Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

Size M/L rSogn. Photo borrowed from the Rawland Cycles blog.

I was going to wait until the bike was finalized to post this, but I think it is getting close enough. You can read all about the planned rSogn on the Rawland Cycles Blog.

Rawland Cycles is updating the Sogn. The Sogn was already a nice bike, but the revisions are just going to make it better. The new bike will have the same tire clearance (58mm knobbies fit) and offroad friendly sloping top tube of the original, but gets lighter tubing and a geometry that is friendly to front loads while still working well unloaded offroad.

This almost makes it a mass produced variation of Gifford, the bicycle that I built in my basement and posted about in painful detail on this blog.  The tubing specs are the same.  The geometry is basically the same.  The construction methods and some details (fork bend, bottom bracket style, braze-ons) are different.

I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this style of bicycle. I don’t have a good name for it, but let’s call it a Rough Stuff bike. It is great on pavement with fenders and a commuting or light touring load. It is great on dirt roads. It is good on singletrack. It is the Subaru WRX of bikes: doesn’t look like anything special, but performs well on pavement and on dirt, and at the end of the day it can carry your groceries home too.  I’ve built 7 of them using a variety of frames in the last decade, and Gifford is the best of them by far.

Sean (the owner of Rawland Cycles) is running the design process well.  I was worried at first that this bike could end up with the “design by committee” failing of some other projects.  That usually produces a mess, where the final bike doesn’t follow any single vision and tries to make everyone happy.  Sean is being good at both listening to input and making tweaks here and there, but keeping his vision of what he wants to build and making sure that the bike meets his vision of how it should be ridden.  He’s had to make some decisions that might cost him a sale or two (cantilever brakes instead of disk brakes), but I think that is better than putting on mounts for both.  The Simpsons had a classic episode about this problem, where Homer ended up building this:

$500 (introductory price) is very nice for the frame and fork.  I’m probably buying one, even though it goes against my current plan of getting rid of bikes (at the moment I’m being too effective at that, I only have 2 rideable singles…Gifford and my MTB).

Disclaimer: I’ve been emailing Sean and providing my input on the bike, but get no kickback for this posting or my input.  I just want to see him sell a bunch of them because it is going to be a great bike.

I’ve switched my blog from running CommunityServer (which went from bad to worse) to Wordpress (which seems to be pretty good, and is certainly popular).

This shouldn’t mean too much for the average reader. I think I’ve properly setup the feeds so that anyone who subscribed to the old blog will start to see posts on the new blog. The old URL of http://blogs.phred.org still works, but the preferred URL is now http://alexwetmore.org.

The only new content since Jan is a trip report from our paddle around the Broken Group Islands. I’ve been busy enjoying the summer and staying busy at work, so the blog has been pretty quiet. Expect the normal busy basement content to start again in October when the days are shorter, cooler, and rainier. I hope everyone else is also having a good summer.

I made one of these when I was first playing with my lathe, gave it to John Speare, and forgot about it. He told me last week that he uses it with every wheel that he builds, and asked if I’d be interested in making 12 more of them for Pedals 2 People’s wheelbuilding class. It is just a dull needle with a rough spiral on it that a nipple can sit in. You place the nipple into the tool, use the tool to push it into the rim, then remove the tool. It makes life easier on rims with deep cross sections where the nipple can get lost between both walls.

I’ve never really made a “run” of anything on my manual lathe before, so it was fun to think through the process to make a bunch of similar objects. Once I got the system down these took about 3 minutes each. Some are short because the needle bent or broke during manufacturing, so I just shortened the body and made a new needle. Those ones probably took 5 minutes. Figuring out how to do it in an efficient manner took me about an hour. So two hours of work, but next time it will be one.

Andre Ball built up a Schwinn Traveler with a Nexus 8sp hub. The chainstay cable housing stop on that bike is very close to the dropout and that short cable run made it difficult to remove the rear wheel. This is an under the bottom bracket cable housing stop and cable guide. It replaces the plastic cable guide that you’ll find on most bikes.

