clamping fixtures.
• Round files are useful for mitering. More on this in a future entry.
• A welding magnet can also be useful for clamping.
• A center punch makes drilling holes in tubing much easier. You need to drill small vent holes in most of the tubes that you braze.
• Sitting under the center punch is a deburring tool. It cleans up the inside of tubing nicely after you cut it.
• Brazing flux and a flux brush.

You need to wear some sort of eye protection when brazing. These safety glasses are special in that they have didymium lenses with a flip-up #3 brazing lens. They are large enough to fit over my regular glasses (yup, I look like a dork with three pairs of lenses on my eyes). You can get them from Sundance Art Glass. Without didymium the flame and flux produce a bright orange sodium flare that is very difficult to see through. It makes it hard to see the underlying metal,which is necessary to know when the flux is getting hot enough (it turns glassy) or the steel is getting too hot (it turns orange). Here is an example without the glasses:

Can you see anything under that huge orange flame? I can’t. This is what happens when you put the glasses on:

Whoa. That tube is too hot.

The glasses are expensive and a luxury,but they are a really useful luxury. I think that they help my brazing quite a bit.

Kent, Mark and I met at the top of the I90 bridge this morning for some socializing and bike geeking. The toys of the day were my Bike Friday Tikit and Kent’s Dahon Curve. Mark brought along Jan Heine’s Alex Singer — normally one of the most interesting bikes of the bunch, but today it didn’t get much attention.

Kent’s Dahon is really nice. For $400 you get a bike which folds up to a tiny package (not as small as a Brompton, but smaller than the Tikit) and which rides nicely. Contrasting the Dahon and Tikit was fun. The Dahon is very simple in comparison. The fold isn’t as slick, but it is fast enough (Kent says it takes about a minute). The Dahon folds into a small package partially because it is a small bike to begin with — both Mark and I felt that it was undersized than us. Kent said that if you think about it as the fast alternative to walking then you’ll have the right mindset. I was impressed with the parts spec on the Dahon. For $400 it includes some nice features like Schwable Big Apple tires and a simple and effective Sturmey 3sp drivetrain.

Kent and Mark were impressed with the fast folding of the Tikit and Mark liked the riding position (which is pretty similar to my other bikes). The Tikit has some handlebar flex that I’m still working out, but once you get used to it the ride is pretty nice. The Tikit is closer to a normal bicycle in ride and fit, but it also has a much more complicated design and is much more expensive.

The ride also gave me a chance to try out my newest rack. I built a second rack for the Tikit that fits into the folded bike more nicely than my original design. There is clearance for the saddle to fit into the rack and it doesn’t get in the way of the rear tire when the bike is folded. I think that I came up with a solution that is asthetically pleasing and functional.

Currently phred.org/bikelist.org are run off of two servers, one running FreeBSD and one running Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003. We also have a file server for our house, so that is 3 computers powered on 24×7. The total power consumption for all three machines is around 400 watts, which costs us about $25/mo in electricity (“clean” hydro-powered electricity, but that is still a lot of energy).

This month I’m replacing all of those physical servers with a single PC. Using VMWare Server I canrun the operating systems from those three machines at the same time on a single computer. They’ll share a single set of disks, memory, and CPU. This one box will use about the same amount of power as any one of the previous machines.

It’s going okay so far. Last night I spent a lot of time trying to move the FreeBSD machine (phred.org) over to VMWare. This process is called P2V (physical to virtual). There are very good tools for doing this with Windows-based computers, but not much for FreeBSD. Here is what worked for me:

• Make a backup of the FreeBSD box.
• Get vdkand dd for windows.
• Use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a virtual disk that is at least as large as the disk in the FreeBSD machine.
• Move the FreeBSD machine’s drives to a Windows box with those tools. In my case this couldn’t be the machine that I run VMWare on because that machine runs 64-bit Windows and my FreeBSD drives use an old 3ware RAID controller which isn’t supported in 64-bit Windows. I used an old PC that is being retired.
• Mount the disk image created with vmware-vdiskmanager using vdk.
• Use dd to copy from the physical volume that contains the FreeBSD bits to the VMWare disk.
• Dismount the disk using vdk.
• Copy the .vmdk file to your VMWare box and mount it in a new VMWare image.

Hopefully someone finds this via a search engine and it is helpful to them.

If you see that phred.org or bikelist.org lists are down for periods of time in the next week or two this is why. I still have one more machine to move over.

I’m excited for the end results. The machines take up a good amount of space in the basement and a single machine is much easier to hide in a corner. Power consumption will be lower. It’ll be easier for me to build out test servers to experiment with. It makes backup and upgrades easier.

The old computers (some of which are only a couple of years old…all will run Windows XP and Office) are going to Global Technology Academy, a non-profit based out of Garfield High School. GTA sends local high school students around the world to setup computer labs in schools in developing countries. I’m excited about this non-profit because it gives Seattle students exposure to developing countries and gets the technology installed in useful ways instead of just dumping it.

On September 7th a cyclist named Bryce Lewis was killed in Seattle at the intersection of Eastlake and Furhman (heading north on Eastlake just before the University Bridge). The cyclist was going straight and a dump truck turned right across his path, dragging the cyclist for 25 feet.

Here is what the intersection looks like (thanks to the aerial photography of local.live.com):

The cyclist’s path is the orange line, the dump truck’s path is the blue line.

The city is not holding the dump truck driver responsible. Most cyclists are upset and think that the driver wasn’t looking and thus isclearly at fault. I personally hold the city responsible — the bike lanes should never have been stripped this way.

