All's weld that ends weld

Got the Rockfish back from Quality Welding yesterday.

 Before:

 After:

Gotta love the rose knot in the center.

The weld isn't too pretty, but I'm sure it'll be fine for a lightweight rider like me. It's in a hard to reach area and it's on hollow tubing. I'm glad handed it over to a professional for this one as I would have just mucked it up if I tried repairing it with my gas-less mig welder. Quality welding only charged me $30 for it, so I feel like I got a deal. I'd rate the overall customer experience a B/B+.

Brian contacted me about getting him decals when I order some. Maybe I'll get a deal by ordering multiple sets at once.

RIDING MY BIKE TO WORK TODAY.

Vote for Will

Will Canup is in the running for Cockpit of the year on Bike Snob NYC. Prelimnary voting is over.

Too much driving = feeling bad.

Today will be the third consecutive day in which I will have driven to and from work. On Monday I drove my Rockfish frame to Quality Welding in Charlottesville on the way to work. I'm having them repair the crack on the seat tube, just above the bottom bracket. They gave me an estimate of $30-$50  and a 1-2 day wait time. Excited to hear from them. I also bought a 1" threaded fork with cantilever mounts and a 9" steerer for the Rockfish on ebay. Pretty costly: $70 including shipping, but those things are super hard to find.


It is supposed to rain and thunderstorm all day. After work I'm heading to Community Bikes to build up bikes so they are 100% ready to sell at the shop or on craigslist. I've emailed the list to see if there are any mechanics out there that want to do the same. I hope that I can turn this into a regular thing. Maybe 1st & 3rd Wednesdays, 6-8pm? Wednesday's Wechanics.


Being off the bike since Friday has left me feeling really crappy physically. It's my main form of exercise and stress relief, regardless of how slow and stressful traffic can be. I feel pent-up, sore, exhausted, and almost sick. Gotta get back on the bike.


Listening to: Bomb the Music Industry! - Bike Test 1 2 3
Full speed along the North Oconee River.
I can feel it in my forehead and while that always fails, my lungs are getting clearer.
I see trucks racing by on the roof above my trail, cops are waiting to ticket anyone with out-of-state plates.
I'm not missing anything.


Swore off all prescribed medication and rode two miles through nowhere to a water fountain spitting out hot water. 
I sit at a bench at a compost heap and I'm about to pedal up a sixty degree slope.


At the top of a hill at a very rapidspeed there's only one place to go.
At the top of a hill at a very high speed there's nowhere to go but down.


And it gets easier as I ascend my bike uphill on foot 'cause last time I kicked it into first I broke a gear by going too hard.


And it gets easier as I pass the Edward Scissorhands village where privileged white kids date rape girls and taunt me in their SUV's.


And it gets easier as I see the double vans in our driveways, I'm glistening but I know that some day I won't even break a sweat.


And it gets easier, as time goes things can only get better.
R-I-D-E. I wanna ride.

Change of plans

So I pulled out of the Paranormal race at the last moment. I had already paid my registration fee, but realized that I had been neglecting the third, and most important, "B." Beer. Bikes. Babe.

Instead, Rachel and I carved a pumpkin:

and did a Edgar Allen Poe hike in the Ragged Mountain Natural Area at 7:30pm. It was dark and spooky along the peninsula trail, which we had never hiked despite having been to Ragged Mountains a handful of time. We were led to an old chimney where a Poe-ish actor read Poe poems and stories by firelight. I'll never forget the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.

Today I finished up removing the paint from the Rockfish:

Gotta get this welding done. Bike polo is destroying my commuter.

123 Polo

Played some bike polo on Thursday night. It's exactly the release that I needed after a shitty long day at work. I always end up breaking the shifting cable for my commuter when I play because it extends out of the rear axle and bike polo is a very contact-oriented game. That's why the Rockfish needs to be built as a polo bike. It can serve as a bike I can wreck without commuting consequences.

I'm definitely getting better at polo... the practice and confidence really helps. Will Canup showed up to polo and it sounds like I'll see him tonight at the Paranormal.

Roll out

The bike is ready. Always is. I'm not. Never am.

Matt Lockaby was kind enough to invite me to watch him brew with his full grain setup next time. He has a reputation of being quite good at brewing, so I'm excited to get the chance to see his process. I stopped by "The Lodge" last night to drop off a wheel for a bike he and Adam are building for a friend, and I got a peak at some of Matt's equipment at the same time. Pretty amazing stuff. Who knew you could secondary in a keg?

Spent some time at the shop last night stripping junk bikes to prepare them for recycling. We are supposedly receiving 40-50 broken bikes from UVA Parking & Transportation on Friday in exchange for a few working bikes for their employees to use. That's one way to recycle. I'm struggling to get a program together where mechanically-oriented volunteers can meet weekly for a few hours to assemble nice bikes and sell them on craigslist for shop rent. Contact me if interested. Free pizza likely.

Paranormal Activities

BRAINS

This Saturday is the 2010 CRC Paranormal mountain bike race in Earlysville, VA. It's always a great 6 hour endurance race with beer, costumes, beer, camping, beer, and best of all - it starts at 4pm and is dark after 3 laps. I've done this race for the past three years, twice with Charlottesville Community Bikes in the shop category, and once solo. I'm not really that great of a mountain biker, so I've never made it more than three laps personally. Also, it doesn't help that I don't have a great light set for riding single track in the dark.

If you wear a costume to the race you are awarded a 2 minute head start. Last year was the first year that I went solo and decided to go all out on my costume. Swine flu:

Turn your head and cough.

I even wore a curly tail.

Charles wielding a sharp weapon as usual. Will as a Donnie Darko skeleton.