Being able to fabricate small bits like this can be very useful.

Winter is coming faster than I’d like to admit.

http://www.ibexwear.com/shop/product/1319/2866/mens-vim-hybrid-jacket

What’s awesome about it? The front is water and wind resistant and works well with the normal light showers that we get. The back is open wool which breathes well and vents really well. The weight is good for most of the winter in Seattle (I find it comfy from about 35 up to 55 depending on what I wear under it). It’s also great for cross country skiing.

I have two of these from previous years (the first was sold as the Breakaway, the second was sold as the Dash Hybrid). Then they stopped making them for a couple of years. This one looks similar to the ones that I have, but isn’t exactly the same. On the old jackets the inner lining of the front of the jacket is wool, while on this one it appears to be synthetic. I’m not sure if this means it will stink up more easily. The older designs also had a back pocket, this one has side pockets instead.

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.

This is what our car looked like when I got home on Monday after work:

Christine was rear ended by a large SUV. She was stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for a pedestrian, and the SUV didn’t stop and plowed into her. Luckily Christine only had minor injuries, but the car is a mess. Basically everything rear the rear tires is bent or broken somewhere, both inside and outside of the car. The trunk and rear passenger door don’t open.

The SUV driver’s insurance took the car to their body shop on Tuesday and we got a call from them today. They didn’t declare the car a total loss and are going to fix it. However they did say that the frame is bent, so they need to cut out part of it and weld it back together. The amount of damage is about half of the car’s value. I’m pretty nervous about such repairs both because I don’t know if the repairs will give us as reliable and safe a car as we once owned, and because I’m sure it will diminish the value of the car.

Our car is a VW TDI and has unusually high value for it’s age (it is a 6 year old car, but the blue book value is about 80% of it’s original purchase price, on craigslist it is probably worth even more) due to being a diesel and a station wagon.We don’t drive much, so the mileage is very low for a 6 year old car. It’s a rare combination.

I’m hoping that someone out there has been in a similar situation (close to totalled car) and can give me a little advice. Here is what is running through my mind right now:

1. Insist that the car is moved to an autobody shop of our choice. There is one near our house that we’ve worked with in the past, and another near our house which specializes in German cars and claims such as this. It makes me nervous that shop currently holding it is tightly related to the insurance company.
2. Claim diminished value on the car. A repair this large it will show up on CarFax (and I wouldn’t feel comfortable hiding from potential buyers anyway) and will lower the value of our car. I don’t know how to calculate this. There appear to be services on the web which will do it for you, but none list their fees for doing so.

What would you do?

We really like this car,but we liked it in it’s pre-major-surgery state. I don’t want to screw the insurance company,but I do want a fair settlement.

If you don’t like leaving comments then shoot me an email, alex (at) phred (dot) org.

p.s. I’d use this as a reminder that I don’t like cars too much, but riding a bike doesn’t save me from insurance claims.

Yesterday we had some friends over for dinner and put on a CD.  A couple of minutes later the stereo let out a quiet pop and a large cloud of nasty dark blue smoke.  It was nasty stuff.

I turned everything off and figured out a backup plan for listening to music that evening.  Today I investigated using my workshop speaker.  The left, right, and center channels were fine.  When I plugged the speaker into the rear left channel (one that I’ve never used!) my speaker didn’t make any noise, but it did glow like a light bulb.  Not good!

Took the speaker apart and luckily it is just a slow blow fuse that died.  I can replace that.

I took the receiver apart.  I’m stuck with two options:

• Replace it.  This is sad because it was expensive and only about 5 years old.
• Remove the surround amp board and continue to use it as a 3-channel receiver.  Since we don’t do surround that is okay, but I’m not excited about having something that let out a poof of smoke running a few hours a day.

So I guess I’m taking the first option.

