Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

I’m on the east coast visiting my family this week. My mom and I enjoyed a nice mother’s day weekend on the Eastern Shore (of the Cheasapeake) andtoday I headed up to my dad’s house outside of Philadelphia.

I flew out here with my folding bike (Bike Friday Tikit). The $15 bag checking fee ($30 round trip) is annoying, but still cheaper and more enjoyable than renting a car. My clothing suitcase is a small carry-on bag from RickSteves that fits nicely on the front porteur rack. Ithelda few days worth of clothing, my laptop, camera, and other stuff.I had a saddlebag for tools and a few other items. My mom is driving up this way in a few days and will bring my bike suitcase along. I love the Tikit and it’s great for this type of trip. The i-Motion 9 that I put on there is working very nicely too.

The ride was an enjoyable route mostly on small 2-lane roads through farms. I didn’t hit any traffic until getting within spitting distance of Newark. At Newark I hopped on Septa (Philadelphia’s regional rail system) and took the train up to my dad’s house. The riding was about 60 miles and pretty flat. I think over here these would be called rolling hills, but in Seattle this would be called flat.

Thanks to Frank from bikede.org for helping me with the route. He suggested about 70% of what I rode and his suggestions were spot on.

All photos (most of them are on here already).

Notes from my previous similar trip. I took a different route, but the scenery is similar.

I’ll come back later and link to the route on Bikely.

Easton eccentric bottom bracket with the shell in Rene Herse/Alistair Spencestyle. Eccentrics are heavy, this setup weighs 425 grams.

Seat tube mitered and water bottle bosses brazed in.

3 hours down, lots more to go.

Friday after work Andre, Andrew and I biked up the North Fork of the Snoqualmie River searching for camping spots. None of us had been very far up the river before.

The first section of the road is called 5710 and gives you access to Hancock and Calligan Lakes. It’s a really nice stretch of road with no traffic and good surface conditions. Beyond that we merge back onto 5700 which is more heavily trafficked (this means a car every hour or two) and looser gravel.

We had a few areas to check for camping in mind. There are two valleys that go into the National Forest, Phillipa Creek and Sunday Creek. We didn’t explore Phillipa Creek and Sunday Creek had snow right at the trail head. Across from Sunday Creek was an old road which looked promissing, but it ended at a broken bridge. This would be a decent camp spot most days, but it was a little damp on Friday. We kept heading up the main road until we got stuck in snow at the Lennox Creek turnoff. There was another (loud) group camping here, so we turned back. At this point it was getting dark and we needed to find camp pretty fast.My GPS showed an abandoned road a couple of miles back, so we checked it out.

The road looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade or two. It was very overgrown with shrubs and trees, but we pushed our way through. The area by the river was pretty nice and had an open spot for dinner and some good trees for hanging our hammocks. Andrew found a nice soft spot for his bivy. We made a quick dinner, enjoyed a small fire, and went to bed.

Themorning air was chilly andafter a bit of tea wehit the road and head back to the car.The blue skies of Friday night had been replaced with a low fog. The roads were clear andthe slight downhill trend made our ride back a little faster than the one the day before. At 9:30 we reached the car andwere heading home.

Ilike Friday night camping because you still have a full weekend for other stuff too. I look forward to exploring this area more in a month or two when more of the snow has melted. This would have been a great area last year because the bridge which makes it accessible cars had been washed out. Now it is open again and there is more traffic.

All Photos

I’ve finished my most recent round of hacking on my Bike Friday Tikit.

I callit the Seasons SpeedingTikit Porteur. Seasons because that is what Bike Friday calls the Tikit with an internal hub. Speeding because that is what they call it when you put on drop bars. Porteur because it has a (mini) porteur rack up front.

The new rear hub is a SRAM i-Motion 9 (or i9). The i9 conversion benefited from some brazing of the bike’s rear triangle. I switched the dropouts to the pivoting dropouts that Bike Friday makes. I also had to move the rear canti studs a bit. I made a photo essay of swapping out the dropouts. The i9 seems to work well and has a nice gear range. I had originally planned on building a custom bar-end shifter, but gave up on that project. The rear triangle will get fresh powdercoat soon.

The drop bars make the quick fold a bit wide, but remove the stem and it gets narrower than a stock tikit. I don’t need a compact quick fold very often, so this is a good compromise for me. I can ride on drop bars all day long, but flat bars hurt my hands after 20 miles or so. I really love the Tikit fold, it is very fast and all of the dirty bits on the bike get folded to the inside.

I made the mini-porteur rack a long time ago and it continues to function well. It looks really dressed up with the black powder coat.

The Tektro V-brake drop-bar levers are a lot more comfortable than the Diacompe 287-V option. They seem to work pretty well on the front, but the rear is a bit spongy from the long cable run. The levers work better if your V-brakes have shoes at the top of the slot than at the bottom.

