Silver Case

This will be something to watch; caught by RogerH

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.

Trying to get all my bikes and equipment packed for Italy. Flight is tomorrow night. I broke Le Chacal down typically, but the Dahon I broke down well beyond normal folding design. Everything fits in a single suitcase, except the wheels. They’re bulky and annoying.

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.

We 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.

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.

On his way home from school

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.

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.

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
I want the transmission to be a Shimano Nexus Hub skewered in vertical dropouts with chain tension controlled by an elliptic bottom bracket orbited by a 3-chainring crank.

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
I managed to get a 410mm seatpost already, so I can crunch my frame’s diamond pretty effectively.

Hubs
I also found out that DT Swiss does make 135mm hubs for 28 spokes. Now I just need to find a distributor who carries this unicorn.

Wheels
Tomorrow I need to take some parameter measurements so that I can calculate spoke length and begin assembling my new 405mm 32spoke rims for Le Chacal.

I’m shagged. Got up with Luke at 6:30 AM, and after he dressed himself and played, I made Osso Bucco (it tastes better if it cooks, cools off, and reheats). The more languid the braising is, the better veal tastes. Then spent the rest of the day on bicycle matters.

In designing Matt’s Fourth Protocol, I was considering the results of Le Chacal. This led me to I spend a fair bit of the day doing measurements on Le Chacal trying to figure out why it handled squirrely on my bike tour in Taiwan. I started out thinking it was due to some fine measurements, but my working theory now is simply a matter of bad weight distribution. (I had too much weight on the back, and the front wasn’t loaded)

Then I finished assembling the Le Chacal. I was being quite anal about tuning the transmission system. Last week I screwed around for an hour perfecting the Z/L (smallest back and smallest front cogs) shift combo. The shifting is in good shape now.

Wish I could say the same thing about the brakes. The Braking system is still driving me up the wall, but that’s not the brakes’ fault. It’s the stupid wide rims I have on the bike. I need to get those replaced with narrower, lighter wheels pronto. There is barely clearance, and if I hit any mud, it jams the faces of the brake pads.

Headsets are a touch loose on both Le Chacal and my Dahon. I need to tighten them. Need to study how in my Barnett’s Guide.

I installed a set of “trekking” handlebars. This will give me more riding positions on long rides, hopefully avoiding wrist numbess and sore back. The old mountain bar was 250g, this is about 500g, but I think it’s an ok tradeoff. Plus, I’ll save more than that much when I replace those damn rims. I need to screw with the stem. Lower it a bit, or farther forward, or something. My friend is a professional Pilates instructor and bike racer. I’ll get recuit him to fix my positioning.

Ling even got in on things and started refurbishing her Paul Frank single-speed cruiser. The chroming was really, really cheap and blistered and rusted. So we took off those bits of hardware. Ling sanded things and I ran other things on the wire wheel. Next week we’ll repaint those parts with some rust-retardant, install the side-view mirrors she’s so insistent on, and then she’ll have a local errand bike.

Dropped the heavy Kenda tires and put a Schwalbe Marathon Racer on the back and a Continental Contact on the front, just for something different. I went out on a testing and calibration ride. I hit a field that was basically grass and lumpy, very wet clay. I managed to spin my way through without spilling over. So although there isn’t much tread on these things, I got the minimum traction I needed. (being able to stand up and crank w/ the trekking bars was also helpful)

I discovered the wooden workbench I dragged home yesterday was termite-ridden, so I beat it apart with a ball-peen hammer and crowbar then tossed the bits in the garbage.

Now I’m basking in my downstairs workshop, sipping a beer, and waiting for my osso bucco to heat up. It was so nice this morning having that massive Le Crusset dutch oven. I could brown all four veal pieces simultaneously, then sweat out the vegetables, plug it up with a cartouche, and let it braise for 2.5 hours. It’s nice having the right things at times. In an undersized pan, I could have never browned the meat nicely. (or at least concurrently)

After calculating Le Chacal’s weight at around 30lbs last night I tried to put it into perspective.

An ultracycling enthusiast said a bicycle weight should be no more than 12% of the rider’s weight. That means Le Chacal is built for a 250lb man. Or it’s 30% overbuilt. That’s his rule-of-thumb. What about the real world?

I found a nice list of actual bike weights for a range of bike styles and sizes. The bikes included long lists from Specialized and Giant (two respectable mass-market bike makers) as well as some more boutique brands. It covered a wide gamut of bicycles, from BMX to MTB to Road.

