A Little of Each

Warm today, around 42F, but I'm fighting a light cold. Sought a little light exercise, and thought about MTB at the PR, but decided to road ride instead. The latter has less overhead - no packing of the car - and the PR trails are likely muddy. I headed out on SlushBike along a very old route I used when I was new to bike commutes, out toward Billerica. Along the way I noticed the road looked familiar, and found I was on the approach to my usual entrance to the PR! All the times I've gone there, I never noticed I was on an old bike commute route. After a long but gentle climb I took a right turn into the PR as if I were starting an MTB ride. I didn't go far, but did hop a ~6" log on the way in, something I haven't done much on this bike. I turned around soon after that, back to the road then on toward Billerica. I didn't go much further though, heading back to home upon reaching a detour. On the way home I did the short MTB spur again, for a total of 4 log hops, the last feeling more sure-wheeled than the first.
With my rigid fork and drop handlebars, I suppose the 100m or so of trails I did was a bit like cyclocross. If so, my take-away is 'youch, my hands!' (SlushBike's position is road-style: low and stretched out to match my summer bike. I suppose a true cross bike should have a shorter top tube for a more upright position, like a mountain bike?)

Ice Storm

Friday (12/12) I checked my email and weather forecasts around 6AM and all looked clear for the bike commute in. It was raining pretty hard at home, but was supposed to clear by midday, and was around 34 degrees, so no real chance of ice along the way. In fact, I picked the summer bike (in its winter mode with fenders and wide tires) for the trip. But just before I left, A suggested there could possibly be some ice for the return trip out West where I work. So I switched to SlushBike for the first ride of the season on it with studded tires.

The first half of the ride demonstrated to me all the water leaks in my normal winter clothing. By the middle of the ride in, my gloves and boots had soaked through, and I wished I had picked a different jacket. A town later, in Acton, I saw light flooding, a nice distraction from my extremities getting cold. The rain tapered off, too. Then, very near the town line of Boxborough, the trees suddenly grew the beautiful shimmer of a layer of ice - a real ice storm! It was just pretty at first, but then branches appeared on the road. The first ones weren't very exciting in themselves, but they lay in fingers of loose ice granules they'd grown in the storm and which shattered loose in the fall. I was suddenly glad to have the studs. As I continued to my work building, the fallen branches got bigger, including whole trees by the end. At one point I heard a sound like a rifle shot, immediately followed by sh-sh-Sh-SH-sh-sh - sounding just like a big breaking ocean wave. It was a big pine branch breaking nearly above me, and the shock apparently kicked loose a lot of the whole tree's ice.

The finale of the ride in was a downed tree within sight of the door to my building. It blocked the whole road and had branches sticking up along it, in addition to the mess on the ground. But there was a large branch sticking up then bending back down again, creating a gap over the trunk, and I was able to ride over the trunk and through this gap without pausing. Fun! (SlushBike is based on a rigid mountain bike, and the studded tires are very like true mountain bike tires, so the bike felt at home hopping these trees.)

Seconds later, I found the sign declaring the building closed for the day, due to lack of power. (It turns out power was out in the whole town.) Luckily, I was able to enter briefly, to swap gloves and socks with spares I keep at work, and refill my water bottles, etc. Then it was back on the bike for the return trip. I took it easy, but by the time I got home I was quite tired. I need to rebuild a tolerance for the weight and slow rolling of the studded tires. (The tire is Nokian Hakkapelitta 26 x 1.9" - a whole different animal from the 700x35mm version I used years ago. The 26" (MTB) model is much wider, more than is suggested by the width in the model name, making it softer and less prone to sinking into a rut.)

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At home we never got any ice, so aside from the radio news, I mostly forgot about it. This morning I tried to mountain bike, but once again as soon as I entered my destination town the ice appeared. So instead of riding much, I spent most of the time clearing my favorite trail - still a lovely way to spend a morning.

17°?!

Winter commuting is fun in a strange way, but this morning was simply cold. No fun snow, only one smidgen of ice. It was 17 degrees F when I started this morning, cooler than most of my winter riding, and it's still autumn! But of course it was nice to ride, the sun was out, and along the wonderfully wild Mill St. I had to cut through a bold group of 14 adult turkeys.

The thing I had most forgotten is how bad the car exhaust smells in the cold. I guess it's just that the engines are cold, but it really feels like the pollution is a couple times worse than when it's above freezing. This will be an incentive to take lower-traffic routes, even though they're longer.

