Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy birthday to me, or "out of town"

I'm 32 on Sunday, and will be out of town starting, um, now (Friday) until Monday. Don't expect answers to emails or phone calls until then. Pictures when I return, maybe.

-Walt

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Congrats Eszter!


Not too shabby - 3rd XC, 3rd STXC, 6th DH, and 11th in dual slalom - not to mention 2nd for the overall omnium. For those not in the loop, I'm referring to the 2008 USAC Collegiate National Championships. The last vestiges of the butt end of the tail end of the mountain bike season.

Now I think it's time for skis...

Sunday, October 26, 2008

DIY geekery

Check out the link:
Homemade carbonation system (warning, extremely nerdy content)

And yes, I am posting this because I just constructed such a device and am quite pleased with myself. Pictures tomorrow, maybe, though mine isn't nearly as trick as the setup shown.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Custom rack?!?


Don't even ask - this was a favor for a friend, and I have no plans to build anything similar anytime soon. Thought I admit it was fun to build.

It's a handlebar bag rack - essentially a shield to keep the bar bag from hitting the front tire on a snow bike from the fine folks at Speedway cycles. Pretty neat. 135mm spacing, 5" of tire clearance (yes, you heard right) and a neato custom rack. It ended up pretty light - 400 grams. And it's probably strong enough to hold 25 pounds or so, though in this case it probably will never hold close to that much. .028"x3/8" 4130 cromoly, with a "spine" made from .125"x1" plate, bolted to a star nut installed in the bottom of the steerer.

Fun stuff, as I said, but I spent WAY more time on this than I wanted to.

Also note the immaculate condition of the shop floor. I don't know when I dropped that screwdriver, and I really should clean up the oil from converting Joel's 120mm Reba (as an aside, those things are freakin' RAD). C'est la shoppe, though.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

A visit from Tashi


I'll let the picture speak for itself. How cool is the full period built Ultimate? Pretty damn cool. And not even the coolest bike he owns.

Monday, October 20, 2008

A silly bike swap

Amazing stuff - Redcoat and I are within 1/2" of the same height. Check out the photos of us swapping bikes...

For those who are curious:
Redcoat: 27" toptube, 120mm stem
Walt: 24" toptube, 90mm stem

Yes, I am all legs, with a stumpy little torso and no arms. And Redcoat is like the AntiWalt - stubby little legs on an enormous torso and long arms.

Goes to show, I guess, that picking a bike based purely on your height is always pretty dumb.

What a weekend...


First off, a couple of pictures of Margo's completed FS 29er. Very girly, I must say!

My sprained wrist/broken hand situation has healed enough for me to ride my 4" travel full suspension bike, on relatively easy terrain, so I've been trying to make up for lost time before the snow flies (apologies to everyone whose emails I've been so slow in answering!)

Long story short, my week went something like this:
Monday: 3 hour/40 mile cross bike ride. 2k climbing.
Tuesday: 2 hour/30 mile road ride. 1.5k climbing. Boring, but tiring. Decide to try riding the mountain bike next time.
Wednesday: 30 mile ride on the plains - Marshall Mesa to Cowdry to Coalton to High Plains. 3 hours, 1.5k climbing.
Thursday: Betasso with Chris - 2 hour sufferfest. Chris (and I) clean the connector for the first time ever! 22 miles, 2k climbing.
Friday: 4 hours of riding from Boulder to Lyons on 80% singletrack. Pretty cool that you can now do this with the Picture rock trail complete! 33 miles, 3.5k climbing.
Saturday: 4 hours at Buffalo Creek. Feldy, Sarah, and I ride pretty fast and don't stop much, but we pick all the steepest stuff and only end up going 32 miles. 4k feet of climbing.
Sunday: 3 hours in Ned with the Goonies. Sarah, Chris, and I bonk badly and retire to the brewery while Eszter, Mason, and Redcoat ride for an extra 2 hours. Good god. 25 miles, 4k climbing.

At this rate, I'll actually be in shape, just in time for, um... wait. Nothing. If the snow doesn't fly soon, I'll burn out by freakin' January!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

A few more shots of David's bike

First, let me say that I love Paragon machine works. Nobody else does anything close to as cool as they do when it comes to bicycle frame parts. Period.

But man, do their steel hooded dropouts look silly. They're clearly a duplicate (in steel) of the ti dropouts, which of course need to be pretty huge, since ti seatstays and chainstays tend to be really big. But for steel... well... you be the judge:


In this case, David *really* wanted a removeable derailleur hanger (puntera desmontable!) so my usual Breezers weren't an option. And after some work with the mill:

Things looked much better (and they were a few grams lighter, to boot):

Monday, October 13, 2008

Dude, I actually *like* that plan...


I saw one of those now-ubiquitous political ads today - this is a shirt you can buy which is ostensibly making fun of Barack Obama, but which I think a lot of bike geeks might view as a bit of a compliment, regardless of their political leanings. I think it would have made more sense to put a pair or worn-out sneakers on there, or a person on a treadmill. Bikes are, um, actually a good part of a smart energy policy, dudes.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sunday recipe!

It's been too long since I've done a recipe on the blog. And this is a pretty easy, and freakin' awesome one. Sarah's mom made this cake (it's apparently a family tradition) for our wedding. Now we make it anytime we can find an excuse.

Sarah's Awesome Carrot Cake

3c flour
2c sugar
1c shredded coconut
2c shredded carrot
2ts vanilla
2.5ts cinnamon
2ts baking soda
1ts salt
1.25c oil
3 eggs
1 small can mandarin oranges (fruit & juice)

Mix everything and pour into 13” x 9”, bake at 350° for ~50min until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. No need to pre-grease the pan.

Frosting

8oz Cream cheese (softened)
3c powdered sugar
1ts vanilla
2tbl melted butter

Mix 'em all together. Smear all over cake. Consume with gusto.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Friday afternoon bloggage/what I'm doing right now

I *think* I'm sick again, though I'm attempting to drown the bugs in sugar and alcohol. It's Avery's big "all the idiotic/crazy/awesome brews we made a few gallons of because we're weird" week, so Sarah and I have been sampling like mad, but I think all the late nights and fun have taken their toll.

In any case, I'm sure everyone wants to hear me whine. On the plus side, I've *finally* got Margo's FS 29er back from the powdercoater. Here's a picture for her and Jay - of course, the distributor somehow managed to leave the front derailleur and stem out of the parts box, so she's not going to be able to ride until next week - ie, after our nasty winter storm wrecks the high country trails for the rest of the year. Doh!

Next up, I'm about 50% done with David's frame. David is from Spain, and speaks English about as well as I speak Spanish (ie, not really fluently), so figuring out the geometry was a pretty drawn-out and humorous process. The best part was trying to describe to him what "endo" meant - I think my description (in Spanish, of course) read something like "Endo is for to make encounter obstacle, and then from bicycle fly until you encounter the ground again." I probably sounded like a Spanish version of Borat, but it was fun to practice (I haven't spoken Spanish in years). David was very patient with my nigh-incoherent emails, and I learned a lot of bike-specific words. A Waltworks, se habla Espanol! Sort of.

In any case, I'm doing internal brake routing for him, and as always, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it looks wicked cool, but on the other hand, it offends my functional sensibilities, since it's way heavy (the tube plus the beefy toptube that I feel ok drilling big holes in probably add 80-100 grams) and it means that if you want to change or install a brake line (especially on a hydraulic setup) you've gotta pull everything apart. Bleh. But darn does it look spiffy...

I'm off to drink more tea. Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Team jerseys for sale!


Another chapter in the "crap we found" saga - I've got three brand new Waltworks team jerseys in blue/white, size men's large (fits very similarly to the Twinsix stuff) to sell off to benefit a good cause - namely the team potluck beer fund.