Le Chacal compared to a wide gamut of models, manufacturers, and styles

With this, I realized Le Chacal weighs the same as an average mountain bike. Right around thirty pounds. Road bikes are closer to nineteen pounds. Le Chacal also compares favorably to all-purpose hybrid bikes.

Le Chacal compared to the entire line of bikes built by Specialized

I feel a bit better having done this analysis. It shows that Le Chacal is not a piggish bike, compares reasonably well to MTB’s and Hybrids, to which it’s most similar, and by trimming a few pounds off from wheels and components, I actually move Le Chacal to the more competitive side of the weight spectrum in MTB and Hybrid classes.

Manufacturer’s average weights by class

Distribution of weights inside classes of bikes

I don’t know what I was expecting when I did a weight analysis of Le Chacal. That didn’t stop me from being surprised that my two wheels account for a full one-third of the total 13.84kg (roughly 30lbs) bicycle.

I’m glad to discover this, because I have known all along that my wheels are overbuilt. The rims are wide and heavily spoked, meant for a BMX bike, and the Kenda tires are pretty chunky, too. So cutting the weight with lighter wheels should make a good relative contribution to the bike. A ten percent savings here would amount to around 400 grams (nearly a pound) or a total 3% weight reduction.

Where can I make other savings? There is nothing I can do about the seat tube+cranks. I’m not sure how much the seat tube weighs versus the crank, but it’s probably 95% crankset, 5% seat tube. The crankset is a high-end Shimano set, so that’s about as good as it’ll be.

There’s no savings in the Fork/Headset either, unless I were to replace the steel blade fork with a carbon fork. Maybe I should consider that. Any meaningful savings from a different headset?

The seat stay and chain stay are made from fork blades. Consequently they’re pretty heavy. There’s nothing to do about it now, but I should think about this for Matt’s bike, The Fourth Protocol. Longer term, maybe I could try out carbon seat stays. Sulaiman suggested that we can probably use lighter tubeset overall.

There’s not much left than incremental savings on some of the components. The Pannier rack is heavy and nothing special. Perhaps I can hack that down or find an alternative. The seat is a stock Bontrager MTB seat. Nothing special and not especially nice for touring anyway. Maybe I’ll loot the fizik seat from my road bike.

Relative weights

This bike will never be a feather, nor need it be. I can probably save some weight and rolling resistance with some lighter wheels and maybe trimming a bit here and there. But, as Alton Brown likes to say, “a pint’s a pound the world around.” Filling up my water bottle can counteract my expensive component upgrades. At the end of the day, this is touring bike, not a racer, so it doesn’t matter so much.

Le Chacal originally had its rear brakes mounted underneath the chainstay. This proved problematic. The tolerances were too fine. The brakes barely fit properly to the rim, and the caliper arm was mere millimeters from the plane of the crank. It was an adjustment headache and a situation bound for catastrophe where crank + caliper collide.

Why didn’t I originally mount the brakes to the seat stay, like most bikes? The shafts of the brake braze-ons should be 180mm apart. The seatstay’s blades are too wide. Backed into a corner, I had to figure out a way to extend the brazeons closer to the center of the bicycle, so I could get to 180mm.

Seatstay

We cut some cmall bits of tubing, chopped them into a C-shape, and brazed the seatstay blade/C/braze-on simultaneously. It worked out well. We made a solid clamp to hold the pieces together and I got everything a uniform, bright red. The brass flowed evenly and smoothly. The backside had a bit of metal to be filed away because the clamping wire caused a touch of capillary action to pull the brass, but it wasn’t too bad and isn’t visible.

Flow, my brass, the policeman said.

So everything is sorted here. Sulaiman will repaint and I should be ready for the Taipei Bike Show #tcs next week.

Glad to be getting out of here.

Bike packed up quite easily. Seemed to have crammed it a bit tighter this time. Weighs in at close to 35 pounds if i have it really crammed with rubbish. Closer to thirty if it’s only bike-stuff. The helmet is the biggest nuisance to pack. The suitcase closes up very nicely sans helmet. But I have to do more fidgeting and jamming if I include the helmet. For obvious reasons I’m not thrilled to be mashing my suitcase when I know my helmet is pinned in there.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm Just remembered…. where the hell are my saddle bags?! Better go find those.

