This will be something to watch; caught by RogerH
Archive for the “Bike” CategoryWe’re flying to Pittsburgh tonight. I’m preparing the cue sheet for a bike ride from Murrysville to Corsica on the randonneur bike I ordered from Boulder Bicycle. It’s expected to arrive in Murrysville on Thursday. The route is a hybrid of Google Bicycle Beta instructions and the way I like to drive to Corsica. i recall the drive being 65miles or just a touch less. This route only adds six miles and keeps me off the foulest sections of the drive.  It’s been totally built-up with decaleur, fenders, lighting, etc. On Friday I have to drive five hours east to pick up my eBay victory — a retired machinist’s entire tooling collection. For $3,300 I bought about $25,000 worth of precision machining equipment. This is definitely a good deal considering that a day before I found this auction, I had been grimacing at the prospect of paying $1,000 for a height gauge.  Click on the pic to see the whirl of tools Once it’s back in Pittsburgh I need to palletize it for sea freight. I cannot justify air-freighting 2000lbs of equipment. My forwarder says it will take three weeks to get to Singapore.
Apr
13
2010
 
Brazing day. Eighty-eight left.Posted by: Michael Slater in Le Chacal, tags: framebuilding Freshly-brazed triangle Today I brazed the front triangle of Ryan’s Mini-Velo. Unlike Le Chacal, where I brazed and mitered piece by piece, on this one, I mitered and fit the whole frame and then brazed at one go. “At one go” is an optimistic way to describe it. It took the better part of the day. I varied my technique a bit — I ‘tinned’ the joints first and then added the fillets. Sulaiman convinced me to make my fillets thicker after I first brazed the frame. That added some time to the process, but it was good practice. I learned some tricks to build much nicer fillet mounds. Fluxing the rod itself enables me to feed it much more smoothly into the fillet mound. And I also can identify the correct color of red that indicates a fillet at the right temperature for building. I wrapped the joints in wet rags overnight so I can remove the flux tomorrow and then measure the alignment. I am hoping for the a nice, straight frame. I added to the fillets after taking it off the jig — hope that didn’t warp things.
Mar
13
2010
ReLoad Messenger BagsPosted by: Michael Slater in Bike, Messenger, Sewing, Singer Professional 20u
Mar
13
2010
Google Maps Does Bicycle Mode NowPosted by: Michael Slater in Bike, tags: corsica, googleGoogle Maps now has a mode for bicycling directions. It doesn’t work in Singapore yet, so I tried it on the Murrysville-to-Corsica route. Click on the map to be taken to the full directions. Overall, the directions (both by car and by bike) are odd, or at least not what we’d customarily do (follow state 66, basically). The bike version really diverges once I reach West Kittaning. Rather than going northeast, up through Goheenville and Distant, it keeps running north, along the river. Maybe it prefers along the river because the grade is not going to be as severe? That little detour along the river, for instance, adds 15km to the trip. It also avoids Olean Trail for some reason. Maybe it tries to avoid gravelly roads too? The estimated time is also bizarre — 8 hours to ride 115km. It thinks I average 14km/h? ahhaahh not quite. Unless I really underestimate the altitude climb required for this ride, I don’t see why it would be so slow. On rides half as long I can pretty easily manage 27km/h solo. Anyway, maybe I’ll try some version of the alternative Google bicycling directions when i am in the USA this summer. Certainly stretches of 66 are not that nice for cycling (no shoulder, two-lane highway). Maybe the riverside run would be nice.
Jan
16
2010
KiloJoulesPosted by: Michael Slater in PowerTap, tags: calories, cycling, kilojoules, kjJust uploaded the power telemetry from my afternoon bike ride. It was the exact same ride I did last sunday. I felt more tired today. That I had a hangover and was riding in 4pm sun didn’t help. Anyway, 68kilometers in 2:30. My device says I did 1396 kilohoules (kJ) of work today and 1365 kJ last week. That number doesn’t mean much too me — what is the significance of having burnt and extra 31kJ today. That is, today’s ride burnt an extra half-packet of sugar. Fantastic.
Dec
27
2009
Sick of Sorry Software Like I’m Sick of Ho’s in ChokersPosted by: Michael Slater in PowerTap, tags: BadSoftware, wtfWhen I’m using Google software I get positive surprises. For example, plot a route in Google Maps then start dragging segments of it to spontaneously change the course. Microsoft software never surprises me. It is decade-old bloatware. It usually has an implementation of everything. When I’m using software from small niche hardware companies, I assume it’s going to suck in countless ways. My longstanding hate-object was Garmin, but now that Google Maps and my iPhone has mooted standalone GPS units, I have the luxury of not even thinking about Garmin any more. A new enemy has appeared — my CycleOps Powertap. This is a small cycle computer that wirelessly talks to a rear wheel hub that measures my pedaling torque (thus wattage). Wattage is the most useful telemetry for a bicyclist. The PowerAgent software that talks to it is shabby and brittle. But of course, that was a known known. I discovered a real gem in the cycle computer’s firmware yesterday. During a long ride, my cycle computer would periodically blink “full.” I had not cleared out old ride data for a while, so the telemetry was filling up. Didn’t really matter, I had already downloaded the old ride telemetry, so having the cycle computer replace it with the new, current ride data would be fine. Except it didn’t. Against all odds, the firmware designers decided that it made more sense to simply cease recording new data rather than overwrite the old data! Why would the default assumption ever be that I value old data more than data I’m currently generating? Does the cycle computer remember that I downloaded previously? Isn’t that a clue? If they agree that it really should replace the old data, but were unable to implement that, then they’re just really pathetic.
And God, the Dahon’s wheels are heavy — 2.25kg for the rear rim+hub (includes a Shimano Nexus internal hub) and 1.18kg for the front rim+hub, radially spoked to a dyno-hub. In comparison, my Aeroheat + XTR front wheel weighs 0.640kg.
Sep
06
2009
Gearing up for ItalyPosted by: Michael Slater in Dahon Mu XL Folding Bicycle, Le ChacalWe leave for three weeks in Italy a week from Tuesday. I’m trying to put our bikes ready in time. I built 406mm wheels for Le Chacal and repaired the headset on the Dahon. Once I started riding Le Chacal on my daily commute, instead of my 700mm titanium racing bike, I realized how absurdly low-geared it is. Small wheels plus the stock MTB gearing set on it leaves me with way too many ultra-granny gears (full cadence 90rpm pushes me at normal walking speed!) and not enough high-end to go fast. So how to fix it? The rear cassette is 11-32. 11 is about the smallest cog you can get without getting into the strange Shimano Capreo transmission system. I don’t want to go down this route because Capreo is hard to find, it uses special tools, and defeats some of the simplicity-of-repair I want for the bike. Then what about replacing the 44-32-22 crankset with bigger rings? Again, turns out these are hard to find and I couldn’t get something big enough to make a difference. It turns out the best thing to do it just toss the crankset entirely and replace it with a road set, like Shimano Ultegra 53-39 double-ring. That combination loses some of the uselessly-low granny gears and earns me a few higher gears. I’ll still be able to spin them out > 40kmh, but it’s definitely going to be faster.
This chart shows my current gearing (Le Chacal Current) and my race bike gearing (Tri Current) versus the new design (Ultegra 53/39 + 11-34). Main differences: Highest gear at 90rpm cadence gets me close to 40kmh. I sacrifice most of the <10kmh granny gears. And since I have fewer cog combinations, the spacing at higher gears is fairly wide. This should do, and Ultegra or comparable hardware is easy and inexpensive to get hold of. The problem, however, is that my bike’s cable routing is setup for a MTB-style derailleur — the cable comes from the top of the bike while road bikes expect the cable to come from underneath the bottom bracket. Bad news. What can I do that doesn’t involve welding on new brazeons? Turns out a German company manufacturers a little addon lever that I can bolt on to the derailleur which converts it to a top-pull operation. I don’t know how long it will take to get this piece. Most signs point to me bringing Le Chacal to Italy in its stock configuration unless by some miracle Speen can airmail me this part in just a few days. And if not, who cares. My high gear still runs at 33kmh, and as proven, this is the max speed I can maintain continuously for an hour, so I can live with it. The bikes are here for leisure anyway, not hard riding. Plus I wonder how my gearing compares to Le Chacal, which Matt will be riding. Fortunately, they are matched pretty well, in fact the Dahon is geared a touch faster.
