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Back Roads…

Published January 12, 2014

Quite a while ago now, back when I was 17-18-whatever, not long after after graduating from High School, I spent a lot of time just driving around randomly with friends, listening to music, poking around random dirt roads and interesting areas doing little other than driving around and talking; essentially hanging out in a car.

I now realize that many of these areas where we ended up are the northern Oakland County dirt roads where I’ve found myself riding bicycles with friends. I’m really happy with the way life has turned out and thus while I recognize that such days-gone-by were great, I don’t particularly want them back. They were good, but are best left as memories to be reflected on while enjoying the now.

(Photo above is Jered and Wendi from thus autumn when we rode an extended version of the Flying Rhinos Back 40 Challenge on some of the aforementioned dirt roads. It started a bit cool, but was otherwise a great weather day.)

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Failed Bushing Hackery

Published January 9, 2014

Danielle’s desk chair began wobbling, and disassembly of the base showed that a nylon bushing had come apart allowing the chair to wobble side to side. The image above shows my attempt to rebuild something like this bushing out of nylon cable ties, but this somewhat failed. The chair no longer wobbles when in the lowest possible position, but it has enough friction that turning is difficult and the hydraulic height adjustment doesn’t work. I suspect the friction of these little cable tie heads is too much for the lift assist.

It’s too bad the low position is a bit too low for Danielle to be comfortable sitting at her desk. Maybe if I’m lucky I can find a replacement bushing, although I don’t see a way to get it installed as the top of the tube for it is crimped to hold it in place. Maybe an entire chair base assembly would be needed.

Oh well, at least it doesn’t wobble any more is usable as a low chair.

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Cheese Is Good

Published January 8, 2014

I really, really like good cheese. This here is the last four pieces of top-quality cheese in the house, each about 1cm x 2cm. On the left is some (incredibly good) Wensleydale, and on the right is a cloth-aged Cabot cheddar. Both were purchased at Zingerman’s Deli a little while back en route to help Alison and Michael move into their new place in Ann Arbor.

It’s very hard to describe how incredibly tasty good cheese is, and the amazing feelings it brings about when eating it.

 

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Wahoo Cycling Speed/Candence Sensor for Salsa Vaya

Published January 8, 2014

The Salsa Vaya (and hopefully the forthcoming Motorless City bike) has the rear disc brake cable run along the top of the chain stay, which means the Garmin GSC-10 (Speed/Cadence Bike Sensor) cannot cleanly fit on the bike (photo). To work around this I picked up the Wahoo Cycling Speed/Cadence Sensor (a compatible ANT+ device) and thus far it seems like it’ll work just fine. I had no problems hanging both sensors below the chainstay, and my Garmin Edge 510 quickly picked up the sensor and was able to get both wheel rotation and cadence data from it.

This setup isn’t as attractive as Garmin’s single unit, and the need to double the cable back on itself looks a bit sloppy, but it does offer more flexibility and overall it should work out fine. I was also a bit disappointed that it doesn’t feature a Garmin unit-like test button/LED which makes setup super easy. It’s a bit higher priced than the Garmin sensor, so it’d be nice if it was at least identical feature-wise. It’s also a bit awkward how the entire sensor body needs to be pivoted in towards the spokes instead of a small/discrete arm, but I do think it’ll work out fine.

Since this was a test mounting I was a bit careless with the cable ties and didn’t peel the adhesive pads off of the cadence sensor, making for sloppy work. I intend to leave this (with its ugly, temporary fittings) in place for a month or so, and then hopefully after that it’ll be in place on the Motorless City bike.

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KitchenAid Mixers Contain a Lot of Grease

Published January 8, 2014

 

Back in 2001 or so, not long after moving into the place where Danielle and I currently live, I laid my new KitchenAid stand mixer on its side on the floor, and when picking it up I’d found that a bunch of oil had spilled out of the side. This both surprised me and was a pain to clean up, so ever since then I made a point of keeping it upright, with the top in the normal, neutral, ready-to-mix position.

Being careful with it worked fine and the problem was mostly forgotten about until earlier this year when I found more oil leaking out after Danielle had left the head tipped up. It had also begun making some awkward squeaking noises when shutting off, so I knew it was in need of some work. This evening I finally got around to taking it apart.

A YouTube video from eReplacementParts.com got me started, and it wasn’t long before I had the mixer apart and was able to see the problem: there was both grease and oil in the gearbox, and when tipped or tilted from something other than its normal position this oil would slowly leak out. I strongly suspect that my mixer was lubricated with either the beginning or end of a new pack/tube of grease, which could have a goodly layer of oil on it. Or, maybe the grease separated over time. (I suspect the former because of how long ago the original leak occurred…)

I scraped out most of the grease, wiped out the oil, and then cleaned off the seal and put everything back together, putting the grease back inside of the housing and all over the gears so it could do its job.

From what I’m reading on other sites this is not an uncommon problem, and it seems like many KitchenAid mixers eventually need their grease replaced. So much so that the KitchenAid-branded grease is even available on Amazon. I suspect that I’ll be taking this back apart some time in the future to regrease it, but for now at least I’ve been able to stop the dripping oil.

(One strange issue that I ran into with the grease is that it would not clean up using ProGold Pro Towels, but a bit of alcohol worked very nicely.)

