Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Mon, 29 Oct 2007
Picking up the new CL175 today was a highly scripted operation -- I used a Flexcar pickup truck, which is billed by the hour, so I wanted to make sure I had it planned out correctly. Turns out I left too much slop time in my planning, and I was done almost three hours ahead of schedule. Hopefully someone used the truck after me, so I don't have to pay for all that time I didn't use.
In any case, the pickup was easy. I grabbed Jesse, and we headed to the ferry, catching the 11:30 instead of the planned 12:05. Greg was ready for us, and it was a matter of minutes before we had the bike loaded in the back of the truck, and were headed out again. Jesse examined the front brake while Greg and I were completing our transaction, and declared that it felt awful because of the cable. That was encouraging. I'd had the thought, but didn't really know how well I was interpreting what I was feeling.
On the way back, we managed to roll into the Kingston ferry dock just as they started loading the 12:40 (or so) ferry, making us two ferries earlier than I'd planned on. I dropped off Jesse and went home to unload the bike. I was back at the Flexcar parking spot by 2:15, and feeling foolish for having so vastly overplanned the trip. Ah well, it was nice to be done early.
Once I got back to my garage, I started going over the bike, to see what I could do in the absence of parts. The first target was the battery. Somehow, in 71 miles and something like six months of ownership, Greg managed to go through two batteries. As soon as I put the battery on a charger, I guessed what the problem was: he was using a car charger on a motorcycle battery. Unfortunately, motorcycle batteries require a much smaller charging current than car chargers can do, and a car charger will quickly overheat the little motorcycle battery. The electrolyte was very low in all the cells, a likely sign of overheating. After I topped the battery up with water, it was reading just 10.1 volts, a good sign it'd never come back. Nonetheless, I hooked it up to the motorcycle charger, and set it going.
Unfortunately, I completely overfilled the battery, so it immediately started spluttering out dilute battery acid onto the bike. I pulled it out, and set it on the ground (and on a pile of baking soda, to counteract the spilled acid -- fun with hissing and bubbling!). It was producing a lot of hydrogen, so I'm guessing it's not going to come back. But there's no harm in trying -- the worst that'll happen is that the battery boils off its electrolyte again. I already assume I'll need a new battery, so if I can get by without needing one, I'll be up $50. (Greg, if you're reading this: for the next bike, get a Battery Tender. They're about $60, but they're excellent at charging and keeping up small batteries like this without damage.)
The next area that really needed attention was the front brake. When I tested it on Wednesday night, it was essentially useless. As hard as I could pull (and 8 years of motorcycling plus more of bicycling means I have a decent brake-pullin' hand), it barely affected the speed of the bike. I knew I wanted to replace all the cables, but I figured I could try lubing the brake cable, and see if that improved anything. Again, the worst that could happen was no improvement. Amazingly, the brake cable came to life (well, relatively) after a good dousing in TriFlow, and now I can actually get some stopping power out of the front brake. It's still not fabulous, but so much better than it was.
I decided to give the clutch cable the same treatment, and discovered that about half the strands in the cable are broken off right at the hand lever. I lubed it anyway, but that cable definitely needs to go. Jesse has a line on one of the vintage racers who has all the bits and pieces to make new cables, so I'm going to talk to him. Apparently the NOS (New Old Stock) cables you can get on Ebay aren't worth it, although they're certainly cheap.
At this point, I decided to head down to Seattle Cycle Center, which is so close to my house as to be "the local motorcycle shop." It's barely a 5 minute bike ride. I wasn't quite ready to replace the battery yet (that will be a day or two from now), but I wanted to order tires, and pick up a new chain. I had good success, ordering a set of BT45 tires, which are the same ones I run on my Ninja 250. They had a chain in stock, and I picked up a set of grips to replace the cracked, hard plastic things currently gracing the handlebars. Had I been thinking straight, I also would have ordered a new set of sprockets, but that didn't occur to me until I got the old chain off an hour later, and really looked at the state of the old sprockets. Ah well, that order can go in tomorrow.
