No training wheels

Yay Maddie!
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Friday Route Recon

Mr Blaine and I spent the morning going over the "meat" of the Midnight Century course that he's devised for this year. The "meat" is from where the route crosses Highway 27 and pops you out in Spangle.

There's ample dirt road. Lots of washboard. Hard steep dirt climbs. One particularly tight, twisty washboardy dirt road descent, and a closed road section. It's a closed summer road. So when it was open it was rough. Now that it's closed and forgotten, it's pretty rough.

David rode his single-speed 29'er with no problems. I rode my blue RB-T with 32mm Pasalas. It worked ok, but I'm probably going to end up riding a fat-tired road bike with a more volume in the tires. Aside from this middle section, which is difficult, the other hard part about this route will be water. Basically, the route goes out to Liberty Lake on the trail, comes back through Saltese Flats, across 27, to Spangle, almost to Cheney, then into Spokane via the Fish Lake trail.

So, the "meat" section, between Liberty Lake and Spangle -- roughly 50 miles -- has no services where you can refill your water. I need tons of water, so I'll probably be bringing my camel pack in addition to my water bottles. I'll fill the camel pack in Liberty Lake.

Spangle (about 70 miles into the ride) does have services, but they all open at 6 AM. So if you're fast, you may miss out on the services. I won't have that problem. By the time I get to Spangle, I may sit down for breakfast at the Harvester, which -- like the convenience store -- opens at 6 AM on Sunday morning.

If you're interested: the ride leaves the Elk restaurant at midnight on Saturday, August 23rd. No fees, no swag, no support.

Swap

Speaking of no fees -- the "just show up and sell/buy bike stuff" swap is up at the parking lot in front of Harrington Insurance company on 29th and Regal. Sunday (this Sunday!) morning from 8-11.

Another One!!

Another bottom bracket crack. First my RB-1 gave up the ghost.


Now my beloved favorite bike of all time with the most soul ever has done the same.

Crud! I did expect this eventually. In fact, I've been abusing this bike for the last year and sort of waiting for the bb, the rear drop out or the chain stay/bb interface to go at any time.

But it sucks, because I've been without this bike since I shanked the rear wheel about a month ago. Liza finished the wheel last night, I had the brakes dialed in, a new XTR 8 spd cassette on there, and put Noodle bars back on there (instead of dirt drops) in anticipation of CX season. Now it's another waiting game. Ugh.

This baby is going to Hairy Gary. I think he can file out the rot/crack and lay
a bead of some hot steel in there and I'll be good for another few years. It just adds to the charm of this beauty. It's a 1991 bike. So it was built in 1990. So that's an 18 year old bike. I've had it for about 4 years and who knows what kind of life it had before I got it. When I got it, the rear canti post had to be replaced, so it's seen some action.

Lacing Wheels on the Clock

I work from home. Yesterday, I had an hour-and-a-half conference call from 10:30-noon. Normally, I'd eat lunch during the call, but yesterday I decided to lace up a couple wheels.

I sort of had to walk through the ethical implications of building a bike wheel while on a conference call.

Here's what I came up with: I'm paid to think and talk when I'm on a conference call. Eating lunch, trimming my nails, picking my nose... I do these things all the time and none of them get in the way of thinking and talking.


The most mentally taxing part of lacing up a wheel is making sure the key spoke is right. (And to try and line up the label on the hub so it's readable through the spoke hole. But that's a nice-to-have, aesthetic feature that I only do because of my respect for Sheldon.) Once the key spoke is in the right place, the brain is on auto-pilot for the rest of the lacing.

So I finished lacing two wheels. Hopefully I can get them trued/tensioned tonight. The first one has the label on the hub lining up, since I started it before the call. I couldn't line up the other one on auto-pilot.

The wheels are for a new bike. More on that later.

The Rack Pics

As promised, I have more pictures of the Plum Tree rack.

Here's one:

Click the picture to go to a Picasa directory with more pictures in it.


In that directory, you'll also see pics of our hanging out up at my dad's place last weekend. He lives on the Kettle River. Which is my all time favorite river. And a perfect century from our house to his, door-to-door.


I see a weekender event in the future where a big pile of friends ride up to his place and camp on the lawn overlooking the river for the weekend. Kids and SO's to follow by car.


He's right in between Sherman and Boulder passes too. So there's great logging roads to explore and great climbs to enjoy.


Next summer. Hold me to it.

Downtown Transportation Plan

DKS is a consultant company that is assisting the city on coming up with transportation plan for downtown. There's a bunch of cycling stuff in there.

If the plan shakes out into something good, the plan is to bake it into the Master Bike Plan. So far the DKS plan is pretty good. There are a couple things that need to change, and it's not exactly how I would do things, but in the interest of progress and moving forward with concrete project-level stuff to raise money for: the plan is good.

You can see the plan here: http://www.spokaneengineering.org/Downtown%20Study/Downtown%20Study.htm

You can send feedback here: DKSTransportationStudy@spokanecity.org

My feedback is here: http://phred.org/pipermail/bab/2008-August/000865.html

This is dry stuff, but if you ride downtown or want to, this plan (well, Chapter 4 and the Bicycle Summary Sheets specifically) is worth a read. People doing this stuff actually do read and act on feedback.

Oh yeah. And of course the dead line is this Friday. My bad. I should've posted this about a month ago.

A Nifty Trick

Liza's comrade in the REI bike shop, John, told me about this sweet little trick. I'm sure it's old hat to most reading this, but it's new to me.

If you are going to replace a rim -- keeping the spokes and hub -- then just tape the new rim to the existing wheel, taking care to line up the valve holes, and swap the spokes over one by one.

I can't believe it. Without this nudge from John, this totally and completely obvious shortcut would've never occurred to me. There's no lacing, no counting, no thinking! My kind of solution.

I did replace about 6 drive-side spokes that had gotten a bit torn up near the elbow where the chain dropped in between the cassette and spokes. And I replaced all the nipples.

Related Question #1

The accomplished wheel-building observer will recognize all but one of the tools in the picture above. Anyone have an idea of what the cylindrical tool with the poker is for?

Related Question #2

The wheel I'm rebuilding is the Velocity Synergy with LX hub from my CX'ish RB-T. I bitched and moaned about this wheel about a month ago.

Anyway, the question: Why doesn't QBP carry the 700c version of the Velocity Synergy? They only carry the 650B version.

Stuff related to Question #2

I ended up ordering this rim from Rivendell, which is cool too. I need to stock up on my Lip Ivo and it gave me an excuse to order the new Riv (Pace) cap, which is orange. The Pace cycling cap is the only cycling cap that fits my fat head. And then only if my hair is mostly shaved off. Pace caps are made in LA. That's cool too.

Cycling caps really are ideal for keeping the sun out and keeping the waves out of your hair after a ride.

Damn. I went to snipe this orange hat pic from the Riv site and they just added a Nitto cap. That's f'ing cool. And it's made by Pace. And it's super low-key. Less writing on caps is good.

Ideally, I'd like the 8 panel Pace cap with nothing on it. But I'll shill for Rivendell, Nitto, Rawland, and maybe a couple others -- and pretty much any small builder.

Plum Tree Rack

A couple weeks ago, I showed a picture of a purple rack in one of my posts.

I kept meaning to come back and talk about that beauty. So here's the story.

That rack was built by local artist Hazen Audel and it now lives at Maddie's preschool, Plum Tree.

The point of the rack is more to serve as a place to lean your bike, than it is for locking up bikes. A growing number of families at the preschool are biking more. Many bike set ups include a trailer or a trail-a-bike, or other cumbersome kid hauling solution. These types of bike trains are hard to park and often the kickstands on bikes don't hold up with a trailer.

Plum Tree doesn't have a suitable spot to lean such bike contraptions, so the school got this rack for leaning. Although, when I picked Maddie up last Friday, a parent had locked their bike to the rack. So you can lock too.

I need to take more pictures with a better camera to do this rack justice. It's really neat and pretty. It's powder coated dark blue and is sponged with purple. Hazen thought that as it weathered, the kids would have fun sponging it with different colors of paint. There are little animals carved into a big plate of 1/2 inch steel. He said it was cut with water jets? Does that make sense?

There's also a cool little cut-out of a bike in there. I think the point of that is to inform people that it's ok to lean bikes up against it.

I will take more pics this week.

In the meantime, if you want to see it up close, you can check it out at 20th and Sherman.

I'm filing this under "sucky racks" so that it is easily found in the future. This is clearly not a sucky rack.