Post-Carbon Comics

I saw this in a recent DirtRag magazine, and a couple clicks in google located it for you. Interestingly, the next-to-last panel was bowdlerized in DirtRag - is it too gory on the blog? Also, there's a prequel comic on the April 2008 page that's a bit different from what I would have guessed.

Almost my favorite part of the comic is the logo for Post-Carbon Comics, a bit too small to read on the blog. The center of the logo is a mound labelled "world oil production", and an arrow pointing to about 1/4 of the way down the slope to the right with a tag "we are here". Nice!

Mine Falls

E and I had a beautiful ride at a spot in southern NH long recommended by MF. It's a relatively easy place to ride, and we had no injuries. But E did have a rather spectacular crash, captured here. He laughed as he slid in those pine needles.

Later, he found the steep and tall, but smooth descent shown here. I was nervous about him riding it, and if I were alone I probably would have skipped it, but E really wanted to try it and a few minutes later we were both enjoying it. (The picture is at an angle, making the path appear less steep than it really is. You can see how the bases of the trees are bent to make them vertical.)

Halloween

E dressed as a space alien, adapting a homemade costume A and I made two years ago. I became a lounge singer; my main song was Brandy. M, the dog, always looks ridiculous, so she's not really dressed as anything - just extra ridiculous.

Commute Foliage

The best part of Autumn bike commuting in New England is the foliage. These pictures are from a spot where I cross a reservoir on Trapelo Road. This is an early morning shoot, when the water is generally still and the sun just coming up. I cross on a low bridge and these pictures show the view off either side. A mile before this I had the unusual visual treat of riding toward a setting full moon, but it was below the tree line when I got the camera out.

Impressionistic Photo Mistake

This is from the New England Mountain Bike Association (NEMBA) Kid's day last weekend. The shutter was way too slow for the precise focus I had hoped for, but I rather like the suggestion of movement in the resulting blur.

Helmet Lights

I started wearing a forward-facing helmet light around a year ago, after a couple winters of having just a rear red LED there. The upper picture shows that first version, a true prototype. I built the bracket myself, based on a home-machined aluminum plate. Over that year I found two major benefits of a forward helmet light. Its height off the road makes it far more visible than my handlebar-mounted light (which I still use) over obstacles like road construction barrels and some shrubs. More important is I can turn it toward any oncoming drivers including those approaching from side roads. In fact, it amplifies my attempts to make eye contact, grabbing the attention of drivers and pulling their eyes to mine. Nice.

Now I wear this helmet for all commutes and I miss the light when I use a lighter helmet for long rides. So I decided to rebuild the helmet light to upgrade its LED light to a far brighter model, and fix the mount. The lower picture shows the new version, based on a Planet Bike Beamer 3 light which is around an order of magnitude brighter than the original. This light comes with a nice handlebar mount, but luckily for me it's made of two separable parts connected with a screw. Removing that screw left me with a flat mount which I built a helmet plate around. (It makes me wonder whether Planet Bike offers a helmet mount, but the bike shop didn't offer one.)

While we're on the topic, here's why I built that first mount. The last time I was hit by a car (Jan 18, 2006 in Acton) I was going home from work under a pitch dark sky. I had my very powerful headlight on, nearly as powerful as a car's low beam headlight (11W HID ~= 40W Halogen). A minivan stopped at a stop sign, and the driver must not have looked much for oncoming traffic before pulling out just as I rode in front of him. I saw what was happening, turned my head to look at the driver and even took my right hand off the bar to wave at him to try to get his attention. No luck. In that moment I felt rather helpless, and I still think about it sometimes. After a while I realized that a helmet light is the best solution for my inability to get the driver's attention. And I make the helmet light blink (as I do all my LED lights) because I believe that's the most eye-catching mode.

Firsts at the PR

For A's second ride on her new mountain bike, we'd planned a rather easy place, but we started running short on time and A decided to fix that by switching to the much closer Private Reserve. E has been pushing hard for a ride there since we started bike shopping, because it's his current favorite place. I had hoped we might go for A's third or fourth ride, after working up to it. A did a great job, including riding a tough descent right at the start which I thought would be too tough.

E rode the whole long wooden bridge that he and I have been walking before today. I still haven't ridden it! We ride down a series of switchbacks, then there's a sharp left just before a large rock which drops the rider down around 8" onto a long, rickety narrow wooden bridge which is off-camber and has a bend in the middle. The bridge is over a dry riverbed and like most PR bridges it looks likely to collapse within the year.

A little later, E made his first crossing of a stream on a bridge made of roundish stones loosely piled in the water. I'd only crossed it once before.

I had no firsts today. In fact, I clearly need to do more work here or I'll soon be left behind!