I hacked up my favorite MKS Grip King pedals to have a quick release MKS EZ axle. This lets them pop off of the bike in an instant to make the fold smaller. Taking axles out of $60 pedals and putting them into $50 pedals is an expensive solution, I wish MKS just offered these with the quick release axle as stock.

I’m taking the bike on a train ride with me soon and looking forward to giving it a real test.

On Saturday morning Andrew, Rory, Andre and I drove up to North Bend with goals of riding up to Lake Hancock and Lake Calligan. It was already sunny and warm at 9am, and the weather reports just suggested that it would get even better. I think we all thought there might be snow up in the hills, but we found it much earlier than planned as we started the climb from the North Fork valley floor up to the first lake. Just a little bit up the trail and at about 1500 feet we found our first bits of snow. A 1/4 mile later the road was no longer passable.

We got to the fork for Lake Hancock and decided to ditch the bikes and hike up to the lake. An hour or so later the snow was up to our calves and we decided to turn back. We enjoyed a fast descent in snow turned slush and then experimented with each others bikes before finding our way back to the car. We’re all excited to return the area and eventually find the roads that link it up with our trip from a few weeks prior.

Today Christine and I took the kayak down to Nisqually Delta. It was another beautiful day which highs around 70 and clear skies. We were hoping to explore the delta and see lots of wildlife (primarily birds), but due to a two timing issues (time of day and time of year) we saw less than we were hoping for. We still had a great paddle,enjoyed wonderful scenery (great views of Rainier and the Olympics) and saw some cool birds.

The whole weekend was a great way to kick off spring/summer. I look forward to another busy year of spending time outside. I hope that I have a little time to work on bike projects too.

We recently made some major landscaping changes to our yard, including adding a small shed. The shed doesn’t have an electrical hookup to the house, but I wanted to make sure that it had basic lighting. I decided that this would be a good way to use some of the LEDs that I had lying around from experimenting with building bicycle headlights.

I first looked at commercial products that put all of this together, but I couldn’t find any that seemed to be bright enough. Most were using dozens of dim/low cost white LEDs without defining out bright there were. Plus I already had the LEDs (in hindsight the cheapest part of the system), so I thought I’d build my own.

This is a system diagram showing how everything fits together:

Parts list:

• Solar Panel — Brunton SolarFlat 15 (about $120)
• Charge Controller — Brunton SolarController (about $25)
• Battery — 12V, 7AH lead acid. I had this already from a UPS, but they are about $20 new.
• LED Controller — TaskLED MaxFlex4 (around $40)
• 6 LEDs — Cree XR-E Q5 (around $6 each)
• Aluminum Strip — 1″ wide aluminum channel from the hardware store (around $10)

My goal was to stay under $200, but I think the total ended up being more like $250. It would be nice if there was a single source for all of these components, but I had to use multiple sources. The solar panel and charge controller came from Amazon, the LED controller came from TaskLED and the LEDs came from DealExtreme.

The panel is just placed on our roof and plugs into the charge controller. That in turn plugs into the battery, which is placed on the top of one of the shed walls (inside the shed).

The LED strips are made of 3 LEDs mounted on a 4 foot section of aluminum channel. The LEDs are wired in series and the wires run inside the channel.

The LED controller is mounted in a small box with a push button and a status LED. I used a piece of copper pipe as the heatsink, and that is also bolted to the project box. The box was rescued from another project,which is why it has some extra holes.

The controller itself is tiny (about the size of a quarter) which made it a little trickier to work with. It is designed to be small enough to work in a flashlight. This is a pretty advanced controller and the selling feature for me was having an auto-off function. It is setup to start dimming the lights after they’ve been on for 15 minutes,and they will be turned off completely after about 20 minutes.

That explains howthe system was built, but how long does the battery take to charge, and how long can the LEDs stay on before the battery dies? To answer both of those we need to look at the capacity of the battery. It is a 12 volt 7 amp hour battery, which means it stores 84 watt hours of energy (12volts *7amphours = 84 watthours).

The solar panel puts out 15W in optimum conditions, but Seattle is far from optimum and I didn’t make any attempt to aim the panel. I figure it is probably worth about 7 watts for 8 hours a day, which is 56 watt hours. So in roughly1.5 days the battery will be fully charged.

The LED controller is outputing 350 milliamps. There are 6 LEDs which have a forward voltage drop of 3.7 volts. So the total watts consumed by the LEDs are: (3.7 * 6 * .350) = 7.77 watts. These LEDs are about 10x more efficient than a normal light bulb, so they are producing about as much light as a 70-100W incadescent bulb. The controller is about 80% efficient, which means that about 9 watts are actually consumed from the battery when the lights are on. That means the runtime is about 9 hours. I could run the LEDs at 700ma each and still get a runtime of4or 5hours, but I don’t think the extra light is necessary. In reality the lights will probably only be used a maximum of an hour a day (if Christine was potting a lot of plants).

If this system is reliable I think I will expand it to include some LED landscape lighting. I’ll probably need to add another panel and use a larger battery, but the basic system configuration will be the same.

Photos

I’m almost done clearing out old projects and finally getting ready to build my first full bike frame. It’s going to be what Jan classifies as an urban bike. Kind of a light touring bike, drop bars, front porteur rack, 650B wheels. I want it to fit knobby tires without fenders or 40mm wide Hetre tires with fenders. To make this work I’m placing the fender mounts around 60mm from the rim. Here is a line drawing which gives the basic proportions:

The hardest place to fit these wide tires is the chainstay/bottom bracket area. I was playing with BG101 (an Excel spreadsheet) on the bus this morning and it shows this very nicely. This is what my bike might look like using a 55mm tire, 9 degree bend chainstays from Henry James, a 44t single chainring, Ritchey cranks (150mm tread) and a Rohloff hub:

Each grid mark is 5mm. Everything just doesn’t fit (the crank arm and chainring are both too close to the chainstay). There is a thin path through the chainring, crank arm, and tire which will let everything fit. A chainstay which makes that ideal path isn’t available off the shelf, so I’m going to have to modify (bend) what I can get. This is the hardest part of the bike for me, and the first thing that I’m looking at when I see other fat tired bikes on the road.

I’m glad that I avoided it on my first bike by using an existing rear triangle borrowed from another bike.

Sorry about doubling up posts on the same day, the blog has been quiet for a while. Bike nerds will enjoy this one, everyone else will probably prefer the one about Markworth Forest.

A little while ago I mentioned modifying a QBP Travel Agent (normally used to make linear pull brakes work with drop bar levers) to make a Shimano 9sp barend shifter work with a SRAM i9 internal gear hub. I finally got around to finishing that project this weekend. Here is the modified Travel Agent:

I made a new pulley which has a 10mm inner groove and a 36mm outer groove. That means that for every millimeter that the cable is moving as it enters the Travel Agent that it will be moving 3.6mm on the output. That should create the right ratio to increase my barend shifter “clicks” to work with the i9 hub. Sadly it didn’t work out that way. The3rd to 4th jump on the SRAM i9 shifter takes a bit more cable pull than the other gears, and the 3-4 jump on the Shimano shifter pulls a little less cable than the other gears. I checked two Shimano shifters just to be sure. I could get the hub to index well in all gears but that one. Hopefully J-Tek makes a barend shifter for the i9 that is as nice as the one that they make for the Nexus 8.

While I was making pulleys I decided to use the Travel Agent to fix the rear brake on our tandem. It has a disk brake which is designed to work with road levers, but the pads were always dragging on the disk. A regular Travel Agent would fix that problem, but make the brake have too little mechanical advantage (it doubles the cable pull which halves the mechanical advantage). I made a new pulley with a 3:2 ratio instead.

First I roughed out the two steps in a chunk of aluminum that will form the pulleys. One that I was done I drilled a hole between the two pulleys using the milling machine (I found it easier to do this before finishing the pulley). To get the angle correctly I just put one vise into another:

Then I made the pulley grooves on the lathe. My lathe was bought used and came with tons of cutting tools in various shapes. One happens to be the perfect size for a bicycle brake cable:

I cut the pulley off of the aluminum stock, made a brass bushing for the pulley to rotate on and did a little finish work. The outer groove is 30mm and the inner groove is 20mm, giving me the 3:2 ratio.

This is what it looks like on the tandem:

This setup feels a lot better than the stock setup and still seems to provide plenty of braking power. The return spring on the Avid BB7 Road is a little wimpy too, so there is a supplementalspring added to the cable. I’m looking forward to riding the tandem without having the disk brake rubbing and making lots of noise.

(click for really big)

The Markworth Forest is about 30 miles from Seattle just outside of Duvall, WA. I’d only been there once before and felt like I barely saw any of it. Lee, Andre, Andrew and I were trying to figure out a ride suggestion and I offered up that Markworth might be worth checking out.

We didn’t really have an agenda. There aren’t good maps of the Markworth or much information available on it. It is a working forest so you see a lot of clear cuts and some logging equipment. The roads aren’t mapped out very well. It’s lowland, so it is swampier than the forests that we’re used to seeing up in the mountains (John Speare used to live near there and described some areas as feeling “Deliverance Like”).

On the other hand it has waterfalls, great view, few people, lakes, and all of those other things that are fun to find in the woods.

On this visit we biked about 25 miles, found one very nice lookout, a creepy lake surrounded by some strange houses, two waterfalls (one that I’ve visited before),a few other cyclists and a woman training her huskies how to mush.

