A rare “gear” post: A few people have asked me about my handlebar bag. It’s the Rivendell Brand V Boxy BarBag. Unlike most decent-size front bags, it doesn’t require a rack for support, which is nice, it’s easy to access while riding, and fast to detach and bring indoors at a stop. I keep my valuables, camera, small jacket, snacks, maps, and so on in it. ...
Winter is coming… time to put various accessories back on the bike.
Quick lunch BBQ in a park with a friend, by bike.
Made a very simple bike-mounted cooler. Arkel pannier hooks plus two bolts, fender washers to spread the force, rubber washers to help seal the holes drilled through the side, and some webbing at the bottom of the cooler to help a hook hold the bottom of the cooler against the rack (not shown).
Work evening: cutting soles out of special sneakers for recessed pedal clips, installing new leather saddle and Pitlock security skewers, re-taping handlebars. Dangit, sheared a bolt by over-tightening.
Clever tabbed no-tape-required bike box design (and have I mentioned you can check a bike on KLM for free?)
an evening degreasing, lubricating, and replacing brakes and bearings. while listening to This American Life podcasts.
Friday was the second SF Bike Party – an evening of biking with 500+ people, a stop in Dolores Park for some live music (Odd Owl), a Michael Jackson (and other music) dance party courtesy of Trikeasaurus in Garfield Square Park, and running into a lot of people I knew. I got home from work about an hour before the ride was supposed to start, and wanted to quickly throw something together related to the “Love Your Bike” theme. ...
It all started when I wanted to replace the completely functional plastic-coated downtube shift levers on my old french road bike: With some slick-looking shifters a friend gave me: Should be easy, right? Just cut the existing cables, replace the levers and string a new set of shift cables… wrong. The old shifters and threaded bosses on the frame were an unusual, non-standard thread, M5x1.0mm, which as far as I can tell mainly existed on 1970s French bicycles and is no longer made. The standard metric screws near that size are M5x0.8mm or M5x0.5mm (the same diameter, 5mm, but a different thread pitch). I knew from Sheldon Brown and previous work on the bike that old French bikes are “special” and, for example, one of the bottom bracket cups is threaded in the opposite direction from pretty much every other bike ever made. But I didn’t think this applied to even small-size, standard-looking screws. ...
New handlebar tape for the old french road bike (and new shifters, but that’s a longer story)