Superflash Upgrade

The Planet Bike Superflash rear blinkie light is wonderfully bright, plus small, runs a very long time on its pair of AAA batteries and is relatively inexpensive. Thanks to SM for showing it to me. I've adopted it for commuting bikes, but it has a couple weaknesses I'm still learning to live with.

• The button is hard to press. Press on the bottom white button while pushing down on the red part of the top, not the white.


• It's not waterproof enough for me unless the bike has fenders. (No one else I know has had trouble with this.)

I already had one round of waterproofing the thing, putting polyurethane on the switch contacts and vaseline on the rubber gasket, and moving the mount a little to the side to reduce the spray against the power button.
After Friday's commute, the switch seized up enough that I had to open the battery compartment and "hot wire" the switch to turn it off. (The edge of a coin will do it - just touch both silver dots on top of the switch at the same time.) While doing this I noticed the switch itself was beginning to rust - a bad sign in a piece of electronics only a couple months old.
So I decided to convert the switch to a magnetic sensor, called a reed switch. Some of my favorite blinkie lights use this technique, and I needed to replace the switch in any case. Luckily I found that the reed switch of a broken bike computer would (barely) fit in the enclosure, and I was able to wire it in. The picture shows an intact unit on the left, and my modification on the right. After taking the picture, I sealed up all the holes I with some silicone caulk. I'll let you know how it holds up through autumn.

While we're talking about rear blinkie lights, I need to mention the Cateye LD1000. While it is better sealed than the Superflash, it's much dimmer, heavier, bigger, and has a short battery life. It also has a bizarre design which prevents using it in a 'normal' flash mode. The real problem is it got glowing reviews in Cycling Plus magazine and on JensonUSA's website, describing it as 'the only daylight-visible' option. That accolade belongs to the Superflash, in my book.

Deerfield Daydreams

I missed the Deerfield Dirt-Road Randonnee in late August, but have been daydreaming of it since. 100km (62 mi) of dirt roads - sounds beautiful, doesn't it?

Part of why I missed it is I thought I didn't have a proper bike for the ride, but have since realized the IF is fine. I can fit big tires because it's designed for medium tires + full fenders. This is my long-distance bike, so I know it would be comfortable enough. I believe I can fit 32mm cyclocross tires, like the ones shown below. I never imagined my bike set up this way, but now I'm looking forward to trying it. I also never imagined silver tires, but every Vittoria tire I've tried has become my favorite in its category, so for the moment this is the tire I picture.

Gear Train Summery

This is a summary of various gear trains at the close of summer.

The IF (summer bike and long-distance ride) odometer just tied with that of minicar, my Subaru Impreza (named by E) at just under 16k miles. The IF is about three times older, and I'm counting both of its frames because the odometer survived the 'big crash' that separated them. They're both running great, and I'm pleased to ride them.

Minicar just turned 2 years old, and its stick-shift transmission is now worn in, smooth as butter. In fact, its fuel efficiency has risen above my expectations, averaging a full 28.5 MPG this summer. I drive on regular gas and use the air conditioner normally. I do coast a bit and (safely!) draft a little, but I don't work too hard on saving gas. Winter typically drags down the mileage, but I hope not far.

The Shimano Nexus 8 internal-geared hub and matching roller brake are running fine on Slushbike, with about 200mi so far. I've read that the hub needs about 500mi to wear in, and already the thing feels smoother, especially in the low gears. During this wear-in period, I'm using the large chainring as much as possible to maximize time in the low gears where drag is worst. I'm also using the rear brake as much as possible to cook off some excess grease. The rollerbrake isn't as powerful as I want, but the manual implies that when it gets low on grease it gets too powerful. And grease is lost by braking (burning off in the heat). So for the moment, the big (optional) heatsink on the brake is working against me, but once its tuned the heatsink will help keep it stable. I'm sure I'll get the gears and brake worn in before the first snow/ice ride, which is when I really need that brake to be strong.

All in all, the vehicles are in good shape for the coming cold weather! I hope you've enjoyed summer too.

E rides the PR

E and I have been riding in the PR most weekends lately. I brought the camera a week and a half ago, and these are my favorite results. I still have a lot to learn about taking action shots like this. They look pretty good at this resolution, but the focus is not very good at full resolution. I'll just need to practice more!

Hummingbird

There's an unusual flying creature in our yard lately. It looks and flies like a tiny hummingbird, but is less than half as long as any hummingbird I've seen. Monday, BM&TD visited us and B walked right up to it to take a close look. She convinced me it's no bird because it has big fuzzy antennae. I hadn't thought I could get that close to it, so I always saw it through a screen. Besides assuming I couldn't get close to it, I also assumed I couldn't photograph it, but now I'm excited to try. Yesterday I went out to see what kind of shutter speed I could use (not great, about 1/60 sec) and try some test shots. While I was there, A spotted a hummingbird and I was able to snap it, and these are the result. I believe this is a female ruby-throated hummingbird on scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma).
Stay tuned for pictures of our strange insect, if I can catch it before our flowers drop for the year.

Lake Winnipesaukee

A week ago DP and I rode the CRW Summer Century, 103 miles with the ski area Mt Wachusett as its centerpiece. We had a great ride but I really felt the last ten miles or so as we went far beyond any distance I'd ridden since last year. DP and I joked a bit along the way, including references to the old cemeteries we periodically passed. A couple years ago I mentioned to him that I liked seeing them because I knew soon enough I'd be in the other side of the fence. For me, a cemetery is in part a signpost reading "carpe diem".
We tended to ride by ourselves instead of with the other CRW riders. While a big group ride like this offers a chance to draft other riders and save energy, we felt in more control and a little safer away from the bunches.
That ride was the first of three big weekend rides in a row, a set that will probably define my summer adventure of 2008. Saturday was the middle event, a solo attempt to ride from home to a point on the north side of Lake Winnipesaukee in NH. The rest of this post describes that ride.
I left at 7:15AM, a little later than I'd hoped, but the air was still cool and the roads vacant. The riding was easy up into New Hampshire, but then the hills began to gather and roll beneath me.
Riding alone on an unknown course is reasonably easy with a handlebar GPS routing system, but I feel a bit uneasy being so dependent on it and also knowing how many mistakes it can make. I could wind up with 18-wheelers with their blown tires littering the breakdown lane. I could be blocked by construction and face a much longer alternative route. The little box of electronics could simply break. Our Garmin Legend has been reliable for about two years, but the handlebar of a road bike takes an awful lot of vibration.
Around 10:00 I started into a zigzag shape on the map, a rather frustrating shape because it's far longer than a straighter line, and the middle part was on a major road (NH Rt 4) going in the wrong direction. I got a second surprise six miles later when I realized I'd underestimated the size of this zigzag by a factor of two. The good news was Rt 4 was big enough for me to find a reasonable lunch spot where I could sit outdoors with my bike. I took my shoes off for a lavish ten minutes or so during lunch, and coupled with my iced coffee, that helped a lot.
Just a mile or two after lunch, it happened: a detour. All of us eastbound traffic on Rt 4 were diverted southward, and one of the people running the detour affirmed I could travel north this way. I had eyed a left turn near the detour, but I assumed that if it were a useful northbound road the GPS would have found it long ago. The GPS re-routed and looked happy as I rode with traffic toward the south, but then I recognized the car-centric GPS' way of indicating I should go to a good place to turn around and then reverse on this same road. So I turned then and did go up the northbound road I had eyed but which no car took. The GPS dropped about 15 minutes off its ETA for the new course, so I was very happy. A more direct, faster and less busy road - this is just what I wanted! In fact, it became the road I had imagined riding in NH: quiet, surrounded by trees and the occasional water view, with few houses or cars. The hills grew and got steeper too, and after several miles I was having flashbacks to Mt Wachusset. This was Rt 107, and my ears popped twice with changes in altitude (I don't recall that at all on Wachusset).
Originally, the plan was I'd ride until about 2PM, when A would pick me up so I could be clean and rested for a day-before-the-wedding party. For a while I started looking forward to 2:00 for the promised rest, but as it drew closer I wished I had time to reach the destination. The GPS has a great feature of calculating ETA at destination, and this time slowly crept down throughout my ride. After I found some water near 2:00, I called and said I'd ride to the end. I could hear E in the background having fun, so it was best for everyone if I could ride the last hour and a quarter. The last miles passed easily and at the corner of my very last turn I passed a tiny plot inside a low wall. The sign read "Swett Cemetery".
(Anticlimactically, I then got lost for a full 15 minutes as the GPS and I got confused on a branching delta of gravel paths and roads. The GPS even turned off mysteriously, twice. Its batteries seem ok; is it dead?)
Totals: 117mi (a personal record), 8 hrs wall clock time.

Goodbye Disc Brake

These (unretouched!) photos show me removing the awful disc brake from SlushBike. After my last ride on it, commuting home in good weather with this thing squealing and useless the whole way, I know I was happy to be rid of it. But if you look closely, I think you'll share my impression that the bike frame itself was relieved to be rid of the thing.

IF Hits 15k miles

My good-weather and long-distance bike rolled 15,000 onto the odometer this morning. The first 2000 were on a different frame though it looked the same. That version was destroyed in my "big" crash May 21, 2003. This bike gets a little under half my miles in a year; I ride SlushBike in the winter and rain. There's a picture of this one in the Brewster ride article below. IF stands for the frame manufacturer, the local Independent Fabrication.

Squirt P4

The Leatherman Squirt P4 is my second-favorite bike tool, and my favorite pocket tool off the bike. On the bike you certainly need a set of hex keys for adjusting and tightening the many fasteners on the bike. But beyond that, I like to have a set of pliers, even if they're small. (I would have really liked pliers when I was trying to pull cactus needles out of a tire one time, but the TSA rules are too pesky about little knives in airline carry-ons.) I also find a small knife handy.

The Squirt P4 is tiny enough to store easily in a case made for a USB flash memory stick, and it weighs just 55g. The blades are high quality and precisely formed. But the capability it has that sealed the deal for me is it works very well as an emergency cassette lockring tool, as shown above. I discovered this in a time of need, around 15 miles from home at night when my shifting stopped working properly and I found the lockring had come loose. I couldn't find any way to tighten it with any of the tools I had, until I thought to try the Squirt, and it fit perfectly. Thanks, Leatherman!

SlushBike Rear Shift Adapter

Here's a true rolling prototype, in fact the 2nd or 3rd version of a design I've been refining for years. This is a good time to discuss it, since it's about to be retired (from SlushBike, at least). The pictures are based on the same shot, but with two apparent zoom levels to orient you to where it is on the bike.

This piece connects my favorite shifter, the Campagnolo integrated brake-shift lever ("brifter" for short), to a Shimano rear derailleur. These parts are not supposed to connect, and even if they were, the brifter is 9-speed while the cassette is 8-speed. I designed and fabricated it myself, from 6061 aluminum alloy.



The function of this adapter is to make the derailleur perceive the cable movement that is correct for its design, but which is driven by the incompatible brifter. The derailleur works by deforming a triangle where one of the sides is a stretch of cable which is pulled in or allowed to pull out. So the adapter really just shifts one point of this triangle, the one where the cable attaches to the derailleur arm and moves the pulleys. Of the three versions I've made, this is the most adjustable, so it could adapt lots of different shifter/derailleur combinations. You can see that it has a long slot for its mounting bolt (the original cable fixing bolt), and this controls the radius of the adjustment. The whole adapter can be rotated around its mounting bolt, allowing the angle of the adjustment to be set. This combination permits quite flexible positioning of the new pivot point compared with the original one.


This adapter has served me well for years, but it will be obsoleted on this bike when I convert to the internal hub.

Toupe Trouble

For the last year I've been using the Specialized Toupe saddle on my good-weather/long-distance bike. Last year it proved quite comfy and lightweight. My only reservation was its name. When I picked it up at CycleLoft, I pronounced it "toop", but was corrected to "toupee". It's hard to think of a sillier name for a saddle.

This Spring I noticed that it had cracked in the obvious place, just outside the rear connection to the rail, where the thin shell is cantilevered. (Let's leave aside the implications for my riding style or weight.) I've never broken a saddle before by simply riding it. In fact, I'd been fighting a 'saddle comfort' issue for over a month when I found this, so I think it cost me some real inconvenience and even a medical test.

I discovered the crack just days before the ride to Brewster, so I needed a saddle fast and was reluctant to risk buying a different, less comfortable one, so I picked up another Toupe. I had wanted to seek a warranty replacement, but couldn't find the original receipt nor the date I bought it, so I mostly gave up hope of that. But the Cycleloft salesman told me to bring the old saddle by some time and they'd see what they could do.

With little hope I eventually found time to return with the old saddle and the receipt for the new one. They looked up the original purchase date, printed a new receipt for it, and gave me a full store credit for the broken saddle! If I'd brought the saddle originally, they'd have given me the new one outright. I think that's the best return service I've ever had. I asked whether the new saddle would fail next Spring, and was told that if it does I'll get another new one. While I'd rather have a reliable saddle (I'll hold out hope that Specialized has fixed the design), I give Cycleloft my Local Bike Shop of the Month award!

Internally Geared Hub Daydream

Looks tempting, doesn't it?

