Archive for category Recumbent Bicycling
A Bounteous Tobacco Harvest
Posted by Ed in Oddities, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-03-30
Spotted on a utility ride to a local shop:
We decided an employee of the adjacent “nail spa” has been making the best of a bad situation.
If it was easy to quit, there’d surely still be a few smokers …
Dutchess Rail Trail: Access Gate Control
Posted by Ed in Oddities, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-03-29
Five different agencies can drive through the Dutchess Rail Trail’s Overocker Rd trailhead vehicle gate:
Well, four of them can, because whoever snapped the barely visible small lock around the long-shackle lock (horizontal, to the right) is SOL:
Perhaps they’re from the DC W&WWA?
The last time we rode past the Diddel Rd trailhead, there were zero locks on the (unchained) vehicle gate; evidently somebody forgot to relock the gate on the way out.
Turtles!
Posted by Ed in Photography & Images, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-03-17
Spotted in Lake Walton on an out-and-back ride to the Hopewell Junction Depot end of the rail trail:
Mary counted & guesstimated fifty turtles in the backwater.
They’re the snuggliest turtles I’ve ever seen:
Taken with the Pixel XL at maximum zoom, hence the gritty overpixelization.
Tour Easy: SRAM Grip Bushing
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling, Software on 2019-03-10
After installing the X.0 shifter, I sprang for new grips:
They’re 90 mm long, which turned out to be 4 mm shorter than the grips that came with the bike; a close look showed the original ones were cut down from SRAM’s 110 mm grips.
Well, I can fix that:
Ordinarily, you’d just move the brake levers by 4 mm and declare victory. In this case, moving the right lever would be easy, but the left one is firmly glued in place by the radio’s PTT button:
Believe me, solid modeling is easy compared to redoing that!
The OpenSCAD source code doesn’t amount to much:
// SRAM grip shifter bushings
// Ed Nisley KE4ZNU March 2019
Protrusion = 0.1; // make holes end cleanly
//----------------------
// Dimensions
ID = 0;
OD = 1;
LENGTH = 2;
Bushing = [22.2 + 0.5,31.0,4.0]; // ID = E-Z slip fit
NumSides = 2*3*4;
//----------------------
// Build it!
difference() {
cylinder(d=Bushing[OD],h=Bushing[LENGTH],$fn=NumSides);
translate([0,0,-Protrusion])
cylinder(d=Bushing[ID],h=Bushing[LENGTH] + 2*Protrusion,$fn=NumSides);
}I loves me my 3D printer …
Tour Easy: SRAM X.0 Rear Grip Shifter
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-03-02
With more snow on the schedule, Mary’s bike finally got a new rear shifter:
It’s an old-school SRAM X.0 grip shifter, evidently compatible with SRAM X.9 and X.7 derailleurs, and seems to work OK. The wavy ridges may be more prominent than necessary for our road riding, though.
In a miracle of rare device, the preinstalled cable turned out to be exactly long enough:
Twiddling the length for perfect shifting requires on-the-road testing and the chain wrap may need tweaking (I may not have gotten it right when I installed the derailleur), but at least the shifter stops at every detent along the way.
SJCAM M20 Camera: Tour Easy Seat Mount
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-02-20
The general idea is to replace this:
With this:
Thereby solving two problems:
- Pitifully small battery capacity
- Wobbly camera support
The battery is an Anker PowerCore 13000 Power Bank plugged into the M20’s USB port. Given that SJCAM’s 1 A·h batteries barely lasted for a typical hour of riding, the 13 A·h PowerCore will definitely outlast my legs. The four blue dots just ahead of the strap around the battery show it’s fully charged and the blue light glowing through the case around the M20 indicates it’s turned on.
The solid model has four parts:
Which, as always, incorporates improvements based on the actual hardware on the bike.
A strap-and-buckle belt harvested from a defunct water pack holds the battery into the cradle and the cradle onto the rack, with a fuzzy velcro strip stuck to the bottom to prevent sliding:
The shell around the camera is basically a box minus the camera:
The shell builds as three separate slabs, with the center section having cutouts ahead of the camera’s projections to let it slide into place:
The new shell version is 30.5 mm thick, so a 40 mm screw will stick out maybe 5 mm beyond the nylon locknut. I trust the screws will get lost in the visual noise of the bike.
A peg sticking out behind the USB jack anchors the cable in place:
The front slab and center top have curves matching the M20 case:
The camera model has a tidy presentation option:
And an ugly option to knock the protruberances out of the shell:
The square-ish post on the base fits into an angled socket in the clamp around the seat rail:
The numbers correspond to the “Look Angle” of the socket pointing the camera toward overtaking traffic. The -20° in the first clamp shows a bit too much rack:
It may not matter, though, as sometimes you want to remember what’s on the right:
FWIW, the track veering off onto the grass came from a fat-tire bike a few days earlier. Most of the rail trail had cleared by the time we tried it, with some ice and snow in rock cuts and shaded areas.
Contrary to the first picture, I later remounted the camera under the seat rail with its top side downward. The M20 has a “rotate video” mode for exactly that situation, which I forgot to turn off in the fancy new mount, so I rotated the pix afterward.
A 3 mm screw extends upward through the hole in the socket to meet a threaded brass insert epoxied into the shell base, as shown in the uglified M20 model. Despite appearances, the hole is perpendicular to both the socket and the shell, so you can tweak the Look Angle without reprinting the shell.
All in all, the mount works well. We await better riding weather …
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
NP-BX1 Lithium Batteries: DOT-01
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-02-18
A quartet of DOT01 NP-BX1 batteries arrived:
The dotted lines show the results from late 2015 for a pair of then-new Wasabi NP-BX1 batteries, so the DOT-01 batteries look about the same. The F battery barely lasted to the halfway point of our most recent bike ride and the G battery now resides in the blinky-and-glowy pile.
I’d be unsurprised to discover all the myraid “different” NP-BX1 batteries all come from the same factory. Unlike the Wasabi batteries, these lack date codes, which seems like an extra-cost option you don’t get on the low end.
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