Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I realized that I dropped the Xtracycle project on here yesterday as if I'd fully explained it. Apologies, it's been running around in my head for long enough that I figured I'd bored everyone to tears with it.
The background is this. In September last year, I went to set up my old Norco Cypress mountain bike with a disc brake front end. I wanted to get back into bicycling more, and what better way than with a bit of bikey bling. In readying the bike for the swap, I noticed a little crack in the head tube (where the steering tube goes). A moments' thought made me realize that the bike was condemned. I lost hope of utilizing the lifetime frame warranty, figuring I'd never find the receipt for it, so it was just trash. I went out and bought a new Gary Fisher bike, which I've been riding a lot since.
The Norco sat in forlorn dispair in the basement for a few months. As I was cleaning out my house in preparation for a move (an entirely different story), I chanced across the original purchase receipt. Hooray! I taped it to the bike, and resolved to deal with it Real Soon Now. That would have been about December. Needless to say, I did not deal with it for a few months. Finally, around March, I pulled it out, stripped off all the extraneous stuff, and took it to a local shop for the warranty replacement.
Said local shop basically sat on it for a month, and after some vicious prodding with a sharp stick (including several calls to the Norco headquarters, one to retrieve the correct correspondence email address... sigh), they finally got off their asses and got the warranty replacement going. I got my new frame after forking over $25 plus tax for the favor of doing the free warranty work. Great. I'm not going to mention their name, because they were kind of out of their element on this, so it's not entirely their fault, but I'm still pretty annoyed that I had to do almost all the work for them.
Anyway, Norco sent me this beautiful new frame, from a Bigfoot model. Apparently they don't sell any $400 bikes any more, so I got a frame from a $900 bike. Darn?
Somewhere along the way, I'd formed the definite idea that I wanted to turn this windfall bike into an Xtracycle. In summary, it's a neat attachment that moves the rear axle back 15 inches, and adds some massive cargo capacity by way of giant panniers and a sturdy frame. My friend Josh built one up, and seems to love it, and I liked the idea of being able to carry big stuff, like my cello, on a bicycle.
So, about a month ago, I started researching and buying parts. I now have a bunch of parts (listed yesterday) with a few more on the way, and more yet to be ordered. I'm reusing some of the stuff from the old Norco, which is still perfectly functional. I don't even want to think about what all this is costing, but I should get a really nice bike out of it. In particular, the rear wheel is composed of a $140 hub, about $45 in spokes, and a $35 rim. However, being a 48 spoke wheel (the more spokes, the stronger the wheel, basically), it should be able to handle anything I can throw at it.
And throw I will -- I weigh about 220 lbs in normal clothes, and the Xtracycle attachment is rated for 150 lbs of cargo. So that's potentially 370 lbs of static load, and when you add in dynamic stresses, I could be putting thousands of pounds of load on that wheel. It'd better be strong.
So, that's the Xtracycle project, to which I will be referring with increasing frequency as I start to actually put things together. This is the first bicycle I've built (not terribly daunting) and the first wheels I've built (much more daunting, but not all that hard now that I've given it a try). I'm sure I'll end up turning this into a slightly easier-to-read web page detailing the build process and with the pretty pictures and all. Check in here for updates.
Posted at 10:32 permanent link category: /bicycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater