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Category: acquired things

Salsa Mukluk 2 is Here!

Published October 26, 2011

Yesterday a friend played delivery driver and picked up my new (but unassembled) Salsa Mukluk 2 from our team bike shop, Trail’s Edge. Last night I mostly unpacked it and took pictures and hopefully I’ll get it assembled by the end of the weekend. There’s a lot to do and I’m intending to be particularly picky during assembly, but I’m also really looking forward to riding it.

The photo above is of my workbench with some of the parts laid out on it and the front wheel aired up to 30psi in order to stretch the tire to shape and get the bead seated properly. These wheels are massive.

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Wrong Size Car Battery

Published October 23, 2011

A not-starting car this afternoon led me to purchase a new battery† on the way home from today’s bike riding. Unfortunately, when I went to install it I found that the part spec’d by O’Reilly Auto Parts to fit a 2006 Honda Civic EX, Super Start Battery #35-72 doesn’t quite fit. The photo above shows why, and after reading a bit it appears that I need a Group Size 51R battery and this 35-72 is something else. I’m not quite sure what size it is, but it’s definitely not 51R.

Unfortunately I found this at 8:51pm and Danielle and I weren’t able to make it there before they closed. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it sorted out in the morning. I’m tempted to return it and go to another (more proper) auto parts place. I would have gone somewhere else to purchase it, but at 7:30pm on a Sunday night O’Reilly was the only place open. For now, I’ve got no usable car.

† After sitting in the car listening to my iPod and charging my phone for ~30 minutes I left the car. Upon returning it wouldn’t start with typical low-battery signs. Nothing had been left on and a jump got things running, and as it’d been a bit questionable for a while (power windows are sluggish after the car is shut off, occasional not-quite-starting last winter) I feel it’s time for a new one.

UPDATE: According to the person at the O’Reilly “…they put the two-door battery in your car…”. I don’t really believe this, but the end result was me obtaining the right battery and dropping it into the car took less than five minutes. Everything is now sorted.

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Wheel Building Time!

Published October 20, 2011

After picking up some parts from the shop tonight I’m now ready to build up a new wheelset. Velocity Blunt SL rims (32 hole, black), SRAM X9 hubs, DT Swiss Competition spokes, and black brass nipples will hopefully make for a nice new wheelset for the Titus. Everything about this build is value-priced, but if things go as planned they should be fairly light and functional. This will be the second full set of wheels that I’ll have built and the first with all-new parts. Hopefully I do a good job.

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1up USA Quik-Rack Fat Tire Spacer Kit

Published October 18, 2011

While waiting for my Salsa Mukluk 2 to ship I’ve been slowly picking up the various accessories I’ll need for it. This is one of them, the spacer kit to make my bike rack, a 1up USA Quik-Rack support fat tire bikes. Since I don’t yet have a need to carry the bike I haven’t installed it yet, but hopefully that’ll happen soon. I’ve got a few concerns about how well the rack will work for non-fat bikes after fitting the kit, since it might not hold the wheel as securely, but if I have to slightly augment the now-wider rack to accommodate smaller tires that won’t be a huge problem.

This kit cost US$29 shipped and while I likely could have fashioned something similar for a bit cheaper, it would have taken a fair bit of work. Purchasing this kit saved me a bit of time and allowed me to get something ready to go which is known to fit. Now I just need to get the bike…

UPDATE: The kit has been installed, and it works quite well. This photo shows the expanded rack easily holding a Salsa Mukluk 2 (Surly Rolling Darryl / Larry front wheel). The only disappointing part is that the Fat Tire Spacer Kit did not come with a wider anti-rattle band for one of the spacers. Instead the previous band must be reused, and it doesn’t fill the space nicely (photo).

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Kenda Slant Six

Published September 29, 2011

A few days back I got a good deal on a pair of 29″ x 2.2″ Kenda Slant Six tires. I’ve been interested in these since they came out over a year ago, and finally having a chance to try them I first put one on the rear of my single speed Salsa El Mariachi. Trying this out on a quick pre-rain ride at River Bends last night I found it to be a very nice rear tire; a bit grippier than the Small Block Eight that it replaced, but without any notable additional rolling resistance. Being much better in greasy corners than the SB8 and a nice compliment to the 2.4″ old-style Schwalbe Racing Ralph (now this tread pattern is called the Rapid Rob) I think I’ll leave it on there for a while. I might even fit one on the back of the Titus once I’ve got its rear wheel working correctly again. (It broke another spoke this past weekend and is desperately in need of a rebuild.)

The only downside I can see to this tire is that at 700-some grams it’s fairly heavy, although I’m not too concerned about weight and don’t notice this very much. It’s also got rather pitiful graphics and a 90s throwback .com branding, but this is forgivable as it works well.

(These are mounted on the Salsa Semi-based wheels that I built up in April. This nicely wide rim has worked out really well this summer.)