These are super, super nice. They are made by Champ-Sys, who have been doing the team clothing for years. Very stretchy, breathable fabric, nice and cool, and even fairly resistant to picking up odors over the course of the season (trust me, I should know). I'm asking $50 each, shipping included. First come, first served.

For those who are curious, we are planning to do more TwinSix/WW jerseys. Hopefully soon, if Brent ever gets caught up.

Climbing and bikes


It always amazes me to see climbers driving into Eldorado Canyon, or to Flagstaff - it's easy and fun to ride a bike to both of those places (well, ok, not *that* easy, but hey, it's good cross training, right?)

In any case, I thought that This episode of the dirtbag diaries was pretty cool. Check it out.

Thanks to Ruben for the pic from the Sierras.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

More belt drive thoughts

A fun weekend is almost behind us - I am finally not sick, and (kinda) not broken, so I was actually able to bandage up my bum wrist and go for a road ride both Saturday and Sunday. Sweet! It's not improving as quickly as I'd hoped, so I think mountain biking is done for the year, but if I can get out on the road at least, I can keep my sanity.

Spent some time this morning playing with belt drive parts and plotting. After looking at the info from Spot, and mounting up the drive cog/chainring on an LX crankset (ie, 50mm chainline) to do some real-world visualization, it appears to me that I can, with some tubing manipulation and trickery, manage to build a singlespeed 29er with 445mm (or about 17.5") chainstays, clearance (just barely) for a 2.1" tire, and clearance (again, by the skin of my teeth) for the chainring thing. It's not anything like what's doable with a chain, of course (you could probably get the stays down into the 425mm range pretty easily) but I'm a big guy and really prefer the stays in the 440-450mm range as it is.

This is a good sign, because last I looked at it (without actually mounting anything up) it really appeared to me that there was no practical way to get any kind of mountain bike tire onto a belt driven bike without making the chainstays super duper long (this is the solution that Spot seems to be using - 18.5"+ chainstays) or doing something really weird with elevated chainstays (barf).

I'm cautiously optimistic that it's doable - but it'll require several tweaks:
-2mm spacers between the crank spider and the chainring/cog to offset the beltline outboard and make extra room. Yes, this is a little bit sketchy as it puts all the force on the bolts instead directly onto the spider, but I think it'll be fine.
-Fairly significantly crimp some S-bend stays for tire clearance (this will get me another 2mm or so on each side of the tire). I do this anyway on a lot of bikes, but never bothered with my current singlespeed, because I don't personally want super short stays or huge rear tires.
-Narrow the tire clearance (at the widest point on the knobs) to somewhere around 60mm. This of course leaves very limited room for anything bigger than a ~2.1" tire (no Weirwolves on the rear of this bad boy) but since I hate using big tires on the rear anyway, it shouldn't be much of an issue. I just better hope there's no mud...

In any case, it's looking like I might actually start this project in the next few days, so stay tuned if you're interested in this sort of thing. I'm also attempting to do a seat tube that will take a 30.9 (Speedball!) seatpost, as well as a few other fancy bits. My loss (wrist injury) is your gain (more framebuilding posts), loyal blog readers!

And yes, I'm aware that this is several consecutive posts with no pictures. Sorry. I'll try to do better.

Friday, October 03, 2008

Fork for sale

So Jason messed up and gave me the wrong numbers for the fork he ordered, and as such, he wants to try to sell it:
450mm axle to crown
45mm offset
1 1/8" steerer
disk brake tab

It's a tapering blade fork built for a 155 pound rider. Appropriate for a 100mm suspension corrected 26" bike, an 80mm 650b setup, or a non-suspension corrected 29er. He's asking $150 plus shipping. The fork is currently not painted, but can be powdercoated for a few extra bucks if you so choose.

If you're interested, email me and I'll put you in touch with him.