I didn't do any more work than that, but I did check a few other things. The tires are excitingly cracked and ancient looking, although I don't know how old they actually are. I discovered that the rear wheel is actually missing a spoke, and neither wheel is particularly round. Looks like I'll be doing some wheel repairs before I take the bike at any speed. Fortunately, my bicycle wheel building experience puts me in a good position to deal with that. Even more fortunately, the bike came with an entire spare rear wheel, so I can just swap the new one on rather than repairing the current one. The spare looks to be in nice condition, so that's pretty handy.
Another thing I did was just get on the bike and make putt-putt noises while bouncing up and down like a kid. Gotta have some fun, right? I also discovered, while bouncing, that the rear shocks actually contain no oil any more. They're just springs. That'll make riding interesting, but also adds another item to my "must replace" list. It'll be a positive change in all ways, though, since I'll actually be able to get the correct strength springs on there for my gargantuan size. (If you've seen my centerstand video on YouTube, and thought I looked big next to the Ninja 250, the CL175 is smaller still. It's going to look like I'm riding a kid's bike.)
I took a closer look at the muffler as well, wondering what damage there was. I found not one or two, but three major holes in the muffler, accounting for the throaty roar put out by the little tiny engine. Fortunately, for racing duty, it's standard practica to just cut off the muffler and run straight pipes. Unfortunately, for street duty, I'll be pissing off neighbors and intriguing cops with my super-loud tiny bike.
Far from being daunted by all the problems I'm discovering, it's actually proving to be an interesting and engaging challenge. The bike is so simple that there's no anxiety about whether I can do a particular repair or not. The parts are all super cheap, since this was a ubiquitous bike in its day, and there are lots of parts left over. It's nothing like working on a BMW, where every trip to get parts results in a multi-hundred-dollar sting in the wallet region, even if you do thank your lucky stars that BMW still produces and stocks parts for a bike that's 40+ years old.
Anyway, a successful first day with the bike. The challenge now will be balancing the needs of unpacking boxes in the house with the desire to go tinker on the cool old bike.
Posted at 08:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Sun, 28 Oct 2007
I'll be writing more on this later, but I wanted to toss up some links:
I've already learned a bunch of interesting stuff, which I'll detail later.
Posted at 19:36 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Sat, 27 Oct 2007
I hopped on my bike a couple nights ago, and got ready to ride: helmet and gloves on, pants cuffs rolled up, and various lights switched on. Something didn't seem right, so I looked down, and saw that my shiny new Nite Rider Minewt X2 was no longer illuminated. I switched it back on to the low-power mode (where I use it 99% of the time -- it's nearly as bright as the full-power mode, but uses half the battery power).
After a few seconds, it switched off. Wait a minute, I thought, it's not supposed to do that... I tried again, but it wouldn't stay on. With anger in my heart, I set out for home.
After stopping half way for dinner, I tried again. I discovered that if I switched modes back and forth a few times, I could sometimes trick it into switching on the red, "Battery low" LED, but not all the time. If I just switched it on, it would stay on for a few seconds, then switch itself off. Very frustrating.
I kept a close eye on it for the ride home, but once it was in the red-light mode, it seemed to be happy enough. I made it all the way home (about 30 minutes) without further degradation to the light -- at least, not that I could tell.
I tried switching it off then on once I got home, and it immediately displayed the low-battery indicator, so I theorized that when it was behaving strangely, it must have been at the threshold point between not-low-battery and low-battery. After an overnight charge (this time blessedly free of overheating batteries), it worked as expected.
So, maybe it was just in an odd spot when it started misbehaving, but it was still frustrating, and not the kind of behavior I want to see out of one of my primary safety devices. I've got my eye on you, little headlight.
Posted at 09:41 permanent link category: /bicycle
Fri, 26 Oct 2007
Goofing around with Tourist Trophy
Jesse and I were playing Tourist Trophy (an excellent motorcycle video game) the other day, and discovered that there's a "Seattle" track. Intrigued, we tried it out. It's actually based somewhat on reality, if you took downtown and made a racetrack out of it. It's terrifyingly dangerous, full of sharp turns with no runoff area. We both crashed an inordinate number of times.
Anyway, I went back and revisited the track tonight on my favorite bike in the game, a possibly-fictitious 1994 Honda CB400SS. I took a couple of pictures:
"Me" riding the CB400SS
A nice shot of the now-demolished King Dome
I'm still impressed by Tourist Trophy's ability to take very realistic looking pictures of the action.
Posted at 23:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Thu, 25 Oct 2007
A 35 year old motorcycle (updated with pics)
I rode out to Indianola today, which is on the Olympic Penninsula, not far from the ferry port of Kingston. There, someone had a 1972 Honda CL175 for sale. This is a motorcycle which Honda also called the CB175, when fitted with different handlebars and a different set of exhaust pipes.
The ride out was perfectly miserable. I managed to pick the one day of the week for which rain was both forecasted and ever-so-present. The rain was pounding so hard as I rode up Bainbridge Island toward my destination that I thought to myself, "There's no way to describe this so that anyone actually understands." My faceshield was a glittering starfield any time a car came the opposite direction, which was most of the ride. I spent almost the whole ride trying to keep the car in front of me from getting too far away, so I could tell where the lane was. My gloves had long ago soaked through, and my hands were increasingly cold and numb. Fortunately, the rest of me was pretty comfortable, so it definitely could have been worse.
I got to my destination (I'm so glad I have a good GPS for this kind of thing) without any trouble, aside from the rain. Indianola turned out to be a tiny bedroom community, with a 20 MPH speed limit and few streetlights. Two turns had me parking as Greg (the seller) waved up at me. He was standing next to the bike in a t-shirt, steaming slightly in the pounding rain.
I parked and walked down the hill to meet him. The CL175 stood, glistening with raindrops. Greg introduced himself, and explained that he was very sorry, he hadn't been able to get the bike to start. He felt like this ruined my trip out, although it didn't feel that way to me.
The little bike was very cute, if perhaps showing its age a bit. A 175cc motorcycle, when this was built, was considered a middleweight bike, falling between the 50cc beginner bike (like the Honda Cub) and the 250cc freeway cruiser. The CB175 was meant for around-town use, but would be the functional equivalent of the 650-900cc class now -- around town, but also freeway jaunts as required.
Of course, now, you're lucky to find any model smaller than 600cc, and the 1000cc bike are coming to be the middleweight class (well, in some cases anyway). If you're confused, just take my word that the more cc (cubic centimeters) an engine has, the more powerful it is, generally speaking. By today's standards, a 175cc bike is ridiculously small.
But I digress.
The little bike looked perfectly content sitting there in the pouring rain. The sun had set nearly an hour ago, so I got out my flashlight, and looked it over. It looked much like Jesse's race bike, but with more lights and appurtenances on it. (The primary difference between a race bike and a street bike in this class is whether it has turn signals and a headlight.)
We spent a few more minutes trying to kickstart the little thing. Every once in a while, it would make an encouraging "putt-putt" as the engine tried to fire, but it obviously wasn't going to happen. Finally we gave up, and adjourned to the inside, where it wasn't nearly as rainy.
Greg and I chatted, and I met his wife and young daughter. Their house was delightful, although the ceilings were designed for someone smaller than me. They had a miniscule wood stove going, which kept the whole house very toasty warm -- I'm going to have to look into a wood burning insert or something.
After a few minutes, Greg looked up, and announced that the rain had subsided enough, and that he'd try starting the bike again. The battery was flat, so the electric starter ("Works fine, when the battery's charged!") was out of the question. The rain had indeed ceased, although it sounded like it was still raining, due to all the water dripping off the surrounding trees. More minutes of kicking the little engine over resulted in both of us tiring out, but no life from the motor. Finally, we decided to try bump-starting the bike, which has the advantage of getting the engine turning for a much longer period of time, more like an electric starter. That worked, and Greg did a quick lap of the block to get the engine warmed up.
I got my riding gear back on, and took the bike out myself. The experience was fairly bizarre. The front brake was essentially useless. A full-force squeeze would bring the bike to a very gradual stop, but not on any kind of slope. The little motor pulled surprisingly well, much harder than I would have expected. The headlight switch (which presumably had been built with Off, Low and High positions, but seemed to consist of a gigantic Off position with randomly-placed Low and High positions) was dangerous to touch, lest the light go out and never come back on. The turn signals blinked once, then stayed on solid. I noticed as I took a more spirited run that the engine ran poorly when I'd accidentally left the turnsignal on -- presumably that extra 30W of lighting was enough to draw down the battery so that the ignition didn't quite have enough power.
In addition to all this, the exhaust seemed to have a sizeable leak just before the muffler, so it sounded just about as loud as Jesse's race bike, which has no mufler at all. I was afraid I was angering the residents of every house I passed, but no one came out to yell at me.
Frightening ride completed, I returned, and told Greg that I'd get back to him. I need to consult with Jesse on some of the bike's more glaring faults, mostly the front brake. In race trim, the bike's charging system will be completely disabled, so I'm not too worried about the apparent electrical problem.
Greg told me that he's done a good deal of work (mostly replacing parts) trying to get the engine running properly. He mentioned replacing the coil, points, condenser, and spark plugs. He's also been scouring Ebay, looking for cosmetic parts.
The bike obviously needs some things done before it'd be a safe street or track bike:
- Front brake work (including control cable, new shoes, resurface drum)
- New battery
- Probably new tires
It'll more work beyond that to make it a safe street bike (which is my goal before I race-ify it):
- Turn signals fixed
- Headlight switch cleaned/fixed/replaced
There's probably more, but that's what I can think of at the moment.
I'm looking forward to discussing the bike with Jesse. He knows much more about them than I do (although not about street-legal bikes, since all his experience has been with the race-prepped bikes). I'm leaning towards getting it, but I need to figure out how much pain I'm in for with the front brake first. Who knows, by this time next week, I might have yet another way to suck down gas and destroy the planet. Huzzah! (At least these little bikes are supposed to get pretty good gas mileage...)
Update: I've posted the pictures I took last night:
To the gallery
Posted at 00:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Wed, 24 Oct 2007
There's been a lot of stuff going on, and rather than make a bunch of little posts about them, I figured I'd just wrap it all up into one.
Bicycles: I took those silly clipless pedals off. The final straw was when I realized that I'd put multiple, visible dents in my floor right where I put the shoes on. The cleats were clearly causing damage every day, and it wouldn't be long before I'd tear up thousands of dollars worth of floor work.
Yeah, grand, the system let me pedal a little bit more efficiently. Not possibly worth the trouble and annoyance of having to carry multiple pairs of shoes around.
Motorcycles: Surprisingly, there's activity on this front. I'm going tomorrow (well, today technically) to look at a 1972 Honda CL175, which is a very small "offroad" bike which can be easily converted for track use. I'm thinking much more seriously about doing vintage racing next year, and this would be a great bike for it. It's over in Indianola, which is a place I've never been before, so that should be an adventure all by itself. It's interesting to think I might own a motorcycle as old as myself.
The CL175 in question.
Nerdery: Bet ya didn't know that was a category. Well, it is for this post. Last week, I broke down and ordered an Alphasmart Dana, which is a sort of laptop-lite. In fact, I'm writing this entry on it. So far, I can tell you that the keyboard is quite nice, better than most laptops. The screen leaves a bit to be desired in terms of contrast and anti-glare. I'm going to have to get some kind of anti-glare shield for the screen.
The reason I was even thinking about something like an Alphasmart Dana is that I'll be participating in NaNoWriMo in November. I did really well last year, somehow finishing fifty thousand words in 13 days. At that rate, I have to try again. Last year, I used my trusty, dusty Model 102 for the task, but lamented that its memory was so small that I actually filled it several times, so that it got in the way of the writing process. I thought to myself, "If only this thing talked USB and could take modern memory cards." Well, guess what the Dana does? It's essentially a modern Model 102 with a bigger screen and more memory/connectivity options, but it's got the same long battery life (25 hours claimed). I was also tempted by the Alphasmart Neo (at 700 hours battery life -- sheesh!) but decided that 25 hours was "good enough" and that the ability to run Palm apps was pretty compelling.
Anyway, I'm not regretting the choice, and I'm looking forward to another speed-novelling adventure. I've got an idea for the next one, and it's even a bit more fleshed out than the first one was. We'll see how that works. Just don't expect a lot of posts here while I'm doing that.
House-ery: Or something. I sold the wardrobe on Sunday, so I actually have everything completely out of storage now. Of course, I've been busy enough at work that I've completely neglected to actually tell the storage place to shut down my account. Hopefully I can remember tomorrow.
Now, of course, comes the challenge of unpacking all those boxes...
I think that's enough for now. The clock tells me it's nearly 1 am, and I really really should be asleep. Should have been asleep hours ago, but sometimes you just gotta play with the new toys...
Posted at 08:42 permanent link category: /misc
Sat, 20 Oct 2007
I passed a milestone today. Everything* is moved back into the house. Of course, it's basically still all sitting around in boxes, but progress is progress! At least I won't have to be making a bunch more trips out to the storage unit.
* Of course not everything. I'm selling my old wardrobe, and rather than move it to my house, I'll leave it in storage until it sells -- for free if necessary.
It'll be nice to get out of the $171/mo storage payment. Soon, yes, soon.
Posted at 20:32 permanent link category: /misc
Adventures in watts (warning, probably boring)
A while ago, I got a Kill-A-Watt, which is this little box you plug inbetween the wall outlet and a device, to see how much power it uses. I played with it a bit, discovering that my computer uses about 18W while just dinking around like I am now, or up to 45W while doing processor-intensive tasks like rendering video.
Now that I'm back in my house, I'm thinking about my electric bill, which has historically been pretty high. I was running as many as 5 or 6 full-size computers, plus some networking equipment. Each of those computers had a 250-350W power supply, although I doubt they were drawing that amount the whole time (but maybe they were...).
When I moved out to sell the house, I made the executive decision that maintaining computers at home was far too much like maintaining computers at work. I didn't want anything more to do with it. Thus you see the much faster speeds for obairlann.net that exist today, as I let Dreamhost take over the hosting. An added advantage is that I don't have the relatively humongous electrical load I had before.
Out of curiosity, I went around, Kill-A-Watting some New House Order devices. For computers, I now have the laptop, the DSL modem, a wireless router, and an external hard drive. The laptop, as I've already mentioned, runs about 18W normally, or 2W when sleeping and keeping the battery topped up. The wireless router, I was pleased to see (a WRT54G, for those keeping score at home) runs 2W total, ever. The DSL modem similarly runs 2W. The external hard drive uses 4W while standing by, or 12W while accessing the hard drive (it normally spins down, so average consumption will be 4.1W or something, based on how often I access it). So, the grand total computer power in the house is now an average of about 25W, since the laptop spends about 40% of its time awake, and 60% sleeping. That's a pretty sizeable jump from the 6 x 200W (not to mention monitors) I was running before, plus networking gear.
Of course, all is not rosy on this path. My TV system, although off 99% of the time, is horrible: a projector which uses 290W while on, and a surprising 4W just to sit in standby. The stereo stack (which includes amplifier, MD player, CD player, VCR, and PS2) uses about 11W on standby, including a 2W drain for the plug-in clock. That drops by about 2W per device that I unplug (most of this stuff stays in a standby mode to respond to a remote control). Switched on and playing a CD at a comfortable volume, the system uses about 80W, although it varies depending on how much noise comes out of the speakers. Listening to the radio at the same volume uses maybe 2W less.
The stack jumps up to about 104W while playing a DVD through the PS2 -- a dedicated DVD player would probably draw less power, since the PS2 includes a lot of fancy (and power hungry) electronics to make video games pretty. Interestingly, playing a video game only draws a little bit more, at 109W.
Fortunately, the stereo system is one which is only on a small amount of the time, and I only turn on the bits that are being used.
Charging things take a surprising amount of power, but not how you think. I checked a couple wall-wart power supplies, and they clocked in at about 2W each, while doing nothing but being plugged in. Of course, their draw goes up once they're powering their intended devices, depending on the device. The problem with the wall-warts is that they draw power whether they're doing anything or not, and many of them end up just plugged in by default, drawing power and doing nothing.
I haven't measured everything, but it looks like my normal "standby" power is under 100W. That's far better than it used to be, but 100W still adds up to 2.4 kWh per day. For that power, I have clocks, computer equipment, and other "always on" devices to thank.
For all that ~400W sounds bad to watch a DVD, I only do that about two hours every few days, for (let's call it) 4.8 kWh per month. On the other hand, the standby power for those systems (15W) is on 24/7, for 10.8 kWh per month. Yeehaw! I think I'll start switching off that power strip...
This leads to the question, "How much does it all cost?" My 2-monthly electric bill reveals the answers. It says the summer rate for power is 3.76 cents per kWh, and that for the 62 days ending July 10th, I averaged 4.43 kWh per day. Since I have a "base service charge" of $6, my actual cost per day for that period was 26 cents per day. Of course, for the same period last year (computers and all running), I was averaging 17.55 kWh/day. Last year, my average power bill was around $70 for two months, and this last July's bill is $16.37.
Hooray for less power usage! Now, how do I reduce it further?
Posted at 13:53 permanent link category: /misc
Mon, 15 Oct 2007
My ability to ride with clipless pedals is increasing. They are giving me noticeably more power as I ride.
But.
I'm now on my second pair of shoes. The first pair allowed a pretty dramatic amount of cleat to hit the ground, meaning I couldn't wear them at all in my softwood-floored house without causing lots of damage. The second pair look good, but with my weight on them, is still touching down the cleats. At least they fit better. Pity they're not returnable.
Despite fitting better, the new shoes aren't making my life much better. They still fit poorly enough that the toes on my right foot go to sleep in short order. Since they still grind the cleats into the floor, I can't wear them around, so they're "bicycle specific" -- exactly the factor I identified as one of my biggest reasons for not riding. I have to change shoes as soon as I get off the bike, which is making me unhappy.
The new shoes also are sort of "summery," which I don't need, but didn't have much choice in. That is, they're partly made with mesh, so they get some airflow. That's great and all, but I also ride in the rain. I don't want to have yet another piece of bicycle-only kit to put on in the form of rain booties, so that's working pretty hard against them.
While I appreciate the increased riding power, I still arrive at work/home winded, with tired legs. I'm not riding any faster (in fact, I'm riding a bit slower, as I get used to using new muscles), and really, I'm still putting out the same amount of energy to get where I'm going. Between that, the fact that I was already getting where I wanted to go with platform pedals, and the massively increased daily hassle of changing out of shoes, I don't think this setup will last the week.
I'll see how it goes, but right now, the prospects for clipless pedals on a 5 mile commute are pretty dim.
Posted at 12:04 permanent link category: /bicycle
Fri, 12 Oct 2007
What I shall call limited success
I actually had far better success with the clipless pedals than I'd expected. I stopped into Gregg's Cycles after work, though, to see if I could find better shoes. I did find some, sort of. I got a pair of Specialized shoes (model name already forgotten, naturally) which fit a lot better than the Cannondales I got last night. Unfortunately, the cleats still protrude just a little bit, so they're no better for the floors.
Ah well, at least they fit well.
Posted at 21:02 permanent link category: /bicycle
I've been riding bicycles since I was a kid. Someone convinced me, early on, that I needed to be riding with toe clips, so I installed some stamped steel clips on my pedals.
I rode around, wondering what the big deal was. I would try lifting the pedals with my feet, but in order for the clips to be loose enough to allow my shoe to be removed or inserted, they were also loose enough that there was considerable slack between pressing on the pedal and lifting on the clip. Lifting with my feet felt inefficient and silly, and I never got in the habit of it. It seemed to energy more than anything else.
Fast forward to this last year. I got on my bicycle again in a big way, and started riding to work daily in September, 2006. Once again, people started urging me to use clips, but this time they were advocating so-called clipless pedals. These are the serious pedals you see that just look like a shriveled, mangled corpse of a pedal. When the rider uses them, they engage with the shoes with a loud snap. They're clipless because they don't have that big, dorky clip running up over the rider's shoe.
Indeed, clipless pedals are supposed to be much better, because your shoe is fixed fast to the pedal, eliminating that slop-factor I discovered with toe clips. However, I had my doubts, and resisted the idea for more than a year.
Finally, some time this summer, I started thinking I should see what all the fuss is about. My friend Jesse, who was the biggest proponent of clipless pedals, compared the situation to watching a friend labor with a hand saw and insist that it was good enough, eschewing the electrically-powered saw that was next to him. A compelling comparison, if you've ever switched from a hand tool to a power tool.
So last night, passing conveniently by REI, I stopped in to check out clipless pedals and shoes. I'd done this before, but the consensus seemed to be that the only shoe that was possibly wide enough for my freakish feet was that $230 model there. Oh, I would say, and walk away dejected. $230 (plus $50-200 for a set of pedals) is far too much of an investment in some technology that I strongly suspect won't work for me.
What I found last night, though, was a set of $45 shoes that basically fit. They're certainly nothing fabulous, but they're "walkin' around" shoes, and they fit well enough to give it a try. I picked up my Cannondale shoes, and a set of middle-line Shimano pedals.
This morning, (while waiting for the DSL to be installed, which will doubtless be a story unto itself), I screwed the miniscule cleats into the shoes, and installed the little pedals on my bike. The very first thing I noticed is that the cleats do, in fact, protrude past the tread of the shoe, meaning that they are not actually "walkin' around" shoes. They still provide hardened steel edges to dig little crescent-moon shaped gouges in any soft floor, such as all the floors in my house, or half the floors at work. Strike one.
I spent a few minutes in the garage, balancing myself on the stationary bicycle, to get used to the pedal engagement/disengagement procedure. Everyone who's told me about clipless pedals has also told at least one, "So I came to a stop, and fell over, having forgotten how to disengage my feet..." story. I'd like to avoid that, if possible. Engaging the clips seemed to be more difficult than disengaging them, so that at least is somewhat positive.
Now confident enough to try riding around, I clipped in, and rode up the street for a few blocks. Nothing. Well, obviously, I thought to myself, if I ride the same way I always do, I won't notice it. So I tried experimentally lifting my legs as I pedalled. Yeah, ok, I can lift now, but the differential in muscle power between my pressing and lifting muscles must be 100:1 or better. Lifting won't gain me much if there's no power behind it.
I came in from the ride thoroughly disappointed. Treading with extreme care (noticing that the protruding end of the cleat was already shiny from walking on the concrete garage floor), I walked back into the house and changed back into safe shoes.
Right now, I am prepared to ride straight back to REI, and get my $145 back. I'm not going to, though. I realize that it'll take some practice to get used to this new world order, so I'll give it a try for a week. If, after the end of the week (and at least 50 miles) I still can't tell any difference, I'll return the whole shebang and never look back.
A power saw with no electrical connection doesn't really get me anything over the trusty old handsaw.
Posted at 10:42 permanent link category: /bicycle
Thu, 11 Oct 2007
More cuteness via the ol' felis domesticus
We brought Miloš out for lunch today. Sushi lunch. He was appropriately enthusiastic.
Of course, I took pictures:
Clicky-clicky for a little gallery
Posted at 13:41 permanent link category: /misc
Wed, 10 Oct 2007
I am pleased to report that I'm not very allergic to young Miloš. Slightly, yes, but only if I actively try to induce allergies, like by rubbing my hands in my eyes, or inhaling through his fur. Since I'm not an idiot, that hasn't been a problem. I seem to be able to be around him without any adverse effects.
That picture is from about day two of his reign chez-Kristin. She is, of course, completely enamored. She's had him out in a little carrier, which apparently produces wild spasms from onlookers. He remains startlingly mellow through it all. All signs are that he's going to be a great cat.
Posted at 16:58 permanent link category: /misc
Mon, 01 Oct 2007
I finished moving out of the apartment and back into my house last night. My home environment currently consists of a great number of boxes.
Of course, since the decision to move back in was made in relative haste, or at least with little lead-time, I wasn't able to start ordering services like phone and DSL quickly enough. So, I won't have a phone there until maybe the 4th (no big deal, I've been living with the cellphone exclusively for a while now). More importantly, the DSL isn't scheduled to be installed until the 12th (or so; you never know with DSL installs).
Sitting at home without internet service is an odd feeling. I can't exactly complain -- my life is remarkably pleasant. It's just strange to be sitting at home, with the computer open in front of me, and not be able to get to all the stuff online I'm used to having available at a moment's notice.
The other very odd thing is to be back in this house, which I'd previously lived in for 7 years, yet be surrounded by boxes and strangeness. I still have many many boxes to retrieve from the storage unit, too. The house is no longer mine, in some important way -- it's someone else's; someone who never showed up to take it.
I'll get it back, no doubt. It's just going to take some work.
Posted at 11:02 permanent link category: /misc
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