Why are cars so good in bad weather? Their drivetrains are shielded from all the gritty muck on the streets. Most bike drivetrains are fully exposed, so one winter ride can make a mess of the whole thing. And gritty, rusty chains make for slow riding and high wear. Putting the gears inside the hub solves part of the problem. More important is shielding the brake, in the foreground of this picture. I'm still toying with the idea of converting SlushBike to use one of these.

[The picture is probably a Shimano Nexus 7 with standard brake. I'm really looking at the Nexus 8 with the upgraded brake. The roller brakes apparently burn their grease if overloaded, and for a small cost increase you can get a big heat sink on the thing.]

Brewster Fauna

This is another look back at Memorial Day weekend. I finally got some pix for you.

Why go to the Cape at all? Well, the kids have a great time, just like the adults. Here is E and his friend K, laughing it up at the beach. (Like all pictures here, you can click on it for a modestly larger view. If you want full resolution, let me know.) Let me confess this shot was a staged a bit to help capture the real fun they had all the rest of the time. We won't get into why they're laughing at me.

Last year I discovered that horseshoe crabs mate off the beach here. I was pulling up crabs as they raced by, to show to K and E. I found a monster one and started pulling it up. Then I realized that it had an extra body segment and put it back down. I had a guess, and later confirmed that this was a mating pair. The smaller male has specialized legs to grasp the female, and they apparently run around like that for a while. This year, on a sandbar at low tide, I saw a number of crabs like the one here. At first I feared they were dead, perhaps a post-mating die-off, like drone bees? Then I realized the crabs were pairs, with the female (wisely) dug into the sand, and they were apparently in good health. The male tail would swing around if provoked. I guess they were just caught by the tide, dug in, and will run around again when the tide turns. They really seem prehistoric! For scale, my (wide flat) size 10 footprint is in the foreground. Notice the bird footprints; I think they were really after the passengers on the crabs, not the pair itself.

I'll end with two shots of my bike as I rode it there. You can see how clean the bike trail was - a normal rainy road ride (like today's commute) makes the bike really dirty. The last pic is my crowded "dashboard" for the rare solo night ride on unfamiliar roads. From left to right: GPS navigator, main headlight, cadence/distance/speedometer, blinky/redundant front light, and heart rate monitor on the bottom [stem]. No more gadgets until I grow wider shoulders! [Road handlebar width is supposed to match shoulder width.]

Memorial Day Ride

We spent Memorial day weekend in Brewster, on Cape Cod. A&E went there Thursday and I followed Friday afternoon. I biked there from home, via the high-speed ferry.

Home to the Boston Harbor ferry terminal took only an hour of pedalling, but wall clock time was longer because of the many stops in Cambridge and Boston. This was only my second ride into Boston, and it felt empowering. I rarely drive into the city, and still feel intimidated by the prospect, so biking in feels like a real accomplishment. At the same time, the bike paths and lanes help make the trip safe, and the small scale of the city makes biking a very reasonable way to get between points. This leg of the ride had summery weather, but my jersey pockets had another layer in case of rain.

The ferry steamed toward the right edge of a rain cloud, but I had hopes of missing it until we pulled into the Provincetown channel and into patter against the windshield. The sun set as we docked; I turned on my winter headlight before starting off. The rain continued for the ~30 miles to Brewster though it tapered and sometimes paused.

My friend TMC recommended Gu as a mountain bike energy food. I rarely use one on the road, but I ate one just before I got onto the main highway for the next ten miles. A moment later I was struck that Route 6's shoulder was a great surface to ride, smooth and clean, and at the same time the rain stopped. Amazing what a little caffeinated glucose polymer can do!

From Route 6 I jumped onto the Cape Cod Rail Trail, this section new since last Memorial Day. What a nice path! Fresh, smooth pavement took me directly to my destination, in contrast to last year's highway ride on bad pavement and through an ugly rotary. I didn't see a soul on the path, freeing me from my concern that my headlight could be too bright for oncoming traffic. Better yet, the warm wet pavement created a ribbon of "sea smoke" fog over the trail, bracketed by fog-free grass. The headlight played up the fog for a dreamy ride. I reached A&E at ~9:10, earlier than I expected.

This was really a great ride. I cringe when I consider the alternative of trying to drive there in rush hour.

Phoenix & Rattlesnake

I'm tuned into a new news feed this week, on the Phoenix Mars Lander. Each sol is a new adventure. [Phoenix is a Nasa robotic probe recently landed near Mars' north pole where water ice is believed to lie inches below the surface. A small backhoe will dig into the red planet and an onboard lab will analyze eight soil samples.]