I hate that it’s 50lbs of metal, much of it semi-rare copper, and it’s going to end up in the trash.  It probably died because somewhere there is a 2 cent Chinese capacitor that failed.  This guy was built in 2002 when many products were made with these timebomb capacitors.  NAD (the manufacturer) doesn’t have parts anymore, so I can’t just replace the failed amplifier board.

I bought a 1949 South Bend 9″ lathe.  It came with a cool but large and heavy (400-500lbs) stand built by the previous owner.  We couldn’t figure out a way to get it into my basement until the seller thought of hiring a friend with this very useful knuckle crane.

The crane carried threaded the lathe and stand through my back yard, rolled it down a ramp into my basement, and delivered the package into my basement doorway.

This is a photo of the old lathe sitting on top of the new lathe just to give a size comparsion.  The old lathe could turn material up to 14″ long, the new one has a 36″ bed.  The new one is much more rigid and can take much deeper cuts in material.

The stand that I bought with the lathe is very nice.  It has a large stock rack on the back for holding metal, 9 drawers for holding tooling, and an open area below for larger items.

We’ve had a weekend of exploring the zoos and gardens.  On Friday we went to the Wild Animal Park which is about 30 miles outside of San Diego.  It is run by the San Diego Zoo and I think it is what many people think of when they are thinking about the zoo.  We took the Photo Safari through Africa which was expensive but well worth it, you really get up close with the animals.  It brought back memories of visiting Zimbabwe as a child since most of the same animals were on display.  Of course in Zimbabwe they weren’t so easy to find.

On Saturday we went to Quail Botanical Gardens, also north of San Diego.  The gardens are pretty large (35 acres) and have a number of areas specializing in things like native California plants, South African plants, Bamboo, a nice herb garden, and cacti.  It was a nice garden with a lot to see and explore.

We spent this morning and early afternoon in Balboa Park, right in the middle of San Diego.  In the morning we went through the zoo, starting with a gondola ride to the far end of the park and then walking back through the exhibits.  The animal collection didn’t have much overlap with the Wild Animal Park which made it nice to visit both of them.  There were a lot of great birds on display in the zoo and we enjoyed the hippos and polar bears.  Most of the animals were hiding in the shade because of the record heat, over 90F.

After the zoo we wandered around some other parts of Balboa Park, checking out the Museum of Photography (small but nice exhibits), the Botanical House (unlike Seattle they have to make shade here so that they don’t cook the plants — there is no glass to keep the heat in).

Christine dropped me off a little outside of Seaworld.  My goal — Ride to our hotel in La Jolla.  I had no map, but it seemed like it would be easy since the bike routes were well marked and La Jolla was only about 8 miles north.  As long as I kept the ocean on my left I’d be okay.

The ride started out pretty well.  I followed a couple of other cyclists out to Pacific Beach, did some people watching on the very crowded beach (first hot day this spring/summer apparently).  Just as I was getting sick of the thick crowds near the beach I found a bike route sign pointing to UCSD (near our hotel) and followed it.

I either missed a bike route sign or the sign took me up a road called La Jolla Mesa.  I realized that I was lost when I had passed the same intersection at the top of La Jolla Mesa two or three times.  It’s really easy to lose sense of direction when surrounded by similar looking very expensive houses on roads with no right angles and fences tall enough to block the views of the ocean.

When I got to this view and could see my hotel hundreds of feet below I decided to check the maps available through my cell phone:

My hotel is down there, near the two white steeples in the upper right of the photo.  The roads around me looked like this:

I was outside of Mount Soledad Park, about 800 feet above sea level.  Not exactly what I had planned, but it was a fun descent down back into the La Jolla valley before the final climb up to my hotel.  When I plotted my route out it looks like I went about 20 miles and climbed 1500′.  Lots of great views, some good beach riding, and a fun climb.  I was sad to check the maps, but I’d do it all again.