Small Construction Project

Back on June 10-11, I finally got started on a project I’d wanted to tackle for quite awhile. My new townhouse complex has two five-car garages that are shared by the ten houses. Each garage locks, but we’ve had very frequent break-ins and have quickly learned that anything not locked/bolted down is likely to disappear, sooner rather than later. After losing a bicycle that was only there for 36 hours, as well as a bike pump and a bike rack in separate incidents, I’d been eager to come up with a more secure way to store my stuff.

I’d talked with my dad and with some friends about possibly building a storage locker or closet downstairs. Other residents had installed cabinets above or in front of their car… but I wanted something big enough to accommodate bikes, and I had some space next to my parking stall. So… dad and I designed a little storage closet, and once we had the design I figured we might as well shop for materials… and once we had materials I figured we might as well start cutting… and once we were cutting, I figured we might as well assemble… and once we had assembled a wall, I figured we might as well install it… so before we knew it, the structure was complete! On the second day we modified and installed a locking door, and the project was complete from design-to-done in maybe 36 hours! Whoop whoop! As mentioned earlier, this project gave me the confidence and inspiration to finally get started on the mutant trike.

Photos:

Home Depot will do up to two custom cuts per piece of wood:

 

Station wagons are good for hauling stuff, like wood:

Dad’s design had us frame out two walls and then hang plywood on said walls:

Halfway there? the first wall set into place, but not secured. yet.

Construction adhesive to bond our wall to the concrete garage

After we did the adhesive,the house’s builder stopped by with a hammer drill, so we also nailed the walls to the garage walls. Win. This structure is super-strong now. You could climb on it and it won’t move.

The finished product, next to my car. Check out that closet door! How pro is that??

Trike Project

I’ve been *very* quiet on this blog lately, mostly because I haven’t been training and racing very much lately – at least not relative to what I was doing in 2007-2010. But I have been staying busy with other projects, such as this one: I am trying to build a two-person tricycle, a side-by-side tandem trike.

I’ve wanted to try to build a mutant bike ever since I first saw a tall bike in college, but it has always been one of those back-burner ideas. Now that I’ve allocated a bit more time to “creative projects” (more on that in a future post), this bubbled to the top of the list.

I didn’t really get momentum on this until I figured out that my schedule will allow me to attend Burning Man this year (where we hope to use the trike), and until Brian from our Burning Man camp offered to help out.

Here is a quick timeline of what we’ve done so far. I expect to need about 2 more weeks’ worth of labor spread over the next month or two in order to finish this off.

Tue 12 June: purchased the plans from Atomic Zombie

Wed 13 June: met up w Brian, debated whether this project was too complicated for us, decided to go for it. Toured altspace and decided to buy a membership. Brian called around to get quotes on the metal tubing. Mike at altspace recommended Online Metals in Ballard.

Thu 14 June: we ordered our tubing and axle from Online Metals. Brian picked ‘em up. I got three wheels from Recycled Cycles and talked to the gang about getting some junker/salvage bikes in the near future. My friend Tahoma’s friend Morgan offered to teach us to weld. We cut some of the tubes but broke a band saw blade, weren’t sure how to replace it, and called it a day. I went to Recycled Cycles and to Stoneway Hardware in the evening to get wheels and pillow block bearings, after calling ahead to verify that Stoneway Hardware did indeed sell 3/4” pillow block bearings.

Fri 15 June: I finished cutting the tubes with an angle grinder. Mike taught me how to replace the band saw blade correctly and how to make more accurate cuts. Morgan taught me to weld and I “taught” Brian. We welded the entire frame.

Sat 16 June: I went to Tacoma Screw in the morning to get washers for the flanges. They had washers with approximately the right inner- and outer-diameters but they were too thick – 1/4” when we wanted 1/8”. I figured I could grind them down, but I really wanted to try to slice then lengthwise instead. A few people I chatted with thought it couldn’t be done, but I chatted w Mars at altspace and decided to try to weld the washer to a piece of scrap steel and then clamp the scrap steel while slicing the washer “like a roll of bologna.” Thanks to my dad for the colorful analogy! I spent the rest of Saturday slicing bologna and drilling spoke holes in the flanges. I broke a 3/32” drill bit in the process.