Mountain biked at Rattlesnake this morning, studying trails that I've forgotten and the new one. That place is crazy - way too hard, but fun and it continues to call to me. Tried boosting the negative pressure on the fork to make it softer on rocky descents, and it seemed better. Currently 115 positive and 125 negative; will try 130 neg next. (Default is matched positive and negative, and that's how I was riding before today.)

More Creatures + Roller Brake

Thursday's commute continued creature week here. On the way in I saw a red squirrel, my second of the year. Then on the way home, again on Windmere, I saw a broad-winged hawk, my first ever sighting. I didn't even know what it was, but the Sibley guide came to the rescue. (Two people suggested it might have been a rough-legged hawk, but Sibley's pictures mostly ruled that out for me, and then I found the rough-legged is here only in winter.)

Windmere is just a great place for creature sightings. A couple years ago I saw my most obscure animal there: a black mink. I didn't even believe the expert KH at first, but after looking it up I became convinced.

In other news, my slush/rain bike's rear brake continues to disappoint. A fender is great for most of the bike, but it douses the rear wheel in gritty muck, which destroys rim and disc brakes. So I'm fantasizing about a Shimano Nexus 8 internal hub back there with the cable-operated roller brake. It would be a lot like our old 3-speeds with coaster brakes, except 8 speeds and a hand brake lever like all the other bikes. Downsides are I'd need to go to flat bars and swapping slick tires with studs would be harder. It's a daydream for now, but it's holding together in that realm.

Creature Commutes

One of the nice things about morning bike commutes is the wildlife is most visible then. This morning I saw a great blue heron at the base of Windmere Drive. I startled it into flight, getting a good look, then when I descended this cull-de-sac I saw it again and nearly caught up to it. [Windmere is the toughest hill I've found to tie into my commutes, a 9% slope. I avoid it in the winter; this was my second attempt of the year so far. I try to ride it regularly in the warm half of the year to build up some strength.]
Two days ago I saw a large red fox in Acton during my previous morning commute.
March 17 I saw my first ever fisher cat, on yet another morning commute.
These are all relatively common animals, but still interesting and a delightful addition to the day. But part of my mind wonders whether I'm seeing them because they're thriving or because they're displaced. A couple years ago I saw lots of turkeys after never seeing them at all, and I formed the impression that the housing boom was pushing them into view. Here's hoping they're thriving.

Homemade Mongoose Linkage

We had a one-wheel bike trailer made by Mongoose for E before he could ride a 2-wheeler, around two years ago. Even then he liked mountain biking, so we took it onto rough gravel paths and other unpaved adventures. It may not have been designed for that, but still I was shocked one day to find that the critical linkage between his bike and mine had broken and bent and was on the verge of total failure. (Such failure would have made him crash badly, like ejecting the front wheel of a conventional bike.) Not only that, but the second linkage we had (for a different adult bike) was broken the same way.
I set about building a replacement, and making it as strong as possible. I also decided this would be a first milling project that E could help on. The banner photo above is from this milling. In the photo below, the original part is on the left and the new on the right.
While building this was fun, and it worked perfectly, it was a bit foolish to make it before contacting the manufacturer and asking for a repair. Also, at the time of creating this part I somehow imagined it a long-term investment, but E outgrew it within a year.
If you want a metallurgy puzzle, why didn't the original part fail catastrophically? The shape looks horribly weak, but finding two copies in the same state before failure suggests it's rather stable. My guess is the steel inner surfaces work-hardened, making them stiffer and stronger? Also note the manufacturer's weld to the steel pipe is in the worst possible place.

Sedona, Part 2

The three of us biked, hiked and horsed around among the red rocks and desert plants. It's amazing to think this is the first time we rented a solo bike for E - he's so comfortable riding this strange terrain. The best example of this is the two pics of E and I riding into the same trench. I did it nervously at first, then he worked up to flying down into it, better than I could! In the long run, I'm in for trouble keeping up.
E was also interested in caves, climbing into any he could find.
I was able to try a SC Heckler, Kona Coil-Air and a Motolite. This was a good opportunity to try alternatives to my own bike, but I couldn't spend much time tuning them beyond saddle position. The Heckler felt the best, probably because it's most like my own Superlite, including a RockShox fork with lockout. The Motolite was probably the lightest of the set (including carbon seatstays), but the day I rode it we had thick, very fine dust on the trails, making everything slippery. The Kona ate up the descents very smoothly, but I pushed each bike up some climbs and the Kona earned the nickname "big pig" with its weight.

At the PR after we returned, I really enjoyed being back on my own bike. I am experimenting with slightly lower rear shock pressure to smooth my bike, a little like the rentals.

