Industriousnesitude: Tyvek Toe Warmers

This is too good not to pass along. Via RANDONNEUREXTRA

I saw this and was all like

Check it out.

Xtracycle Add Ons

I added some DIY foot pegs to the Xtracycle last week. These are re-purposed bar ends that slide perfectly onto the xtracycle v-racks. When my daughter gets too big for her seat I'll move the bar ends down as needed.

I saw this on another blog and thought It looked like a good fix. To waterproof your xtracycle, take sections of road tube and slide them up the racks. When they are all the way on, take the bottom half of the tube and roll it up over the top half. Next put the racks back on the frame and unroll. The tube should create a nice waterproof sleeve where the racks meet the frame.

It's the little things...

April Harvest: Morels And Ramps

WARNING: The following post is about another hobby of mine and has nothing to do with bikes.

I think April is my new favorite month. I'm a huge fan of foraging for wild foods and April has quite a bounty. This month I've found my usual morel mushroom spots to be producing quite well. I found enough morels for a few meals which is not always the case. 
Sauteed in a little butter and shallots, these yellows and greys let off a succulent hazelnutty flavor.

This year I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a nice sized patch of ramps, (aka wild leeks) while foraging for morels. If a very yummy onion and a clove of garlic made sweet sweet love and had a baby, that stinky lovechild would be a ramp. The ones I found don't have the reddish stem color that most do but turn out to be much more tasty.

After making a few ramp omelets I did a search and found two recipes on Food52. The first was a pesto from the greens which turned out great. No garlic needed.

The second was for spicy pickled ramps which should be done this week.

I should note that if you find a patch of ramps, harvest sparingly to ensure next years crop.


It's nice to find and eat local foods sans food industry.

DC area wild food resources:
MAW DC
The Natural Capital
Slow Food DC

Xtracycle: DIY Child Seat

My first project was to make a new snapdeck and attach a child seat to it for my eldest. As I spec'd out wood for this project I found the scratch and dent section on Xtracycle's website and scored a scratched and dented snapdeck for half price. Perfect for drilling holes into! 

After dremeling the legs and springs off a Topeak child seat, I attached it to the snapdeck using 5, 1/4" bolts with large washers for stability. Now, when I'm taking the little one to school I put her snapdeck with the seat on and when I'm going to work or running errands I put the regular one on, easy peasie. As a precautionary measure when I have her seat on the xtracycle I strap the bars together in the front and back to make sure they tight and secure against the snapdeck. 

When she's older I will move the seat back for my youngest, put a pad on the snapdeck and add a hadelbar for my oldest.

Holidaze 2010: Bike Gear Cheer DIY

Once again I have a prolonged holiday cold which has kept me off the bike (and the blog) for weeks. To combat the doldrums I've turned to the "Holiday Spirits" to pull me through. After consuming a few glasses of said spirits I made this ornament for a tree decorating party I attended this weekend. 

It's pretty straight forward. I butchered two semi-worn cassettes I had laying around and got my little girl to help me paint the bottom on to look like a wreath. Then I tied it all together with picture frame wire.


Holidayed Bitches

PS. Any home cold remedies are welcome. The wackier the better.

New Blog Series: Will It Compost?

Most of you have probably seen the "Will It Blend?" website that made the rounds a while back. The idea was to see if the latest must have personal electronics equipment could be taken out by a blender. The answer was always yes, yes a blender can destroy an: ipod, cellphone, game system... whatever. I thought it was pretty stupid at the time but a variation of the idea might be pretty cool. Recently I purchased a set of Ergon GP1 grips (which I love),  and noticed the substantial "green" engineering effort that went into the packaging and I had my variation.

Will It Compost? 

The idea is to put packaging that is supposedly "green" to the test by subjecting said packaging to a month in my worm composting bin. Then I'll be able to judge weather the companies claims of eco-friendliness are legit or full of compost. If my worms don't eat it, it ain't green. At the same time I will be getting an education on green packaging, as I don't know much about it. 

And just to clarify, I'm not going to put recyclable plastics or any other petroleum based product in the bin, unless the product claims to be biodegradable.

So Ergon, think your packaging is sustainable? Let's find out.
As you can see in the photo below, Ergon uses soy ink and 100% recycled paper. There is also some glue holding the cardboard tube to the rest of the package. 

Step 1. Cut a hole in a box...  Soak the packaging.

Step 2. Shred the packaging to make it easier for the worms to work with.

Step 3. Throw it in the bin!

Tik-Tok Tik-Tok... (fast forward a month or so...)

DING! We have our results.

The worms ate almost all of the packaging. They went through all of the pressed cardboard material leaving only a ring of glue mentioned above and the thin "waxy" outer layer that made up what the main graphic was printed on. One cool thing about worms is that they leave behind only what they don't like. A good example is this Starbucks cup I threw in there a while back.

The worms are about halfway done with it. They eat the paper leaving behind thin layer of wax that made the cup waterproof.

I'm pretty happy with these results. Most companies would put a product like this in clear plastic, which even if it does make it to the recycling bin uses more oil and more energy to make it into yet another piece of plastic.

In this case (for most of this package), I represent the end of the line, converting a useful product, paper, into an even more useful byproduct, fertilizer for my winter greens and eventually food on my plate.

In conclusion I think Ergon did a great job with their grip packaging. The only improvement would be if they  could find a way to print the graphic directly onto the cardboard and use less glue.

Please comment with any "Will It Compost?" requests.

Happy Mondaying

DIY: Helmet Repair

I'm a bit tough on my bike gear. I tend to push bike parts and accessories farther than most people would. Mostly because I'm cheap but do take pride in the longevity of a good bike part.

I have a Giro Atmos that I love dearly. It's a great helmet that I rarely notice while riding. To me that's the sign of a good piece of gear. If your not thinking about it while riding then it's doing it's job and all is well. 

With the Atmos however, a piece of the metal... um...  clip housing thingy, broke off allowing the plastic band that fits the helmet to my head to come loose...  often. To fix this I took a rather unconventional approach. I needed to put something in there that would harden in place like glue. I was worried about the glue dissolving the styrofoam making the problem worse or possibly weakening the helmet.  What I came up with was wood filler.

With a little wood filler in place the plastic strap snaps right back into place allowing me to once again forget about it's existence.

I know it's frowned upon to do any repairs to a helmet out of fear that the helmet won't perform as it should when the time comes but this seems pretty minor. I'm going to replace it at the end of the summer anyway.


All this talk of helmets makes me think of... the 90's.

Lethargy And Vermiculture

So I'm still under the weather. Still not biking. It's been 7 weeks since I felt well.

SEVEN WEEKS...

Grasping for perspective and anything positive I've turned what little energy I have toward hobbying. I started to think about all the cool things that I wish I had the time to get into but never did. The list was long but somewhere near the top was vermiculture. No, it's not something to do with breeding rats, it's composting with worms. I have been considering this for some time and it seems like just the low energy distraction I need.

A bin of worms will eat most non-meat non-dairy kitchen scraps as well as newspaper, cardboard, egg cartons etc, turning it all into highly effective fertilizer for my veggie garden.

There are several different ways to make your own worm composting bin. Most of which can be done with things you already have lying around your house (google it). After some research on worm compost bin design I settled on a simple one bin system from seattletilth.org. There are benefits to doing a stackable system where the worms will separate themselves from the compost on their own but I thought for my first venture I'd keep it simple.

My worm bin is coming along. I have a few vents installed but I think I need a few more. Rather than spend more money on fancy louvered vents I think I'll just drill some 1" holes and glue screen to the inside of the box.

PamJ is kindly helping me out with the worms, which I will get as soon as I'm finished with the box and bedding. Hopefully they will like their new digs.

UPDATE:
The 1" holes with screen worked out great with a healthy serving of super glue. I believe the bin is adequately ventilated.

Tail Light Back Pack Hack

So I have a theory about the cyclical nature of lost gear and cycling. The idea is that the gear you loose on the trail has a way of coming back around to you in a new form. Example: if you loose a tail light you will eventually find another tail light or a pair of cycling glasses if you ride enough. This theory came about after loosing one too many tail lights and finding a few.

Last night in hopes to break the cycle I made an enhancement to my Deuter AC Lite 25 back pack that should stop the tail light from falling off.

I punched two grommets through the fabric of the back pack and ran a zip tie through and around the clip of my tail light. I tightened the zip tie as much as I could and now the light isn't going anywhere. The grommets are through the top flap of the pack so there are no holes in the main compartment.

I got the grommet kit from Home Depot. The kit is made for tarps and vinyl but easily worked on the heavy canvas of my pack. Included in the kit was a hole punch which was useless on fabric so I just cut a very small X with and exacto knife and punched the grommet through.

I got the idea for this from a blog I read last year but for the life of me I can't remember which one.

Say "Back Pack Hack" out loud, right now.

Tuesday, I wish I could quit you...

Talkin' Bout Mudflaps: DIY

Spinal Tap? Anyone?

I found out on a training ride the Continental Contact tires that come with the LHT (yeah you know me) spew out a ton of dust on dry dirt trails like the C&O Tow Path. After a 55 mile ride I was covered in dust and annoyance. After consulting with the LHT&CC google group I decided that a mudflap was just what I needed. However, for something so simple they can be pretty expensive, and I thought I could make one ten different ways out of stuff lying around the house. One way rose to the top, making one out of old mountain bike tubes and glue.

It was pretty simple, I cut open a tube and lay it flat cutting out two sections of similar length and gluing them together. I used one of those dual compound super glues and it seems to work fine. Once it was fully dry I cut the jagged messy edges off and it looked pretty good. Another option might be to use tire patch glue.

Next up, using my Dremel I drilled two small holes in the fender to attach the mudflap. I made the holes as small as I could and far enough from the edges that they wouldn't weaken the fender itself.

Finally I fastened the mudflap to the fender with a small zip tie. I made sure to face the mudflap outward so the curve of the tubes matched that of the tire.

After riding it in this morning I think I may add third or maybe even forth layer of rubber to stiffen the mudflap. It was flapping a bit at high speed.

UPDATE:

I added two more layers of rubber and it seems to work perfectly.

What did the hand say to the Monday?

SLAP!

Crank Brothers Candy Rebiuld, A Rambouillet And Safetyness

I am a destroyer of bikes and bike parts. I'm the cthulhu of all things that make bikes go. That's where the irony lies, for I have a deep deep man-gear love for every little piece of my bikes. Most of the destruction comes from my belief that if you ignore the problem it will just go away. This is never the case but I continue to hold to it. I have been getting a squeak in one of my Crank Brothers Candy pedals for a few months and ignoring it was not working. So I ordered a rebuild kit from these guys and let it sit on the shelf for a few more weeks just to make sure the problem wasn't going away. Finally the squeak had reached a volume than couldn't be ignored and last night I got to work. 

Much like Chris King, Crank Brothers have very cool DIY videos on their website.

The first thing I noticed was that the sealed bearings seals had disintegrated and the bearing body had rusted to the inside of the pedal.  After some WD-40 and elbow grease the rusted bearing body gave way and the rest of the rebuild went swimmingly. 

Sealed bearings should never see the light of day, very sad.

New                              Old

The rust damage to the spindle body was pretty bad. I don't think this pedal will ever run smoothly again. It should however work slightly less than smoothly for a very long time. This is an easy fix that I recommend to anyone for do at first sign or sound of trouble.

Next up,  I saw this Rivendell Rambouillet in Silver Spring yesterday. I was noticing the Carradice saddle bag and thought it might look nice under my B-17. It may be too big though.

Finally, I got another batch of stickers from the Safety is Sexy bunch. 

Cheer up, your Monday is almost over.

Bike Tubes For Household Use

There was a gap between the floor boards and a joist running under my closet that would vibrate when the furnace kicked on. I was having trouble finding a solution until I thought, "what would Sheldon Brown do"? I figured cutting up an old schrader tube and wedging the pieces in to the gap to serve as rubber bushings is just the sort of thing he would have come up with.

Pabst of Yore

I was working in the basement this weekend and decided it would be a good idea to go spelunking in the crawl space. What I found there was a treasure every cyclist and cheap beer aficionado would be proud of. Whoever built my house in 1937 was drinking on the job, god bless em' and dropped a few empty cans of PBR into the foundation before slapping the house on top. These cans sat still for 71 freakin years, waiting for someone with the lack of common sense to shimmy their way into the darkness and yank them into the 21st century. There they could achieve the greatness those cans were destined for... a handy tool holder on my peg board! With a can opener, a dremel tool, and a wee bit o' moxie I brought a little more honor to my beloved workspace.

suck it.

Details:
I used a dremel cutting wheel to make a cut around one inch long at the top of the back of the can. Then it was just a matter of sliding the peg board bracket in through the slit. I finished it off with some glue to keep everything tight.