Aug
30
2009
Of course my Saris Cycleops PowerAgent doesn’t work after I installed Snow Leopard OSXPosted by: Michael Slater in PowerTapOSX Snow Leopard installed fine and all my software worked fine immediately or after the apps updated themselves. All except PowerAgent. Once again it cannot see the PowerAgent unit and gave me a new set of error messages. I hope they fix this quickly; I’ve already sent them a note with all the error stacks.
Communication Error
I need to pin my headset plug today. I just went through my set screw collection. I have some nice 3mm X 6mm set screws that would work great. And I have a nice 3mm tap. That would work, except the set screw is a 0.5mm pitch ISO threading system and my 3mm tap is a 48 threads/inch American Standard Unified thread system. Those two aren’t going to cooperate. I double-checked all this with my Machinery’s Handbook 28 to confirm. Damn it. Basically my taps are useless. I’ll have to buy the appropriate tap when I buy my chuck key. Today I machined a plug to repair the badly-designed, badly-assembled, and destroyed headset clap of my Dahon Mu XL. I ended up using Sulaiman’s lathe because I didn’t have a 12mm square bit for my lathe’s three-jaw chuck. doh. Have a small list of wrenches and keys I need to get for my Shanghai lathe. It was a good first project. I used aluminum which Seetoh told me is a good metal to start machining with. As well, the plug required a bunch of different techniques. Facing the aluminum bar, turning it to diameter, boring, drilling with a tailstock drill, and even using the lathe as a jig for my helicoil tap. The epoxy is setting now. Presumably tomorrow I’ll be able to install the pins and then the headset will be back to good. I need this finished so that we have two bikes in Italy (just 2 weeks away).
Ling and Luke finally reached an agreement. The 4-year-old negotiator wanted five stickers in exchange for a haircut. They eventually settled on three.
In the meantime I’ve been tensioning a pair of 406mm wheels for Le Chacal. I’m using the truing stand I built from another’s plan. I have many grievances with the design. Cheap, light plywood is a big contributor. I’ll have to modify this thing later, but in the meantime I need to get Le Chacal ready for Italy, and this means lighter wheels and a transmission with higher gearing. Oh, and I have to repair the Dahon by building a new headset clamp. I’m going to turn an aluminum plug on the lathe, thread it with a helicoil plug, dress it with some grooves to hold epoxy, and then I’ll pin it through the steerer tube.
Aug
17
2009
(FIXED!) Saris CycleOps PowerTap SL+ Installation Problems Mac OSXPosted by: Michael Slater in Bike, PowerTapUPDATE: Jan and Ryan from Saris responded very very quickly to my problem and resolved it pretty much immediately with a beta version of PowerAgent combined with the firmware updater. Apparently an OSX upgrade was clashing with the old firmware updater.
Nice to be out of my state of ‘ high dudgeon’. Now I have to stop being irritated with Saris and instead irritated with my lame wattage output tonight on the trainer. I think I soft-shoed it by 10% at least.This is an expensive product. It comes with a java application to control the powertap (configuration, downloading data, etc). It doesn’t work on any of my Mac computers even though the literature claims it does. I followed the instructions exactly (on two separate Macs and also tried a Parallels XP installation) yet it always fails. I did manage to install the (crappy) software on an IBM ThinkPad, and it will find and talk to the PowerTap, but only after I did some gross thing to change the COM port id of the USB jack I was using. Doubt me? Here’s where I install the PowerTap driver on my OSX machine. Then when I run the the PowerAgent software, it cannot spot the PowerTap, and com.cycleops.exceptionhandler.ReadableException throws. I tried to do some debugging, but nothing works. The online technical support for this product is lamentable. The closest thing I found was TrainingPeaks software help that recommended adding an FTDI driver. This made no difference and everything continues to not work.  