Sedona, Part 1

A, E and I are back. While the film is being developed (ha!), here's a picture I didn't snap.
The top-shelf MTB rentals out there are set up big and fat and moto-style. 2.35" tires, 5+" suspension, huge forks and softly sprung for a really slack head tube angle. I think the locals ride the dry creek beds, bare stone and small boulders and small waterfalls all worn smooth by the occasional deluge. We stayed on the trails, so these rigs were a bit beyond my needs.
Anyway, perched atop a pickup I saw a bike too cool to be rentable. The extra-beefy frame had been steel-wool rubbed free of any decals, and the tall dual-crown fork was painted white. The only logo I saw was a bling gold King headset, I think 1.5". This thing was a motorcycle without the engine. The owner wrote a custom top-tube banner (using a Sharpie, I'd guess): Royale with Cheese. Oh yeah.

E MTB Jump

E and I went to his favorite local jumping spot both days last weekend. Unfortunately, I picked the drizzly day to bring the camera.

In a way, E is teaching me how to take action shots. He's at least giving me motivation and opportunity to practice!

Ode to Sleep

Fear not! I won't attempt any verse.
The road bicycling press has long recommended good sleep as a pillar of training, vital for recovery from past efforts and preparation for future ones. I've seen this in my own road riding and firmly agree with its wisdom.
This morning at Rattlesnake I formed the strong impression that sleep is even more important for mountain biking. Rattlesnake's "Stones and Bones" section is a technical trail, and this morning I felt limited by difficulty in mentally focussing on the obstacles. Sleep is crucial for focus, so today I think I was sleep-limited.
On the positive side, I made it through the trench once upward (after several failed attempts) and got closer to riding the ridge (downward), though it still eludes me.
The first attempt at the ridge ended in an endo over a dip that caught the front wheel. I found it oddly comforting when the bike landed on me, an old friend visiting in a time of distress. Over the last month I've been wondering whether elbow pads were worth wearing, but here the left one picked up some deep scratches to prove their value.
Tires: I took MF's advice on Panaracer FireXC and they're wonderful, the stickiest I've ever used. The 127 TPI, Japanese version was hard to find though, except at Jenson. Look for the red bead!
[Naturally, this whole blog is written from the standpoint of my own technique, strength, etc. Many riders can fly over obstacles which stop me cold. This blog will never represent a cutting edge of riding.]

Modified Bash Guard

[A bash guard replaces the largest chain ring on a mountain bike to protect the front most gears from crashing into rocks and logs.]

After mulling over this for about a year I finally put the 'guard on the mill and hacked it on Feb 24. I pared down 0.15" of radius to increase ground clearance and reduce weight, then drilled 28 3/8" holes to lighten it further. I removed 68g weight, dropping it to 102g, but I believe I retain all the useful strength. This guard protects my 34t chain ring and is based on a Nashbar part which is reliable but quite heavy. In the picture, an unmodified part is on the left, and my customized one is on the right.

In terms of machining technique, this was the first time I've moved the work piece between drilling operations. I was taught to fix the work then perform all the drill operations (center drill, then 1/8", 1/4", 3/8" drills in succession). This works well for beginners because it eliminates the risk of breaking a drill due to the chuck being misaligned to the previous hole. But in this case it would have taken a lot more time so instead I center drilled all 28 holes, then put in the 1/8" drill and went around again. I had no trouble with it (in the context of a low-precision project).

Now that I've ridden it twice, I'd say the advantages line up this way:

1. It looks better to me, and in a sense I've bonded with it, so riding is a little more fun.
   
2. The clearance and weight improvements are nice, but they don't change the riding experience in a substantial way.
   
3. Milling is always fun.

Fixing an SPD Pedal

Yesterday I wrecked my left MTB pedal (Shimano 959) on the P.R. The rear, sprung part became loose, clattering and useless, but I was able to ride out using the other side. I think I hit something, pulling back that sprung piece until it let go.
Things brightened when I looked closely at it at home. No parts were lost, and I was able to fish out the tension screw with pliers. I couldn't get it reinstalled until I unscrewed the top of the pedal, but then it all became rather easy. The pedal appears to be fully repaired now, and on the commute in this morning I mostly convinced myself that the pedal is designed to fail this way, like a mechanical circuit breaker, in order to avoid permanent damage. Nice design!
The only downside is I bent my 2.5mm (cheap) hex key unscrewing the bolts, which has a red thread lock on them. And I used blue locktite to reassemble since I don't have red. I'll need to keep watch and make sure those screws don't wiggle loose.