On Saturday I also realized that once we finish the trike we will have to take it on a tour of Seattle to show it to all of the people and businesses who helped us along the way. Of course we will bring beers for everybody!

Sun 17 June: bought two new drill bits at Redmond Home Depot. Finished drilling the spoke holes. Tried to mount the axle but my pillow block bearings were more like bushings than sealed cartridges. I worried that this design wouldn’t tolerate road grit or playa sand very well, so I started calling around looking for better bearings. I acquired three old bikes from Recycled Cycles to use for various parts that we’ll need soon.

Mon 18 June: day off, as I focused on Bicycle Adventures prep. I rode in La Conner, Anacortes, and Guemes Island in order to familiarize myself with the Day One and Day Six routes. Then my friend Shashank taught me how to make two fantastic dishes to serve to our lucky guests as a picnic lunch – a curry chicken and paneer, both of which will be used to make naan sandwiches on Day Five or Day Six. I did also manage to order some better bearings, which required a one-day delay as they shipped from Tacoma.

Tue 19 June: picked up the new bearings at Motion Industries in south Seattle, bought some mounting hardware at Pacific Supply on Capitol Hill, and spent a good chunk of time mounting the axle. I broke a 1/2” drill bit in the process and had to buy another at Madison Park Hardware. Then sliced the axle in half, welded on the flanges and painted the new pseudo-hubs. While the hubs were drying, I cut the headset and fork off of an old BMX bike and ground down the extra metal on the headset with an angle grinder.

Wed 20 June: Brian and I enjoyed the sunny weather in Seattle by lacing up the wheels at Madison Park. It took awhile as we had no clue what we were doing, but the late, great Sheldon Brown’s wheelbuilding page proved to be very helpful.

So tomorrow we hope to weld on the front boom tube and fork, giving us a rolling chassis. Then we have to build the steering system, acquire and install seats, build the drivetrain, and paint/tune/finish. We’re also still trying to acquire two custom-machined parts for the drivetrain: the freehub & brake rotor mounts that will be welded to the rear axle.

We have plenty of work ahead of us, but I’m proud of how far we’ve come in a week. It has been a ton of work so far, but I’m learning a lot of new skills and I’m exercising my problem-solving muscles every step of the way. Win.

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A few photo highlights:

Aligning the frame as we weld

one of my first welds

Brian welding. Doesn’t this look cool?!?

goofing around w the completed frame

some of the parts that I bought on Friday+Saturday

the awesome idea to weld scrap steel onto the thick washer in order to “slice the bologna”

the band saw in action, slicing the bologna

forgot to mention this earlier – I hacksawed an old hub in order to create a widget for marking the spoke holes on the new flanges

using the widget to mark spoke holes on the flange

four finished flanges – well, almost finished as I still needed to clean up the welded area

a bunch of old bikes in the back of my car; this part made me a bit sad, but hopefully they’re about to become a part of something great!

the correct type of Pillow Block Bearing

rear axle is mounted!

flanges welded onto axle!

flanges painted!

this bike is about to die

cleaning up the head tube after cutting it off of the old BMX bike

a completely laced wheel, after a tough afternoon in the park

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And for those of you who made it this far: I ran a race tonight – 5000M on the track in Shoreline as part of the ClubNW All-Comers series. I was hoping I was fit enough to break 16:00 for the first time, but I went out aggressively with the lead group and fell apart once I lost them. I ran 5:02/mile pace for the first half of the race and 5:20/mile pace for the second half. Fail. But I still ran a 16:15, and I’ll have other opportunities to run. Races always make me want to train more/better so that I’ll race better the next time!

A lot of stairs

While in Colorado Springs for a recent PROTA board meeting, I decided to check out the Manitou Incline. Dave Messenheimer had told me about this epic staircase a few years ago and a friend of a friend reminded me about it at a recent dinner party. I think that conversation went something like this:

DUDE: There is this really difficult staircase in C Springs that you should check out on your trip. I used to hike up it in like 50 minutes, but I hear that it’s been done in forty.

ME: Wow, sounds tough. I wonder if I could beat forty. Actually, I think I’ve heard of that before. What’s it called?

DUDE: The Incline. The Manitou Incline.