Almost all bike lanes (including the ones above) put cyclists at the right side of the road all the way up to the intersection. This puts the cyclist to the right of right turning cars. When I’m riding I avoid this by pulling into the lane before the intersection, but that is not an obvious or typical thing for a cyclist to do. The bike lane needs to merge with the traffic lane before the intersection, cross the traffic lane, or otherwise indicate that bicycles going straight should not be on the right side of cars which are turning right. I don’t want to see more bike lanes in Seattle if they are designed like the ones on Eastlake Ave.

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I was also disappointed to see that The Stranger (one of Seattle’s weekly’s) put Cascade Bicycle Club on the genius shortlist. They specifically gave credit to David Hiller for the Stone Way Bike Protests, an event which was actually planned and organized by a point83 spinoff called “Seattle Likes Bikes“. Cascade often does good stuff, but there is a lot more going on than what they organize. The point83 guys got together last weekend and built a memorial at the accident location. I’ve ridden past the accident location two or three times since then and there are always people looking at it. This does build awareness.

As an aside, I was hit by a car on April 17th about 300′ from the accident shown above. I’m okay. I was also in the bike lane when a southbound car turned left across my path. Someday I’ll write a full blog entry about my learnings on dealing with insurance after a bicycle accident.

This is a followup to my previous mini-report on the Bike Friday Tikit. I took it on a 10 day trip to Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Saugerties, NY. This involved two flights and a lot of car travel. I used the bike for 3 twenty mile rides, mostly in the Saugerties/Woodstock area. The rides were really enjoyable and gave me time to explore some of the backroads that we don’t see while driving around the area. Once back in Philadelphia my brother and I went for a nice around Springfield Township. This is all riding that I wouldn’t have done without a bike along, but none of it would really be enough to justify bringing a full size bicycle.

The Tikit packs almost as fast as Bike Friday says. It takes me a little bit longer due to the drop bars and my front rack (which has two bolts), but it packs much more quickly than my New World Tourist did. Everything that I need to remove is easy to adjust, unlike the NWT where I removed the cranks, derailleurs, and other major components. I’d guess that I’m packing the bike in about 15 minutes, and unpacking it in about 10. There is a lot (almost too much) of extra space in the suitcase and I had no problems storing my rack, shoes,water bottle,and tools in there with the bike.

The fold is really fast. On Wednesday I used the Tikit to bike commute (which involves a bus). I arrived at Montlake bus stop and started folding the bus. I looked up and a bus was arriving, but I still had time to put the cover on the bike. My Tikit folds wider than stock (due to the drop bars), but it still makes a fairly compact package that was easy to carry aboard.

I’m happy with the gearing that I have on there (54t chainring, 11-34 cassette, which gives me 25 to 80 gear inches). In Saugerties I rode up some very steep unpaved roads and they were challenging but no more so than on my other bikes. The bike handled nicely when coming back down them too.

I emailed the service department about the little bit of play that I had in the hinge that holds the stem. 15 minutes later I had a phone calll from the owner of Bike Friday (Hanz). He gave me some suggestions and I’ve been able to eliminate most of the play. I’m very happy with the companies service.

All in all I’m very impressed. I’d still suggest the Bike Friday New World Tourist for someone who wants to fly to a destination and spend a week on the bike. If you are primarily using the bike for shorter trips and mixing in a lot of other forms of transit (bus, car, train) I’d suggest the Tikit. It rides almost as nicely and folds much more quickly. I don’t think I’d have any problem doing some light touring (overnighters) on the Tikit.

What would I change now that I have a bit more experience with it? I still think that the bike would be better with an internal gear hub. I’ll be putting one on after I learn more about the SRAM i9. I want to tweak the design of my front rack a little bit and wish that Bike Friday had a better system of their own for carrying cargo. A second water bottle cage might be nice. It could be a little cheaper orcome with nicer components. All of these are minor complaints — it really is a very nice folder. It’s a nice blend of folding fast, folding pretty compactly, fitting into a airline-legal suitcase, and riding pretty well. There are many folding designs that can do some of these things, but not many that do them all.

He posted this to the touring list, but I think it is something that is interesting to a wider audience:

http://search.bikelist.org/getmsg.asp?Filename=touring.10708.0740.eml

I’ve noticed a dramatic increase
in saddle complaints from cyclists since the early 1990s, when STI and
Ergo shifters became the norm on better quality bikes. With shifters in
the brake levers, it’s much easier to shift gears than with other
shifters. So cyclists tend to shift gears more often now than they used
to, with detrimental effects on the old tush. Here’s why.

I haven’t put significant time on STI or Ergo shifters in about 10 years (my bikes have downtube or barend shifters). I do tend to stand on small short inclines. On Sunday I rode with my friend Rory who does ride with Ergo and I don’t think he shifted much more often than I did or spent more time seated.

Someone’s probably looked at the photo above and is wondering why that bike has STI and barend shifters. It was an overly complex setup:

• STI left shifted a SRAM 3×7 hub
• STI right shifted the rear derailleur
• Barend left shifted a front derailleur
• Barend right controlled a drum brake

If I still owned this bike I’d have ditched the 3×7 hub and STI shifters.

Christine and I have been talking about how to restructure the backyard for years. One of my goals is to get a workshop space back there. Originally I had drawn up plans for a garage with a roof deck that looked like this:

I liked the idea of the deck and thought that the garage would be useful for future owners of the house, but she didn’t like how much yard space this consumed. It also would have been a very expensive project involving way too much concrete (mostly for the big pad under the garage and the walkway next to it).

Last week I started drawing a fresh design that is sort of a tall shed. It has a much smaller footprint but is tall. The height gives me space for hanging bikes and a loft for storage. The workshop would still be plenty large for my metalworking/bike shop needs, but it would be a little small for woodworking. This is okay, moving the bikes out of the basement would give me back lost space there.

Here is what I came up with: