Downtown bike parking

Picture courtesy of Google maps
Finally we have a covered, secure bike parking solution for downtown commuters. Jon and I visited Lu today at the City Ramp Garage and took a tour of the tire room. The tire room is a huge vault of a room in the basement of the garage. The tire room is now the bike room.

Here are the details:

• The City Ramp Garage is at 1st and Stevens.
• To get the bike room, you can ride down the ramp -- no stairs.
• It's $1/day.
• You must register to use the service. This is a good thing as it keeps only registered people coming and going to the bike room. That said, you still want to lock the bike once you get it down there.
• There is a bathroom you can use to change, but no showers or lockers (yet).
• There is a car washing station that you can use to spray down your bike.
• Hours are M-F 7am-9pm; Sat 10-6. When the garage is closed, the ramp leading to the bike room has a giant roll down gate; so leaving bikes there over the weekend is very secure.
• It's early days. The room is a dirty mess and stuffed with tires. But you can't beat the price and Lu is interested in moving out the tires and optimizing the room for storing bikes. She's excited about the potential to make this a useful service. The more cyclists that use this service, the better the service will become.
• The building is sweet. Lots of nooks and crannies. I found an old Mr Pibb can way in the back of the tire room. I also found an old set of Carl Maxey's winter tires. And the building is art deco. Cool.

If you want to use the service, just show up and fill out a registration form and pay $1/day. There is no long term obligation or requirement to pay weeks/months in advance.

The phone number there is 624-1313.

Belated Badger post

See Pat's write up for the full story. In a nutshell: we overnighted last Friday at Badger.



I think this is my last Badger run for the year.


If I can swing another overnighter, I think it's going to be on the kayak, or to a different bike destination.

Patrick (not Pat) took these pics. That's Pat there sipping a beer.

I'm out

Wow. That's got to be some kind of record. But I'm done with the 100 mile diet and it's just barely past noon.

It's the caffeine that's going to do me under. I got a dreaded 3 AM call last night -- family member in the emergency room. That kept me up until about 6 AM, when I finally got to the hospital.

Afterwards, I made a good breakfast (emmer + honey + raw milk) and just had a great lunch (local beef + wheat berries + peppers/onions). But w/out the coffee I'm a zombie. Liza just called me at work and WOKE ME UP! Yow.

I'm off to Bay Market for some caffeine.

Looks like we're in for a rough week and I'm going to be needing as much caffeine and easy carbs as I can get my hands on.

Good luck to the rest of you.

Last day of summer

Maddie's first day of 1st grade is today. We spent a couple hours yesterday kayaking and hanging out at Fish Lake.

On bearings, a Shogun, and a bitchin BMX

Smooth bearings are one of life's simple pleasures. Our tandem is running a six-speed freewheel. I have this fear that some day, we'll be out riding it and the axle will break. The freewheel design, compared to the freehub design, is more prone to failure since the axle is sticking way out there without any support. So, I wanted to put a hub, with a freehub, on the tandem. I found a great deal on a NOS 7-speed tandem hub (threaded for drum brake) on ebay. I got it for $40 shipped. Nice. It has an OLD of 145. Our Burley has an OLD of 135. So, Glen, of Elephant fame, got the assignment to make our Burley have an OLD of 145. To do that, he removed the bottom bracket so he could secure the bike as he expanded the rather beefy rear forks. When he removed the bottom bracket, it sort of fell apart in a way that bottom brackets shouldn't. A quick consultation with Alex (knower or finder of all bike info -- no matter how exotic or esoteric) revealed that the early-model Burleys use a sort of non-standard sealed cartridge bearing fitted into the bottom bracket with a super-high-zoot-full-on-

anaerobic bonding agent. That's how I found myself at McGuire Bearing company on East Trent yesterday. They had this cool shit on the counter:

Can you find my bottom bracket? That's pretty easy.

Here's the Shogun I built up. My "back pedaling" muscles are way out of shape. Those are the muscles on the top of your thighs. I guess those are the quadriceps. It's great riding a fixed gear again. I love climbing hills on a fixed gear: they just force me to push up them so much faster than I do when I'm downshifting and downshifting and downshifting. I'm drenched in sweat when I get home and it's not that hot. I think I'm going to ride this bike every work day for a month. It really forces fitness, which is what I need on the eve of CX season.

Dig this Mongoose. This was outside REI earlier this evening. The rad dude (or lady, can you imagine??!!) riding this bike was not obvious as I scanned the store. Maybe he or she was in the bathroom or something. I really looked around the store.

Stuff and other stuff

I built up the Shogun into a fixed gear and rode it around a bit today. Kind of fun. It's been a while; I'm not as comfortable on the fixed gear as I was a year or so ago. I did the top trail on Highdrive and I was sort of tentative and weird.

Here's the next five Elephant bikes, in their unassembled state. TT and DT use OS 858.

100 mile diet

Radius map generated here.

I'm in.

Plan here. This is good timing, since I still can't shake the beer weight.

For the record, Hank inspired me.