ME: Hrmmm…

ME (via text message): Hey Mess, what’s the OTC record for the Manitou Incline?

MESS (via text message): I think [Mark] Fretta’s done it in 14:30. My best was more like 16 or 17 minutes.

ME (back at the dinner party): check this out. This guy I know did it in 14:30!!

Yeah, I can be a bit of a punk…

So anyways, after our board meeting I had not-quite-enough time to go run the Incline before taking Jesse & Rebeccah to the airport. Really, they almost missed their flight because of me. And here I said that I would stop being so self-absorbed about training during my “semi-retirement…” but this wasn’t training. This was silly masculine competition.

The Manitou Incline is about 0.9 miles long and has an elevation change of 2000 feet, for an average grade of 42%. I think that the peak grade was in the 60s. My goal was to get up there in twenty minutes. Not even close.

View of the Manitou Incline from Hwy 24, shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com. I didn’t bring my camera up the hill.

I started off at sort of a “casual jogging” and hoped I could build into it. But after a minute I was already winded. Did I mention that the Incline *starts* at 6600 feet above sea level, and that I live in Seattle? Urgh. It hurt.

I plugged away at a pace that could only be described as “a brisk walk.” The steps were rather uneven at times, and some steps were above knee height, requiring a pretty big step up.

Oh, and there was a lot of snow up there. It was mid-January, after all.

I thought I was going to come close to my goal, only to realize a bit of a “false summit” at 20-21 minutes in.

Incline profile shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com. See that “false summit” around 0.8 miles…

I finally reached the top at 26:45 and checked my pulse: 160! not bad for a retiree whose heart always runs a bit slowly!

View from the top, shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com.

The way back down was painful and dangerous. I was short on time to get to the airport, and I think that I slipped and fell at least three times. Not smart. It still took longer to get down than it took to get up. The snow and ice didn’t help. My quads were sore for about four days afterwards. Very sore. Don’t run down stairs.

In other news, I’ll soon reveal my racing plans for 2011… as well as what I’ve been working on during my extended break from high-volume training!

What does it mean?

Sorry, this post is not about Double Rainbows.

Back in May I stared drafting a blog post in response to an idea that had been hopping around the blogosphere. My friend Mark retweeted that Simon Whitfield tweeted that Anabel Luxford blogged that Kevin Collington tweeted that “the amount of time since an athlete’s last blog post is directly proportional to the probability that he/she is injured.”

I haven’t posted to this blog in almost three months. What does it mean? Is this hypothesis from Mark, Simon, Anabel and Kevin correct in my case? Am I injured? Sort of.

I felt like I was really dragging or struggling a lot through the last 2-3 months of my racing season, especially the final 3-4 weeks. I put in a very solid 6-month block of training from Jan 1st – June 30th, but then life caught up with me and the body started to break down. From late-June through early-October, I attended my dad’s 60th birthday party and my brother’s bachelor party, I was in two weddings and I helped to organize a training camp in Kona… all while continuing to work full-time at Microsoft and racing a few Continental Cups. Some folks can handle such a workload, but this year I couldn’t. I caught a mild head cold at the end of June and it didn’t really go away until early August. There is a lesson in there somewhere!

Through August and September, I felt tired and unmotivated a bit more frequently than I would have liked, but my numbers still looked good in races so I kept at it. Kelowna was a near miss, I coulda/woulda/shoulda been in the money at Pac Grove … but then it all caught up with me at Tuscaloosa and I just had *nothing* out there. So I decided to take a break. A physical and mental break.

After Tuscaloosa, I decided to stop “training” for a little while and to only work out socially. To a bystander it might still look like training, but from my perspective this was a night-and-day difference. Yes I raced half a dozen cyclocross races and a XC running race, and I ran a few 60-mile weeks, but all of that was cases of “Friend X wants to go here and do this, are you in?” So minimal stress. Minimal obligation. Minimal feeling of being overscheduled. It’s been a nice break!

I have plenty of funny stories to tell from the past 2.5 months but most of them have little to do with triathlon! I’ll write about a few of them and about some of my plans for racing/training/life 2011 in a future post as this one is already getting long. But I did want to stick my head up and say “hey” to the outside world again. You’ve not seen the last of me!