Omani Border post. Waiting for John Rambo to arrive with Bazooka.

5% 10%? Even downhill was brisk

Tiny panorama

click here to download the Quicktime VR panorama

Setting up a high tension tower

I couldn’t make out exactly what was happening. It looked like they were cinching up the cables between 2ndRecent and 3rdRecent. This was the second-to-most-recent tower. The most recent tower, with massive temporary anchor cables, was still unpainted. There was a terrible amount of yelling and carrying on. I’m not sure exactly what the process was. I didn’t see anyone/anything at the third-most-recent tower either. It appears cable-pulling duty was provided by the backhoe below. Indian men were pushing around giant block-and-tackle pulleys that look as big as a small washing machine. I took short video but it doesn’t help to explain much either.

All-in-all it was a very pleasant four hour ride. I should have liked to do the full ride into Oman, I had the legs and planning for it, but oh well.

Le Chacal rides. After a heroic wheel-building effort from Sulaiman, we finished assembling Le Chacal today at 7pm. I report that it rides extremely well. It feels solid and similar to my Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bike. I am very happy with it. Tomorrow I will attempt to disassemble and pack it into a small suitcase. I leave for Liberation Day parade on Tuesday.

I need to stage a better photograph later.

When I get some more time, and after I’ve made revisions to the bike, I’ll do a proper neutral background picture of the bike. In the meantime, in my excitement, this is the best I have. Notice the over-long stem. The extender is too long. To compensate, I flipped the stem upside down. Looks weird, but the handlebars are in a good position relative to the seat. It’s a bit daunting riding the bike, because it feels like there is a 4″ long spike waiting to drive into my chest. Anyway, Sulaiman can machine off the end on Monday. I love the Kenda “urban trials free-riding” tires. They’re sort of urban BMX tires with a neutral, omni-directional tread. Not knobby enough to suck on the road, yet enough traction to ride on dirt roads.

Le Chacal

We tried to achieve a “gun blueing” effect on the frame, by tinting the clear laquer blue, but it’s not very apparent. Tomorrow I’ll have a chance to see it under sunlight, which brings out something of a violet tint. Can I blue my next frame like a firearm? Would that be more durable than a paint job? Sulaiman put heavy coats of laquer and top coat to hide the imperfections in my frame. It looks rich. I managed to drop a (heavy) part of my park bike stand on the top tube, taking some big dings out of the paint. Turns out that my roll of electrical tape is a very similar black, so I “touched up” the scar with that.

Chainstay. The matte part of the chainstay is actually several layers of electrical tape to guard against chainslap. Probably insufficient. I’ll have to do something better later.

This is a bit finicky part of the bike. The rear v-brakes cannot fit on the seatstay, as would be traditional, so we had to mount them on the chainstay. It’s not ideal, but it works. The tolerances are VERY tight, tryin to get the brakes andjusted, but to not come out far enough that the pedal hits them, etc. This is definitely not great part of the design. Fourth Protocol will have a different braking system for sure.

Seatstay

S&S Coupling

Got a surprising SMS today.

I didn’t expect this until saturday. Sulaiman has already machined out an extension that clamps on the steeering tub and extend up to the stem/handlebars. Turned on a lathe and cut for two clamps.

Wow! Sulaiman is going nuts. And I feel bad, because I know how many frames in his queue are waiting to be painted!

Today I booked my vacation to Taiwan. I’m going to the Taiwan International Cycle Show in March. Sulaiman and a few other friends are going. They’re going to bicycle around Taiwan for another week thereafter. I’m going to join them for riding for a few days as well before heading home.

Once I get back from Dubai I’m going to have to help Sulaiman get his own Le Chacal finished for his Taiwan trip. I’m not sure what he’s going to call his bike, but I’m looking forward to helping out on it.

I gave my friend Sulaiman a minor heart-attack today when I mentioned that I was leaving for Dubai next Tuesday. How in the world are we supposed to finish the bike in time for me to take it. Remaining: wheel building, painting, stem fabrication, and assembly. After some deliberation, we decided if we only primered the frame, that would leave enough time to finish it up for my Tuesday flight. I’ll properly paint it when I return in February.