Contacting technical support is dubious. CycleOps support gave me a webform tell me to keep my question to under three hundred words. This is not an auspicious start to debugging.
Apparently they’ll get to me in about three days……………….
I went on a 3 lap (36km) time trial ride today and collected all telemetry. I felt like shit and wasn’t fast. I analyzed the data with Tableau Software.
My target was 33km for the whole ride. I failed. Lap 1 was good: consistent speed with little variation. I felt especially horrid on the second lap. The third lap I felt fairly lousy too, but finished it with a sprint chase that put my heart rate to some insane 200bpm for a moment and left my puking white slime on my arm afterwards. Having not ridden for the better part of two weeks did not help.  Overview This first chart shows my instantaneous speed sampled throughout the ride. You can see the five stages and even make out from the speed where I started the laps and did the 180 degree turns. Other oddities include receiving a phone call at 9am from Denmark and having a brief sprint chase near the end of the last lap.  Power and Torque during the ride The chart of Watts and Torque (Watts = Torque X Angular Velocity) shows, with unflinching eye, when I was working and when i was cheating and suffering. You can see in Lap 1 I started out strong and kept working throughout. I slowed down purposely because the 250watt range was running me closer to 35km, above my target rate. Alas in laps 2 (especially) you can see I was generating less power and also there were many instances of no torque (meaning I was just coasting on the pedals). I was fidgeting a lot in the later laps. I shifted my seat forward, taking stress off my back, but now am putting probably too much weight on my arms. In the second and third lap I came up off my aero bars several times.  Three power/speed outputs You can see in the chart of spped versus power that Lap 2 was a shaggy, inconsistent lap. Big swings in speed range from as slow as 25km up to only 33kmh. Also, you can see I had no power to keep the bike running at 33kmh. sigh.  Lub dub lub dub lub dub My fast, fit friends’ heart rates run at 170bpm. Mine ran at 180. My resting heartbeat measured last night was 70, which is an indicator of poor fitness. Ideally it would be closer to 50, like Michel. See the spike when I was being chased? At 200bpm I seem to vomit.  BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG Here’s a zoom-in of my heartrate before/during/after the chase. I peaked at 198bmp (!) and then dropped back to saner rates after a minute+. I read last night you should drop at least 30bpm within one minute of stopping max heart rate. I came in slightly slower than that. My heart should run slower and cool off quicker. Anyway, now that I’ve finished with the Pakistani Gift That Keeps on Giving and can resume riding consistently, I’m looking forward to trying again next week with a better effort to see what I can get. There is also a lot more meaningful analysis which can be done with this data, but I just haven’t read the theory yet.
Jul
31
2009
Finish Line Speed Bike Degreaser: What’s the Formula, Kenneth? (updated)Posted by: Michael Slater in Bike
Promised capabilities included:
And it lived up to those capabilities. Truly, I sprayed the stuff on, the grease-filth ran off like water, and the bike was left clean an dry. Downside? I used an entire can and an entire can costs $20. Which begs the question: What’s in this stuff? I can’t pay $20 every time I want to a deep cleaning…what is a cheaper substitute for this cleaner? There isn’t an ingredients list, but in the description of its poisonous characteristics, the label mentions the product contains acetone and petroleum distillates. So what’s that? acetone and kerosene? acetone and naptha? pressurized? The kero cuts the grease and the acetone helps everyhing rinse away and evaportate? Can I get acetone and kersone and make a useful broth? How can I spray it? Could I find a resistant squeeze bottle? Maybe I could find more detailed toxic waste about this product online… UPDATE
Dad found the Material Data Safety Sheet for this product. (how? he asked the company, heh) So what’s the broth? Something like 70% n-Heptane, 20% Acetone, and 15% Ethanol. Then dad asked, “but what the hell is Heptane?” Of course I quickly responded: “n-Heptane is the straight-chain alkane with the chemical formula H3C(CH2)5CH3 or C7H16. It is the zero point of the octane rating scale (the 100 point is iso-octane).” But more importantly, “Heptane (and its many isomers) is widely applied in laboratories as a totally non-polar solvent.” And even more exciting, “Heptane is commercially available as the rubber cement solvent “Bestine” and the outdoor stove fuel “Powerfuel” by Primus.” So this isn’t super-obscure or super-deadly. I ought to be able to find it. Acetone should be available, and of course some ethanol. After that, I just need some sort of spray bottle that can contain the mix, and then I’ll have homemade speed-degreaser. I bought a