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Fear Sells: A Reminder

Published January 7, 2014

My usual source for weather information is the National Weather Service’s rather nice site weather.gov. It shows everything from the basic forecast to detailed hourly forecasts in graphic and text formats. This was having issues loading at one point today (load/use, I presume), so I headed over to The Weather Channel at weather.com to use their services.

While I was able to find forecast information, and I did see some of the expected advertising, the most obvious headlines on the main page were far more fear mongering than I’d anticipated — enough to make me really take notice of how much fear is being used to sell:

  • WARNING: Up to 72 Inches of Snow Ahead? (Scary magenta weather map!)
  • ‘Almost Everyone is Dead’ (Sad / wise looking brown-skinned man.)
  • Woah! More than 60 Inches of Snow! (Old photo of plowed highway cut through snow.)
  • Deadly H1N1 Flu Virus Sweeping U.S. (Needle going into arm.)
  • Will THIS Wipe Us Out? (Picture of erupting volcano.)
  • Saturn’s Rings are HOW Old? (Ominous looking photo of Saturn.)

These aren’t even the typical clickbait Elsewhere on the web  / “You wouldn’t believe…” ads, but actual links to pages within the weather.com site. Fear mongering for selling things (products, politics, or revisits to websites) are nothing new, but as someone who rarely watches broadcast news or visits sites such as The Weather Channel I can’t help but be taken aback at the naked hype.

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Winter Snow by Streetlight

Published January 6, 2014

 

Here’s a photo, looking out my office window early on January 6th, 2014, of the snow that’s fallen. I was bored so I cleared off my car and shoveled the area around it earlier today, but much of this has been covered back up by drifting, blowing snow. It’s really beautiful, but if the next couple days’ forecast for particularly cold weather holds true I’ll likely find it to be a bit much.

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New Trail Map of Bald Mountain Recreation Area – North Unit

Published January 5, 2014

This morning I’d originally planned on going for a ride in the currently-active snowstorm, but I started working on a project that I’d wanted to complete for a while, and this evening I completed it: a CRAMBA-IMBA map of Bald Mountain Recreation Area – North Unit. Home to some gently rolling, old-style trails built with cross country skiing in mind it’s not very challenging, but this is one of my favorite mountain bike trails in the area.

Over the last few slow speed wintertime rides there I’d collected the GPS data I was lacking, put it into OpenStreetMap today, cleaned up the existing data, and followed my mapping workflow to create this map. It has a fair bit more detail than the official park map, showing some of the unofficial but well used connector trails, colloquial names for some areas, and a bit more context. It’s what I personally would want for a mountain bike centric map of the trail.

So, what to map next… I’d like to do a CRAMBA-IMBA map of Pontiac Lake Recreation Area, but I’ll need to spend more time riding and exploring there before that’s feasible. I’m familiar with the trails, but not familiar enough with the park to do a proper map. I also want to update the Bloomer Park map to get something that better matches the style of the other maps. But, for now, I’m glad that this got done. I feel like I’ve accomplished something.

One can see this map overlaid on Google Maps, along everything else in the MMBA Trail Guide here: link.

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Brake Lever Insulation for Winter

Published January 4, 2014

Riding a bicycle in winter is made easier by insulating one’s body from the metal frame, which acts as a heatsink pulling away warmth. Bicycle grips, saddle, and boots do this fairly well, but metal brake levers can quickly chill one’s fingers even with gloves on. I’d looked into some carbon fiber brakes such as the Tektro MT5.0 on the Mukluk, but $50+ seemed like a lot to spent for just a bit of extra insulation.

Earlier today I came across this post on MTBR in a thread about insulated brake levers which suggested using some heatshrink tubing to insulate the blade itself, so I’ve decided to give that a go. This was pretty easy to do, and while there are a couple slightly visible high spots and subtle wrinkles the curved part where my finger goes is smooth, and it seems to feel good.

I’ll give this a go tomorrow and see how it works out, but just basic experimentation in the basement is showing it to be warmer than the bare metal lever. Now if I could only find something to do about the metal clamp at the end of the Ergon grips…

UPDATE: After a 2+ hour ride in the snow at Bald Mountain I’m going to declare this a success. The brake lever never once felt cold, I had to consciously try to feel for a differing texture, and things just worked.

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2014 Huron-Clinton Metroparks / Oakland County Parks Passes are Poor Quality

Published December 30, 2013

 

The 2014 Huron-Clinton Metroparks / Oakland County Parks pass is much lower quality than the ones from past years. Starting this year the sticker has a few changes which make it much harder to apply: the backing is split instead of starting at a tab at the top, and the white background fill is alcohol soluble. Because of the split backing I had a much harder time applying it and ended up with a slightly wrinkled sticker, and cleaning the window post-application wiped off some of the white paint and left it smeared all over the window. With the tear-off top of the decal being perforated along the top of the decal itself this also means that the top edge is rough and can’t be evenly smoothed.

I much prefer the older style decal, as I could easily get it applied smoothly in the lower corner of my car window (photo) and passing over the sticker while cleaning the windshield didn’t wipe white paint all over the lower reaches of the glass.

UPDATE: When I attempted to use the Contact Us page on metroparks.com to relay this concern to park management it returned an ASP error that I believe was trying to give me an HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) so I tried using the listed info@metroparks.com email address, which then bounced saying recipient not found. That’s worse quality than the passes. Time to dig up some real people’s addresses.

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