I spent a few hours at the Rebound Centre today working on frame prep. We reamed out and faced the head tube and the seat tube. Brazing warps the tubes, so with a very precise reamer, we scrape it back to round. I did bunch of filet filing and took the rest of the lot home to polish up and tape the S&S couplings. Next week Sulaiman will sandblast, primer, and paint the rest of the frame. The fork is already painted, but not top-coated.

My big problem now is finding rims for my bike. I need high quality, 32-spoke, 20″ rims preferably about 26mm wide. Bike shops haven’t had them here and the BMX specialist only had 36 and 42-spoke wheels (way overkill). Ugh. I need them quick. I may need to airlift them from the USA.

When I came home I used my dremel tool to cheat and polish up the s&s couplings. Luke saw and wanted to join in. So we played with the dremel tool and afterwards he decided he wanted to drill (his favorite craft).

Luke and Mona then went on to play chase and tug-of-war until they were both absolutely exhausted.

Ling, Emily, Luke, and Ling’s mom are in Klang visiting their family. I’ve spent all weekend working on my bike.

It’s getting close to the end, and it’s getting to all the sort of shit I hate doing. I feel like I’m in Vo-tech Autobody Class now…. filing brass, sanding rust, cleaning up the finish. Stuff I’m neither inclined to enjoy nor inclined to do a good job with. Anyway, the fork is primered, as are two straight segments of down and seat tubes. The remaining pieces still need more cleanup to smooth out the filet welds.

Boy, lesson learned. “touchups” of brazes suck. Far, far better to do it all correct and complete the first time. Do it right, like I did on a job today, and the resulting work is so smooth and nice, it barely needs sanding. Do it wrong, and you get boiled-off brass, bubbles, lumps, excessive filing, etc. Major mistake? don’t get the piece(s) uniformly cherry red. Most of my problem came from applying brass before everything was critically hot.

Anyway, I’d say by this time next week I should have a totally primered frame. I’m working on a small headbadge. My main issue now is getting hold of a good quality wheel-set for the bike. The rest of it I’ll assemble with ubiquitous Shimano components. I need to make a stem too, but I can do that later.

I took a day off today to settle a bunch of errands in the morning and then spent the afternoon at Rebound Centre working on Le Chacal.

I silver-soldered the “braze on” fittings– water bottle screw mounts, pannier mounts, and cable guides.

I tried to touch up some missing brass on an earlier braze but didn’t build enough of a fillet and I’ll still have to build it up further.

The silver-soldered stuff went on mostly ok except for one I flubbed, blackening the metal. When the joint is polluted with oxidation, the silver won’t flow until I clean it up.

I didn’t mess with the two sets of brake mounts yet. They’re a bit more fidgety to fit, measure, and mount. Plus, they need brazed with brass, not silver, and I managed to ruin the #2 oxy-acetylene tip I use for brass brazing. So tomorrow I need to run to the welding gas store and buy a new tip.

The bike is getting dangerously close to assembly. Finishing today’s work on Saturday will be an hour or so. Hopefully I can get the brake mounts finished in under two hours. With that done, we’re ready to prep the bike, facing the bottom bracket, etc. At that point I have a finished frame ready to paint.

I want to hustle and get this finished. Looks like I’ll have to be in Dubai for most of the second half of January. Yuck. A workweek there is bad enough, let alone a weekend. I think what I’ll do is take a weekend trip to Oman. It’s mountainous desert and should be considerably more interesting than Dubai. This will be a great chance to test out ho Le Chacal works in the field. What better place to do it than in the mountains of a medieval desert fiefdom.

Things I’d do differently for my next frame, The Fourth Protocol:

1. Before I do any work, I’ll primer the tubes. This will keep them from corroding from my sweaty hands (I cannot wear gloves — they drive me nuts) and will make marking measuring points far clearer. I can always sandblast that off and re-primer properly when ready to paint.
2. Label everything. “up down left right” etc. The would have saved me, for example, one wrecked set of dropouts and an afternoon.

Everything but the fork

Sulaiman was the hero of the day. After I made a totally pathetic effort to scallop one of the s&s fittings with the grinder, Sulaiman volunteered to grind the other THREE (ugh — that’s about 6 square inches of carefully ground-away metal) while I silver-soldered. It was telling that I couldn’t even distinguish the factory-scalloped fittings from those Sulaiman made. While my one’s “point” was a 5mm radius circle.

I am off Wednesday, so I should be able to make a very earnest run at finish this thing up to make it ready for painting and components. Sort of a weird that all the sudden it’s 80% done.