All Fixed Now!

Okay, all is not fixed, I did put the downshift lever and cable from my donor bike onto the canondale. I am quite pleased with myself and for the part bike manufacturers have played in allowing interchangeable parts. If you can call swapping a shimano lever for a shimano lever.

Took a short .75 mile ride and it was a little scary with all the potholes, I ran through all the gears was going along faster than I have ridden a bike in years, mostly because I have not really ridden a bike in years;-)


  
 

Canondale Road Bike

I picked up a Canondale Road Bike at a moving sale, For a "All Must GO" sale the woman was pretty tough on the haggling, though she was nice. She did come down on the $50 price tag. Of course what really "forced" me into buying it was that Pete has been going on about his road bike all week;-) What can I say, it sounded pretty cool having a road bike.

This is the most I have spent for a 2 wheeled bike in 20 years. It is missing a shift lever and cable to the front derailleur and the paint is bubbling in a bunch of places. Tires (700 x 23C) are not great but are not plainly cracked and ready to fail.

So overall it is in pretty good shape.

I rode it up and down the street and I thought it was pretty decent. Of course the last 10 speed (the Canondale is a 14 speed) that I rode was a Huffy. And if I do ride a bike on the street it is my Trek 820 mountain bike. I am going to swap levers from a Bianchi parts bike I have just to complete the Canondale and see how it goes. I am not really picky on things like this. I will have to take a better look at the tires, any old tires that could be 22 years old really should be replaced. They may be newer, do look like they could be from 1986.



 
 
 
 

Mig Welding Practice

I dug out my mig welder. The stick welder was burning through my bike tube practice piece. I think I could stick weld tube with smaller stick, but since I do actually have a mig welder I thought I should try it. It worked ok. Any problems were probably due to it being only the second time I have tried to use it. I did have a couple burn through holes but was able to fill them in. The fill was a big mound of metal but it was filled! At least I have some hope of doing what I want to do with the welder. More on that later if it starts to look like I can manage it.




 
 
 
 

Arc Welding

I have been building up to this for a while. I bought a auto darkening welding helmet, welding gloves and a chipping hammer. I spent a lot of time this weekend clearing out space in my garage just to be able to get at my welder.

I finally got to it at about 8:30 pm Sunday night and did these practice beads. I was using a old craftsman welder. It went okay. I was using very old welding sticks and the welds were ugly but would have more or less worked.

Next time I am going to use the Lincoln welder I have but I have to dig it up.



 
 

Bikes Repair or Chopd

We disassembled the Pink Huffy, it sticks in the ground nice. N and S (North and South?) wanted to strip more frames and make a bike frame fence. I plan on chopping it for a recumbent homebrew or a bike powered grain mill.
',
Also got a Schwinn "vintage" 10 speed, kinda ugly but free. Got caught looking at it a tag sale and the Woman yells to me "take it, it's free!" If Pete wants it, it is his. I forgot to check if the brakes and derailleur works. I kinda like it after looking it over. And I have huffy that would be a cheap donor for cables and tires.



 
 
 
 

Tag Sale Bikes

I have been getting cheap bikes at yard sales pretty regularly. The going price for a kids bike or huffy has pretty much been about $5. More or less. I got a cruiser this weekend, it is novel in that it has front drum brakes and goofy handlebars and big seat. It is a 3 speed and has big balloon tires. It is pretty dorky to ride.


 
 
 
 

Bike Trailer

Finally used the free bike trailer frame. I used only scrap I had around and though it doesn't look all that special it works ok.


I had been thinking that the trailer connected to the bike with some sort of attachement but Pete thought it mounted directly to the bike, well that does work. As it turns out I found an illustration of the style while looking at the torker bike site, they appear to sell the same style bike trailer.



 
 
 

Baby Goat Delivered.

The baby goat was born this morn. Rosie goat was due today, and when S went out she found that the goat had been born. This was really great, even though all the preparation for the event and expected hanging about to help the goat deliver was averted. Rosie was milked to relieve some of the pressure at lunch time and later at 6 pm. We plan on bottle feeding the baby with her mothers milk. Right now it is the first milk, the colostrum, though reserved for the baby goat I decide to try a 1/4 cup (the most M reluctanly allowed me to have) I was pleasanly surprised to find it very yummy. Kind of like a mild vanilla shake.


 

Unrelated to goats I satisfied a long time desire. To get a unicycle. I had never ridden a unicycle and so the first thing I did on getting it was look up info on learing to ride one. One page suggests practicing for an hour a day (balacing, not actual pedalling around) and after a couple of weeks you should be able to ride. We will see about that. I think it is pretty difficult, but that is ok.

 

Horrible Green Fangs - Jumping Spiders and Woodworking

I was going through my stored wood to make a goat milking stand and came across a really big(for this area) jumping spider. I measured it at 7/8" long. It seemed to have made it's home on this piece of wood and was reluctant to leave it. So I decided to take some pictures and video of it.

Tricorders and Gardens

Had to work Saturday, got into work at 5 am, it was drizzly and dark, and left about 11:30 am to blue skies and sun. The worst part was that instead of the predicted rain it was beautiful and sunny.

Did some planting in the garden that afternoon, and made a "custom" setup for marking rows. All out of scrap wood I got on the curb from a woodworking shop, last week in fact. Also made row markers with scrap slats from the same pile by cutting them into 12" long pieces.

The main features of the row markers are that they are 36" long and are themselves row distance measures. One has 2 screws for winding string that are spaced 24" apart for measuring out the string for estimating row length. The triangular pieces are a handy foot pressing pad to seat them in the ground. All from free scrap wood.

