Always with the projects

The original, the mold, the duplicate.

I've made a bunch of saddles over the years and finally think I figured out the formula.

I'm always looking for something that is comfortable. But also something that I made myself because, you know that's just me. I borrowed the ism 3.0 saddle on the left from my friend Tim and I almost really like it.  It's ugly as sin but it gets the job done.

Big vacation

I've been in Spain for the past week with a couple of friends riding bikes. It's the first time I've done a trip like this and it had been really fun.


We are in the town of Calpe, on the Costa Blanca, which is a great home base for riding. The town is hot to at least two world tour cycling teams, and there are another 4 or 5 more in the area. I was passed by the reigning Olympic road race champion, Greg Van Avermat and his teammates the other day. The riding is insanely good here as the pictures can attest. The one exception is that the roads are fine when dry, but as slippery as snot on a rock when wet.

I ate shit on an otherwise innocent looking corner on Saturday. It looked innocent, but was in the shade. With the humid air, the condensation forms on cold surfaces, and the sun hadn't dried off the dew of the morning. I ended up taking some skin off my hands and wrecking my rear derailleur and the derailleur hanger. On the plus side, they have a bunch of bike rental places around here; I found a rental that fit and was back in the saddle again today for probably the most scenic ride I've ever done.

It was a great experience just figuring things out and staying calm and realizing that it can all work out in the end. I'm at my best on vacation, need to bring that with me back home.

I just love mugs.

And by mugs I mean bikes. I got my 3/4 Trek emonda put back together as a killer cross bike. it looks good, rides good and all it cost me was a heap of time and a couple hundred bucks in random parts and carbon bits.

Why stress about bike geometry

Sometimes, it just doesn't even matter.

I found a pomegranate

In the course of bicycle rides over the past years I found a surprising number of things. The first thing I found was a wrench on my way to go skiing in St Paul Minnesota. Over the years I've found, tools, furniture, money, and a surprising number of fruit. Today was a good day, I found a pomegranate. It was sitting nicely in the gutter as I left the city just past City Avenue, a nice fresh, unblemished pomegranate

My 1000 other bikes

Feet Redux

Before and After-- Scott Scale

I just did a repair on an odd little crack that may have been precipitated by a rock strike, or just some massive quadriceps, on a Scott Scale. Certainly not a huge break, but one that could have led to a long walk home. 

I'm really pretty happy with how this one turned out.  I was able to vacuum bag just the joint, which requires a lot more sealer tape than I've been using in the past with my 'giant ziploc' approach.  The extra stretchy green vacuum film along with some more stretchy release fabric provides a bit better appearance with fewer wrinkles in the finished product. I basically overbuilt the entire brake area since it's a fairly high-stress zone. 

Swing and a miss

So, turns out my shoes were a good try, but not good enough to wear more than half an hour. The arch is hugely supportive, but supportive like a brick, not supportive like a good friend in a time of need.  When I took the cast of my feet, i did so in a fully relaxed position; basically I put on a sock, dunked my foot in liquid plaster of paris and let it set with no pressure on it.  This did create an accurate representation of my foot, but didn't account for how my foot works under pressure.  I've got super flexible arches, so much so that my footprint is basically a ski, rather than the traditional bean shape.

Rather than re-cast my foot wholesale, I decided to do some editorializing with a bit of bondo, lowering the arch, widening the heel, and making a bit more room for my toes.  We'll see how this next one goes.

Fancy Feet

Ever since I got my first set of orthotics back in college following my first round with Achilles tendinitisI have wanted to make my own custom footbeds. I guess that turned one thing into another and I finally ended up completing (mostly) a set of custom cycling shoes. I made the foot molds a year or so ago, and the soles have seen fits of work every now and again, but I finally cobbled together the uppers and soles this week.

The uppers are a pair of Allen Edmonds Oxford shoes that I got on eBay. They were too big, but cheap enough that it wasn't worth relisting them. With a bit of trimming, they formed fairly nicely to the soles. I hope to try them out this weekend. We'll see if they wreck any of my body parts.

Ohanami

One always needs goals.  My goal with this bike was to get it painted, assembled and ridden before the cherry blossoms had all fallen.  In the end I squeaked by, but only just.  First ride was April 27th, and it was good.  Of course I had to take some gratuitous pictures in front of the cherry blossoms in Fairmount Park, and then do some loops through the winding park roads. Two awesome things occurred during the ride.  One, my bike didn't break, and actually rode pretty much exactly as I'd hoped it would.  Two, I got a flat tire.  What made the flat tire awesome is that it happened right across the street from a condo building on City Avenue that's undergoing rennovation.  As I pulled out my spare tube, wrenched around for way too long with the Michelin tire on the stupid deep section rims, and started to pump things back up with the cutest little pump ever, I noticed the security guard from the building winding his way down the driveway and across the street towards me.  I thought he was just headed to the convenience store to my back, but he was definitely headed my way.  

When he got about 70 feet from me (standard Philadelphia conversation distance) he yelled out, "Yo, you got a pump? Lemme see that?"  He was totally smitten with the micro pump that I was furiously employing to get the tire back up to pressure.  

I responded, "Yeah, it's awesome to carry, but it's a pain to use.  You basically have to pump it a million times to get the tire inflated."

"Right, I was over there watching you and it looked like you was jerkin' off!"

Yep, that's what I was thinking it must have looked like, and that's what he came out and said.  I replied, "Yeah, you know, just sitting here on the side of the road, enjoying the weather, jackin' it."  

Then he turned and went, "See ya. Have a good one." and walked into the store to get an ice tea.

Some progress

I finally got the tubes all tacked together and it's time to start the lay up of the joints. This is the first bike that I've ever done with full carbon construction, and honestly, it's a lot easier than working with bamboo. Things are straight, at least for the factory made tubes, and there isn't the concern about splitting.

A quick rundown of the geometry that I've settled on for my 'perfect' road bike.

All dimensions in millimeters.  

• Head Tube 182
• Seat Tube 570
• Top Tube 590
• Chainstay Length 410
• Seat Tube Angle 73 deg
• Head Tube Angle 73 Deg
• Rake 43
• Trail 58
• BB Drop 72

The idea here is more of a road bike, as in something for the longer steadier courses, than a criterium bike.  I'm hoping that stability will be good, and that it will just lean into a corner and stick it.  Even with my 177.5 mm cranks, I can get away with the lower BB drop because I prefer Speedplay pedals with their extra cornering clearance.   In the end, it works out pretty much the same as a 68 BB drop with standard Look or SPD pedals.  I have really liked how well the lower overall center of gravity felt on my last bike, though that was largely due to an incorrect fit.

Little something that I whipped up in my basement composites lab

I was recently inspired by a couple of different folks, most recently the folks at Guru in Canada, and thn some crazy kid in Slovenia who is doing amazing things with carbon.  There is something that I really like about working with carbon fiber.  I like that it's a flexible material, that there are almost limitless options for how it can be made, and that with enough time I could do almost all of the operations in my basement.  Sure a full-on prototyping facility would be grand, but just wait until I get the new basement set up.  It's going to be sweet.

Top tube and modified chainstays in anticipation of my new bike.

The chainstays are merely a modification of the ENVE stays that I've been using for years.  I added a sculpted block of styrofoam filler and then overlaid the carbon. to make what is essentially a giant gusset along the inside of both stays.  Should be stiffer, and not a whole lot heavier.  I can definitely tell that ENVE spent a lot of time working on their commercial products, but frankly not a whole lot of time engineering their framebuilder supplies.  It seems like it was basically just my man Carl Turner cranking stuff out to order.  Oh well, now it's on me to figure out how to make cool stuff.

The tube was all me though.  I dissected a Scott Addict top tube to figure out generally what goes on inside the layup of a good bike, and found that it went something like this:

From outside to inside the unidirectional plies were laid up in the following orientation (degrees):

+45
- 45
  90
+60
- 60
+45
- 45

So I just worked to mimic that layup with the various types of fiber that I have at my disposal.  I wouldn't say that it worked perfectly, but I would give my first top tube a B- all things considered.

Some inspiration and reconfiguration

Some good posts recently on Bike Rumor which have solidified my idea of making a full carbon bike for myself.  I'm even thinking that I'm going to take a stab at molding my own tubes around a mandrel.  I've done some dissecting of a Scott Addict top tube, and will delve into some other bits and pieces to get a better idea for what other companies are doing.

Also, I gotta give a shout out to my friends Richie and Max at Philly Bikesmith.  They took about 2 hours last night to fit me and go over all of the crazy details that go into bike design.  My current plan is to let them come up with a frame design for me and then build it up.  After picking their brains last night, I have utmost confidence that they'll come up with something that fits and handles well.  The rest is just up to me building the dang thing.

Lots of pondering, not much doing

I've been test-thrashing my second version of my bamboo CX bike, and in general I like it. The steering is a bit on the slack side compared with anything else I've ever done, trail must be close to 60 mm, which makes for some awesoeme high-speed turn carving ability, but some unusual sensations at lower speeds. I 'think' that I like it, but it's different enough from any of my other bikes that I'm honestly not sure. My other issue is that with my general strength imbalances, it feels like the bike pulls right. That said, most of my bikes feel like they pull to the right, so this isn't necessarily indicative of anything wrong. My hunch is that it's mostly the difference between the handling sensations and my own lopsidedness. Eventually my plan is to get an alignment table set up in the basement of our new house, but that project kind of depends on the state of the basement over there. It's not finished yet, so the granite alignment table will have to wait.


 My other recent brainwave is that maybe I want to make a full-carbon bike. I've spent much of my time thus far designing around the limitations of bamboo--it it can split, it's not as light as carbon and the torsional rigidity is not so spectacular. I read an interesting interview with Nick Frey, proprietor of Boo cycles about how they deal with these issues, or don't. I general find the guy pretty irritating, too much spin and wide-eyed optimism for my liking, but he seems to be living the dream and his grad school project did inspire me to do my own work, so hard to fault him there.  Maybe for a full on race bike, it'd be more awesomer to build a bike out of carbon fiber ONLY!  Might be on to something here, as all of the top bikes in the world are carbonium these days.  I'm trying to decide if I'm going to try to make my own tubes.  Well, specifically, my own top tube and seat tube.  I've got remnants from ENVE for all the other pieces, but nothing that strikes me as particularly appropriate for a top tube or seat tube.  If Kirklee can build their own tubes, why not me?   Oh yeah, because they do this professionally and have sunk hundreds of thousands into tooling.  Me, just twos or threes of thousands. I really enjoyed looking through this guy's photo album of how he built a couple of fantastic looking road bikes.  Looks like he got frozen out by ENVE as well.  They are capitalist bastards after all.

The incredible bamboo hulk.

Head tube

The green machine is basically done and I'm waiting for the go-ahead from Ian on the color scheme before applying the clearcoat and sending it off.  Ian was thinking of the natural bamboo color as the theme for the bike, and I have actually been thinking of that exact color theme for a looong time.  The emerald green of growing bamboo just looks fantastic and I hope that the tint I found does it justice.  Hopefully it will look even deeper in color once the clearcoat is applied.  The green on green on green is a little unusual for me, since I've always done some sort of contrast colors before, but I think it works here.  The other color I was thinking of for the text is a pearlescent orange, but that would probably just end up looking like Michaelangelo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.  Mikey-angelo was always Ian's favorite from childhood, so maybe that's what I should have gone with.
 


If he OK's it today, I can get it clearcoated tonight, polished tomorrow and boxed up and shipped out by Thursday.  That would be just super. I think I had initially told Ian i'd have the bike done in the spring, but hey, time flies when you're in the basement.

Downtube View

Head tube/Top tube joint

Seat cluster

The whole shebang. Bamboo bike number 11. 

Brotherly Bike

I've been working on a bike for my brother Ian for the past few weeks.  It's actually a centaur of sorts--the front end is brand-new but the rear is the rear end from my attempt last spring at a new road bike.  While that bike was a flop due to some incorrect tubing spec, this should be a winner.  I've done some new stuff and really like how it's turned out so far.

Here's my idea for a head tube badge.  It's a nice reproduction of a ukiyo-e print from a calendar I had last year.  The scene was from the February month, and given that Ian was born then, I thought it fitting.  There are 11 other versions that might fit the bill too though, so I'll let him pick.

Ian's Bike

 Looks like I'm almost ready for test riders!  Really too bad that I'm not in riding shape right now, as I've got a feeling this is going to be my best bike yet.

Another view

A view of the brake bridge and seat cluster of Ian's bike. Notice the black line running along the top tube.  That's the seam where I split the tube and lined it with carbon fiber.  Stiffness should be pretty good and it should be more resistant to the ever popular handlebar smash in the unlikely event of a crash.

LITTLE BIKE DONE!

Thanks to the flying spaghetti monster for his blessing!  I finally have finished the tiny cruiser and sent it away to its owner.  Also, it actually fits, and fits pretty well. After the last screw up, I chopped out the top tube and seat stays and re-did them a fair bit lower.  The end effect was sort of a BMX looking city bike, but one that gives generous ground clearance.  I took no chances here, and am unbelievabley relieved to have the monkey finally off my back.  My only regret is that I didn't take any pictures before it left my posession.  Sometimes it might be better to forget anyway.