CycleOps PowerTap SL+ and a set of Mavic OpenPro rims. The SL+ rear hub is constructed with built-in strain gauges that measure the wattage the rider generates while pedalling and wirelessly pumps that to the speedometer unit. (Interestingly, It apparently measures cadence very accurately by looking at the patterns of power output too). Wattage is the ideal telemetry to evaluate cycling performance. I need need to get the wheel built by Sunday, as I’m going out with two friends who are training for a Team Time Trial. I’ll just draft along behind them, but I still expect it will be a tough ride. These guys clocked > 39kmh for an hour at last week’s individual race. Michel, at 39.1kmh finished fifth in the entire race. (I clocked nothing, because I still have Pakistani flora gardening in my abdomen) I laced the wheels tonight while watching a one hour Yale lecture on game theory (boring first class – just introduced basics like ‘prisoners dilemma’ and dominant strategies). I’ll try to get the wheel 90% done thursday/friday using my handmade jig and then give it a final tensioning on Saturday using Sulaiman’s tensiometer. After this wheel is built, I’ll switch over to building up some Velocity Aeroheat wheels for Le Chacal. Then I’ll return to building a new front wheel for the road bike using the second Mavic rim. The only running bike in my garage is my titanium race bike. The Dahon is dead until I machine parts for the headset. Le Chacal is useless until I get 406mm narrow wheels for it. I’m waiting for a quote on a parcel of high end 406mm rims, then Le Chacal comes into service. I’m going to Taiwan for bike business in early August. Hopefully I can buy all the tooling for my lathe while I’m there. Then I’ll be able to build the headset for the Dahon. In the meantime that leaves the race bike. The Unnamed bike is actually nice to ride. It’s like riding a razor — light and fast. I finally caught the hands-free rhythm of it for long road rides, and I am ok to ride it messenger-style during traffic commutes. I’ve been getting faster on my rides. The reason appears to be that I’m getting out of the saddle more and giving it more kick, rather than being a lazy spinner. Anyway, under the abuse of the last month or so, the thing is starting to deteriorate. I found tonight that the rear wheel has probably 7mm of lateral wobble. The seat clamp is failing (actually, I think it’s rusty bolts not tightening whell) and the seat keeps rotating back on me. The transmission needs tuned, it’s missing way too much. So looks like I need to replace the spokes (old, rusted galvanized aero spokes) on this thing. Which means I need to hurry up on my project to build a bike truing stand. I’m doing a bike Time Trial race on July 26, so I need to hurry up getting this sorted. Have spent all my free time for two days plus $70 for spokes to build these lighter faster wheels for Chacal. Finished up this afternoon. Time to mount them on the bike. Why don’t the tires fit??? Try to find some rational explanation why tires that fit my old 405 rims don’t fit these 405 rims. Because these are ’405 Mini Velo’ rims. About 2″ bigger diameter. Feel like puking. So fucking annoyed. I was really excited to get chacal back on the road. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Back to fucking square one. I am so fucking disgustipated right now. Ding Ding. I’ve got the lateral and radial wobble down to a point where I cannot judge it without stainless steel feeler gauges (which I do not have). I’m done for the night, it’s 0130. Tomorrow morning I need to do some “stress relieving” of the wheel (basically beating it around a bit) and then I’ll do another tension scan and square up any last minute wiggles. Unfortunately, I still have a laced rear wheel waiting for its truing. Presumably I’ll be quicker on that one. I’ll target two hours for the rear. (which is way slow for a professional) I want to have Le Chacal ready for a ride Saturday morning. I have spent the night watching an exciting Stage Six finish to the Tour De France and building some narrow wheels for Le Chacal. These are the first wheels I’ve built. Lacing the wheels (wiring in all the spokes) was less error-prone than I feared. Truing the wheels is approximately what I expected, but fearsomely finicky and slow. The standards for what make a good wheel are scary: 0.3-0.5mm radial wobble (how round the wheel is) 0.1-0.3mm lateral wobble (does wheel wobble side-to-side) I’ve been purposefully plodding to some extent. I have no experience with wheels, so I periodically stop and measure all the spokes with a tension gauge. This helps me check if the wheel is getting out of control (dramatically different spoke tensions around the wheel). This practice is efficient for me because it gives me a truer wheel quicker and lowers the probability that I really screw things up. I keep my notes on a spreadsheet so it’s easy to analyze the results and spot neighbor spokes with dramatically different tensions. Averaging those two out generally gives the wheel better fit.