I think it’s too bad that all of this “near Seattle” forest is mostly working logging land and not really designed for recreation. There are some great oppurtunities here. I think I’ll be back to explore some more.

A few photos (more are here).

Andrew checks out the view of Seattle

Looking northish to more mountains and trails.

This crazy waterfall was loud and energetic. I took a(sideways)video too which you can see in the gallery.

touring*2 + mtb = pugsley

I played with building my own headlight back in November, and just got back into it last Saturday and yesterday. I think I’m done with such projects for now and I’m using this blog entry to document what I’ve done so far.

What I’ve built

I built this headlight yesterday (click for an annotated slideshow showing the construction):

It looks nice, but this is a very basic light with no standlight. The brightness and beam compare well to a Niterider MiNewt USB-Mini headlight. This is good, but not as nice as the brightness on most commercial headlights.

In November I spent a lot of time experimenting with standlight electronics. Thanks to a lot of help from the CandlePowerForum I came up with a circuit that works pretty well:

Here is how the circuit works:

• Therectifier is the circle on the left and turns the AC generated by the dynamo into Vcc (positive) and ground.
• Most of the power runs from Vcc through the LED (D)and back to ground.
• When the supercap (C, marked 10F) is discharged some power ispulled off to charge it. The LM317L is a simple voltage regulator that regulates the output from therectifier down to 2.1 volts (the maximum that the dynamo supports).
• The ZXCS310 is a LED driver thattakes the power from the supercap (0.8 volts to 2.1 volts)and boosts it up to the power needed by the LED. Using this driver let me get all of the possible power out of the supercap and gave a runtime of around 8 minutes.
• There is a bug in the drawing, the other side of L should go to Drive, not a mystery 4th pin on the ZTX618 transistor.
• A more optimal design also has a transistor which watches for Vcc to drop to 0 and then disables the Shutdown pin on the LED driver. This makes it so that the LED driver isn’t running unless you need the standlight (the dynamo isn’t running).

I did a lot of playing with space layout and got a layout that would fit on a 2″ by 1″ board. I never did end up building that board.

I also built a housing for a LED headlight. It would use the same circuit, but 3 LEDs instead of 1. The housing is about twice the diameter. It looks like this:

The wall thickness on that housing is too thick (to make it possible to use screws to secure the front and back). It weighs a lot more than commercial headlights. The idea with this one is that one LED would be the standlight, and the other two would always be on. It should have been brighter than the commercial headlights.

Headlight Beams

All of these headlights use symetricspot lenses as on most battery headlights (like theNiteRider MiNewt series). I don’t like that beampattern too much because if they are aimed high enough to see far down the road then they also blind oncoming traffic.Most commercial dynamo headlights use an asymetric beam whichis brighter at the top than the bottomand which has a sharphorizontal cutoff. That is similar to a car or motorcycle headlight and does a really nice job of lighting up the road in front.

Peter White has a long post with photo comparisons of headlight beams. The Super Nova E3 is a headlight with a spot beam (you can see that it is lighting up the trees and the brightest part isn’t the farthest) while the eDelux is a headlight with an asymetric beam.

The “right” beam is a subjectopen to debate, but I personally prefer the beams of the commercial headlights such as the Schmidt eDelux or B&M IQ Fly. The optics for such beams are hard to reproduce in a home workshop because there aren’t easily available lenses for them.

My Conclusions

I think I’m done experimenting with building my own headlights. Here is why:

• It takes me about 4 hoursand $15-$20 in parts to build a headlight roughly as good as the $60 Planet Bike one, only it doesn’t have the standlight. Most of this time is machining time to build a housing. I don’t think that time/cost tradeoff makes sense.
• Building a headlight that is as light, compact,and reliable with the same features as a commercial headlight takes even more time. It is difficult for me to do surface mount electronics with custom boards at home,and those are the features that make the commercial electronics so small.
• I can’t build a headlight at home with a beam that is as good as the IQ Fly ($92). The IQ Fly is my baseline for a good dynamo headlight.
• I don’t need a highlight brighter than the eDelux or IQ Cyo. I actually don’t want a headlight brighter than that, I personally don’t think that brighter is always better. I think the best reason to build LED headlights at home is to get the super bright spot beams that are useful when mountain biking.
• It’s distracting me from my main fabricationgoal this winter (building a bike frame).

I have another project which will use my remaining LEDs (I’m building solar powered lighting for our shed). The supercaps that I bought will be useful in taillights (which I do enjoy making).

If anyone wants to buy my LED optics just let me know. I have 6 L2 OPTX (including adapter lenses) and 3 L2 OPTX 3 that I probably won’t be needing.

It’s too bad that there aren’t commercial standlight circuits for homebuilders. There are tons of tiny driver circuits available for home builders who want to make their own battery powered headlights.