I was also making furrows to plant in by riding my mountain bike down the rows.

Sunday morning I kept thinking it was Saturday. Working Saturday really puts me in bad sorts on a weekend.

Though I missed Tag Sales Saturday, N made it to some with his mom. He got a pair of flip open walkie talkies to "convert" to tricorders. He is 7 and really into star trek right now. He really wanted a "real" tricorder but they are out of his budget. I am thinking that he will eventually find one at a TS for a quarter or in the free box.

So N hits me up to help him make a tricorder from the walkie talkies. We came up with a nice template from the nokia maemo forums.

We resized it to print on hp photo paper so it would fit on the walkie talkie right and did the cutout and double sided taped it to the walkie talkie case. We did a second one where I used the radial arm saw to cut the top off to make it more sized like the st tricorder. Cut a piece of 1/8" plywood to fit and filed and glued to the case. Found that a silver sharpie marker was a decent match.

The first picture is the gutted walkie talkie case. The second is the case cut down with "decals" applied, and the third is a "real" tricorder, I think it is a playmates toy one.

Massey Fergusson Tractor

Our tractor was delivered Saturday. The 5' tiller was attached, and the bucket fork lift were there too. The rotary mower, finish mower and post hole digger will come in Monday or Tuesday.

Tilled some soil and removed some really big thorn bushes. Put about 5 hours on the tractor.

It is really nice tilling. The fork lift is ok, better than lifting by hand!

The tractor got really dirty.

Agricultural Plans and Equipment

This year I am trying to get a lot of things done. A big one is getting a small farm going.

In that spirit we have been planning and taking some actions. The farmed area will be fairly small. Less than 5 acres is what I think we will end up with this year. One acre tilled will be a success. It will have to be very low maintenance.

Making gardens and land improvement are the orders for the year.

The heart of the plan is a small tractor. We signed the papers for a Massey Ferguson 1528, it is a hydrostatic drive ,28hp compact tractor, with payments.

Necessary accessories are:
-5' tiller,
-12" post hole digger
-5' 3pt hitch rotary mower
-5' 3pt hitch finish mower

Items on the wish list (pretty much any attachment that would fit our tractor):
-cultivator
-disc harrow
-fork lift attachment for the front loader
-weight box for the 3 pt hitch (to counterbalance the fork lift etc.
-backhoe w/ thumb
-3pt hitch round bale mover.
-logsplitter
-generator

I am planning on tilling up as much yard as possible to convert to garden;-). To put that into perspective, our house lot is 2 acres and I mow about an acre besides to put a path to our small pond and the area around our animal shed (goat and chickens)

If I convert 2 acres of that to garden, it immediately reduces my wasted time on lawn maintenance.

I am going to try to rotary cut as much as I can, we have 5 acre area that is becoming overgrown but I think I can get it cleared, and we have about 10 acres of woodland with swamp in parts. That will be a chainsaw challenge as it is is wooded with a 20-30 year old stand of trees, it was clear way back. Also there are many, many rocks. I am hoping I can manipulate them with the loader. I really wanted a backhoe with a "thumb" attachment to pick up smaller rocks (ones small enough to grab with the thumb but big to move by hand. The thumb is a arm that is either fixed or moves that is positioned to pinch things you want to pick up with the backhoe bucket. It sticks down so you basically have a "jaw".

This weekend I am trying to do yard cleanup and work on the bikes a little. Sarah and I got a pair of bikes yesterday to use as parts for a 3 or 4 wheel bike and scavenge to fix her bike and build Nathan one.

I am ready to test drive one of the 3 speeds I got last weekend, did a hose off to clean the dust and debris from it. I think it was stored in a dirty garage for the
last 30 years. The tires are cracked so I will have to get "new" tires. I think it is cool because I have not seen them for so long. I don't know if they are cool now or not. My guess it not, but you never know.



If it doesn't rain this afternoon I will take it out for a ride with S.

Solar Cooker

I had to come home early today and on a whim decided to warm my precooked chicken lunch under the fresnel lens I have. It did work but took 30 minutes to do what the oven does in 15-20. I did cook it in the open and am thinking of trying the experiment again in a glass enclosure. Maybe use a pyrex dish overturned. As it was the chicken sizzled and came out slightly browned.

Human Powered Generator - Bike Version

A long time dream of mine has been to make a pedal powered generator. I remember as a kid in the 70's seeing articles about people that did this with converted bicycles. I never got around to it, but the idea stayed with me.

Lately I set up my mountain bike on a stationary trainer stand. It does what it is supposed to do but the idea of the "wasted" energy bothers me and so I started thinking about bike generators again.

I had my own ideas but I decided to check the current state of the art and found it to be pretty good.

Here are some sites I thouht were worth linking.
Exercise bike conversion. I really like how they reused a bunch of scrap to make theirs.
http://www.angelfire.com/80s/sixmhz/bikegenerator.html

Dave Butcher's site has useful information, and sells plans for his gen bike.
http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen/stats.html

This site is ok also, and he made a style more like what I was thinking of.

http://www.mattshaver.com/bikegen/index.htm


One thing I really want to add to the design are super capacitors, they are expensive but very cool. I have been reading about them but Dave Butcher's site shows him using a Maxwell Technologies 58 Farad 15 module. It is really interesting. Buying the components to make a module, is a little less expensive, but you don't get the neat packaging. The price for the 58 Farad Module is $185.

http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/modules/bmod0058-15v.asp
http://www.prestostore.com/catalog.php/tecategroup.com/dt9239/pd30235/BCAP0350_E250_Ultracapacitor