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Garmin Edge 500 Distance Aliasing Issues Alleviated By GSC 10 Sensor

Published August 28, 2011

Past experience with wildly varying data has prevented me from trusting GPS-based devices for accurately logging distances while riding mountain bike trails, but after hearing reassuring reports of modern units and seeing how useful it could be to have one unit logging data for all three of my bikes and automatically aggregating it I decided to give it a go. I purchased a Garmin Edge 500 cycling computer and a GSC 10 wheel speed / pedaling cadence sensor a month ago and after beginning to use it things seemed quite accurate, but I continued to be a bit suspicious that it may not be providing as accurate of data as it could. So, I decided to do some tests.

The results of these tests have shown that when the Edge 500 is used in conjunction with the GSC 10 it is just as accurate as a wheel-based computer and can be relied on to provide sufficiently accurate distance measurements while riding curvy mountain bike trails. Coupled with all the extra data that the system can log (heart rate, location, temperature, cadence, etc) it’s quite a nice system for recording data.

Without the GSC 10 (using only GPS-based data recording) the Edge 500 showed drastic undermeasurement, 20.70% on a typical Southeast Michigan trail ride and 33.87% in a worst-case test scenario.

Continue readingGarmin Edge 500 Distance Aliasing Issues Alleviated By GSC 10 Sensor
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New Shrubs, Successful Flowers

Published August 21, 2011

Thanks to a suggestion from Bill Edgerton and Danielle’s concurrence there are now two Althea / Hibiscus Syriacus / Rose of Sharon bushes planted on each side of the sidewalk, next to the driveway, replacing the two dead shrubs. Two different colors were purchased a Chiffon (blue) for closest to my place and an Aphrodite (pink) for the space across the sidewalk, next to my neighbor’s place. They were planted in decent size holes, placed on a cone of clay, surrounded potting soil, sprinkled lightly with slow-release fertilizer, and topped with the sand/clay/dirt mixture that was dug out of the holes. Each has been been watered and lightly rained on, so hopefully they’ll take and fill in these spaces nicely.

Click here if you’d like to see all the photos of the new shrubs, including the tags.

On the topic of growing things, this year’s flowers (and herbs and such) have come along very nicely since they were planted back on May 22nd. The sage went from forlorn to full, Danielle’s Meyer lemon tree has lemons on it, the nicotina around the tree has filled in, and the purple plant has practically exploded. Compare this photo of the porch from three months ago with this one taken this afternoon.

If you’re interested, the rest of the 2011 Flower photos can be seen here.

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The Bruery’s Mischief

Published August 20, 2011

Here is a bottle of The Bruery’s Mischief, given to me by my sister and brother-in-law (Sarah and Josh) as part of a wedding gift. Because of the 750mL bottle and 8.5% ABV I’d been saving this for a bit, and last night was the perfect time to try it. I really enjoyed this beer, and it was a spot-on hoppy Belgian ale. I really enjoyed this, and if it were available in Michigan I’d definitely pick it up sometime in the future. I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out for it next time I’m in Ohio.

(Oh, and yes, I way over-exposed the photo. Bringing it back to normal levels left the top of the blass almost completely blown out. At least the bottle is nicely visible and the beer is its proper color.)

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16GB of RAM in my iMac

Published August 15, 2011

Along with the SSD I also upgraded the RAM in my iMac to a full 16GB. It’s amazing to me, but a full 8GB (2x 1333 MHz SO-DIMMs) is only US$59.99 from Crucial. It wasn’t long ago that an 8GB flash card cost this much.

Sure, I don’t need this much RAM very often, but I did find that with 8GB and a bunch of design programs open (such as when doing PCB or mapping work) the machine would occasionally page. At today’s prices I don’t mind buying a bit more ram so that swap is almost never used.

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SSD Installation in a Mid-2010 27″ iMac

Published August 14, 2011

This weekend I fitted my 27″ iMac with an SSD and I now have that running as the boot and OS drive, with large-stuff-storage on the internal 1TB drive. I’ve been considering an SSD for a while, and with prices finally becoming reasonable (~$225 for 120GB) it was time to give it a go. Due to Apple’s screwup last year I ended up with a mid-2010 iMac; a model which could have been ordered with an SSD from the factory. While this 27″ iMac didn’t come with an SSD, thanks to this post by Tobias Müller I found that it was possible to buy the plastics and cabling and add one with a factory-type fit. So, I did.

After receiving the parts and reading through Tobias’ post and the Apple factory service manual I set about fitting the drive. I won’t go into details of the install here, but it would easily rate 4 out of 5 for difficulty of non-custom computer work that I’ve done. Because the SSD sits in a carrier behind the logic board I had to remove the display, power supply, LCD power supply, Airport card, a blower, hard drive, optical drive, logic board, and an IR receiver to get the job done. The SSD, mounted in the pressure wall / plastic carrier and connected with a new wiring harness, settled nicely into the case and everything went back in.

Beyond the SSD, if you’d like to try this modification yourself you’ll need the following Apple parts:

922-9531: Power Cable / Wiring Harness
922-9485: Pressure Wall
922-9538: SATA Cable

I purchased all of these new from Usedmac for a total of $84.24 shipped and installed them along with a 120GB Intel 320-series SSD. These parts, with the SSD attached, can be seen here. If you don’t want to pay ~$20 for an Apple-specific SATA cable, a 10″ cable with a right angle connector on one end (only) which bends towards the top of the drive will suffice.

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