In 2009 I raced on my 26" rigid Scott Paisley mtb (to be salivated over on a later post). But this year I'll be converting my rigid mountain bike commuter into something viable. It has a 3 speed Sachs Torpedo internal hub in the back, two rings on the front, and a front generator hub to power a headlight. To convert my commuter I'm swapping out my slick tires and spring saddle to knobby tires and a racing saddle, adding another water bottle cage, and removing the rear rack, light, and fenders. This bike, too, is a rigid 26":

So tonight I'll be re-suiting my commuter for the race and rebuilding a rear mtb wheel for Chris. He has had the worst luck with spokes breaking, so I've convinced him to go with double-butted Wheelsmith spokes. They should be fun to build with.

If anybody in the Charlottesville is looking for a teammate that can drink better than he can bike, drop me a line and we can ride some beers together at the Paranormal.

The chickens go BOCK

I'm currently brewing my very first beer, a European Bock, using a Brewer's Best extract kit. I'm 4 weeks into the fermentation process as of today:


That's the inside of a mini-fridge that I've converted into a temperature-controlled fermenting chamber. What you can see is my 7 gallon glass carboy, a bung on the top, a piece of blow-off tubing emerging from the bung, and a small bottle of clean water tucked into the back right. The blowoff tubing allows gaseous byproducts of fermentation to escape the carboy and carries it to the water bottle. The water allows the gas to bubble out and prevents anything from traveling back up the tube into the beer.

The beer is currently in the secondary fermentation process, meaning I've already transferred the beer from a primary fermenting bucket in order to remove off-flavor-creating trub and to promote beer clarity. I've cold-crashed it and now it's lagering at around 38F.

In order to accurately control the mini-fridge temperature I picked up a Johnson Electric temp controller from Northern Brewer. It's the blue box on top of my fridge:

The temperature controller is great because it controls the on & off cycle of the fridge to maintain a specified temperature range. It has its own thermometer probe to slide into the fridge for an accurate temp reading. It has a small simple display, but is invaluable for being able to control lagering temperatures.

Also, big props to Northern Brewer. $8 for shipping really isn't bad for 3 large boxes by FedEx Ground arriving on a Saturday within 3 days. Thanks!

I plan to bottle the beer Nov. 7. It should be carbonated enough by Thanksgiving.

Ride the Divide @ The Paramount

Community Bikes has organized a screening of the new film, Ride the Divide, at the Charlottesville Paramount. The screening is November 11 @ 7pm. Tickets are $11, and benefit the shop! So bring your grandma and her tea drinkin' cronies.

Rockfishin'

Charlottesville Community Bikes moved to a new location on Preston Ave in late 2009. Since then, it's been quite the task to clean out the old space. There were crappy bikes up to our ears in there. Back in August we had help from a group of UVA Project SERVE volunteers to bring one last load of metal recycling to Cycle Systems (formerly Coiner's). As we were tossing crappy Huffy bikes into a giant pile of steel, a diamond in the rough caught my eye:




This Rockfish frame happens to be a special local bike creation from two Charlottesville,VA locals, Nick & Boris. I got the scoop on them from Scott Paisley over at Blue Wheel Bicycles:

The Rockfish bikes were a project that my original frame building partner, Nick, and Boris created. There was a push to create a new racing format to encourage BMX riders to transition into bicycles as adults. The idea was parking lot criteriums with adults on super quick handling small wheel bikes. I built one prototype on 24" wheels that Boris has been riding around town for years. I may have built one of the 20" wheels as well, but I don't remember, and don't think I did any more than advise on the steering geometry. Those frames were built by Cycle Craft in Tennessee. Nick still has a bunch of the frames unpainted somewhere.

In other words, these were BMX bikes built for Formula-1 racing. I scoured the internet a bit to find Nick's site. There are some good pictures and info on there, despite the Rockfish project being defunct.

I snagged this frame right as it was about to be tossed into a heap of scrap steel to be lost forever. I brought it home and have plans to rebuild it. Unfortunately, after closer inspection, I realized that there's a 1" crack on the back of the seat tube just above the bottom bracket:


So I need to get this tig-welded. I gave Charles a call to see if he would braze the crack for me. He convinced me that tig is the way to go for this crack. He claimed that he is getting a tig setup within the next couple of months, and I hope to pay him to do the work . He told me that if I prepped it by stripping the paint and drilling out the ends that it should be a fast repair. I ended up breaking 4 skinny drill bits trying to drill the ends of the crack out to prevent it from spreading. I also started stripping the frame with a wire brush attachment. In the past I've used chemical strippers, but they are such a noxious pain. As for the color... I've looked for metallic pink automotive paint, but to no avail.


Over the past few years, several of my local friends have also gotten their hands on these frames... but I have yet to see one of theirs working. The frames we find are usually significantly damaged or missing the fork. Mine is both. I have some leads on 20" wheel forks with long steerers and cantilever studs on ebay.

At first I was thinking about restoring this bike to it's original specs. However, I think this frame with 20" wheels would make an amazing polo bike. Charlottesville Bike Polo has really gotten organized in the past few years, thanks to Barry. They meet up at McIntire Skate Park on Tuesdays & Thursday evenings. I showed up thrice recently (after not having been since things got rolling) and damn, pretty good turn out and everyone is gettin tough.

I've also started recreating some decals for the bike. Back in the day (~2006) I found a Rockfish sticker at the old commbikes shop, and I recently got my coworker Andrew Stronge to walk me through scanning, retracing, and vectorizing it in Adobe Illustrator. If you need the vector file, drop me a line

Now just to find someone to reproduce the decals. Velographic looks promising.