This wheel is nearly done. My lateral wobble is around .4mm and my radial wobble is around .7mm. I need to get feeler gauges for this job. Just bits of folded paper and a student’s ruler doesn’t work very nicely. Finally, when the wheel is complete the deflection of the spokes should average .35, more taught than I currently have it. Had figured there was a good iphone app for tracking the Tour De France, but seems not to be. It tells you a lot about the finer details of how the race is conducted. As I am writing this article, a new update came in:
I thought this was weird, riders stopping for a pee break. I’m curious about the strategies of a peloton and especially of attacks. Like right now I look at the stage and there are six riders in the breakaway group. The strongest guy of the six is ranked 37th overall in the tour. So it seems unlikely that any of those six will win this stage, so why do they make life harder for themselves (and less useful for their team members?) by getting ahead of the peloton. I found a story that answers some questions both about pee breaks and the strategies of a peloton. The race is going on now, early morning US time, evening in Asia. Nicer for me to watch than for my massive North American audience.
Just picked Shimano XTR hubset for my 32 spoke wheels. And we calculated spoke length. I’ll order my spokes from Attitude Bike and lace the wheels up this week. Then this weekend use Sulaiman’s bench to tension them. Can’t wait to get Chacal fully-burning. Next project after that is to get a tubing bender so that I can make a front pannier rack for chacal. They’re cheap–i’m just bending aluminum. The other shop can weld for us. Sulaiman made a good suggestion for the adjustable rake on Fourth Protocol: use something like track style dropouts with sliding rails. (deserves a photo but I am writing this from my iPhone in a taxi) We also discussed a center frame bag. This fit nicely with an idea I had for using bottle braze ons for a shoulder strap last week. I can tension the bag so it stays still. Lastly he showed me a picture of a tubing bender for titanium bicycle tubes. Criminally simple. We can build one and make curved tubes for our frames!! Too many ideas and projects but no time. For Le Chacal, I built a frame and then jammed components on it. For Fourth Protocol, I have more idea of what components I want to use, now I’m trying to figure out what’s available and how I can make it work together. Transmission The tricky piece here is whether I can get an elliptical bottom bracket that also allows me to use a 3-ring chainring. Most EBBs are intended for single speed bikes (which have a single chainring). I’ve found two guys that make EBBs to fit normal bb shells, Tr!ckstuff Excentriker and. Forward Components. Forward Components replied to my email in twenty minutes and told me that they’ll be announcing a multi-chainring EBB in a couple weeks. I’m still waiting to hear from Tr!ckstuff. I’m nervous that unless they too have a new product to announce, it’s unlikely that their (lighter) product can tolerate multi chain-rings. Seatpost Hubs Wheels
Jun
13
2009
Terribly designed, assembled headset nearly ruins my Dahon Mu XLPosted by: Michael Slater in Bike, Dahon Mu XL Folding BicycleThank God I have a lathe — I’ll be able to machine some customized replacement parts for this weak motherfucker.
|
Entries (RSS)