Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
What I do not understand is the lack of a license plate on that front bumper, here in New York State where front license plates are mandatory. I’ve noticed several Tesla vehicles (in their S3XY automotive series, among which I cannot distinguish) without front plates, so it must be a Tesla owner thing.
The WordPress AI image for this post gets the angular aspect right, along with the missing plate:
The cord path isn’t at all obvious, even given the smudges on the seat struts:
Tour Easy – seat mesh removed
Pictures of the original cord as installed at the Easy Racers “factory” served as guidance:
Tour Easy – seat cord – front viewTour Easy – seat cord – side viewTour Easy – seat cord – rear viewTour Easy – seat cord – bottom detail
The knots joining the cord at the top, taken juuust before I pulled the right knot apart:
Tour Easy – seat cord – knots
Those are in addition to my Tour Easy a few feet away, but you can never have enough pictures.
A 3.5 meter cord will be plenty long enough and marking the midpoint simplifies equalizing the two sides. The cord crosses the seat frame at the bottom from the lower guides, although I’m reasonably sure it wouldn’t matter if you ran separate lengths up the two sides with a knot in the lower guide.
The new cord claims to be 1000 pound test (200 pound working), but the vital dimension is its 2.6 mm diameter to match the OEM cord. It does not claim to be UV stabilized, which may turn out to be a problem over the course of a few years.
A fairing fragment provided an excuse to practice plastic polishing:
Fairing polish – start
That’s from a EZR-SZ Zzipper fairing ridden about 2000 miles a year since 2001, so it’s spent far too much time in the sun and definitely not gotten all the finicky care it deserves. It’s tinted 60 mil polycarbonate, vacuum-molded into the bubble shape required to fit on a Tour Easy recumbent.
Fairing Flashlight Mount – Mary approaching
On the other paw, Karl Abbe (the guy behind Zzipper) says the typical fairing survives maybe half a decade, so it doesn’t owe us anything.
I applied all three bottles of Novus Plastic Polish in descending numeric order, using snippets of Official Polish Mates (which could be a Krakow escort service) with a vigorous circular motion, ending up with a reasonable result:
Fairing polish – transmission
I cut the smaller chunk from the fairing for comparison. It’s been washed to dislodge loose crud, but is otherwise as-ridden.
The fairing has deeper scratches than Novus can buff out, but removing the surface scuffs and haze definitely improves the clarity:
Fairing polish – clarity
The view from father away:
Fairing polish – clarity
Eks describes this sort of thing as a “Used Car Finish” = high polish over deep scratches:
Fairing polish – surface finish
All in all, a nice result from very little effort.
The decaying ADA bump (a.k.a. detectable warning) strips at the Dutchess Rail Trail’s Overocker Road Trailhead require cyclists to carefully pick their line. We’re on our way for groceries, so I’m towing the BOB Yak trailer and have just jounced over the edge of the concrete “ramp” while making a right-angle turn to the right:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0020
The four-digit frame numbers tick along at 60 FPS.
The car remained stopped at the crossing during this whole affair.
Mary is approaching along the same line with the same intent:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0198
A closer look shows her front wheel is parallel to the edge of the concrete ramp:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0198 detail
We think her wheel slipped off the edge of the concrete and, with the edge preventing her from steering left to counterbalance the sudden tilt, she knows she’s going to fall:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0228
Whereupon Newton took control and left no way out:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0250
Fortunately, this is at about zero miles per hour:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0276
She collected a nasty bruise on her starboard ham, plus a few scuffs here and there as the bike basically rolled over her:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0306
And back down again:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0330
Elapsed time: 100 frames = 1.7 seconds.
The drivers of vehicles in both directions rushed to assist Mary, but, apart from a few bruises and scrapes, she was in good shape.
The fairing incurred fatal cracks, but held together as we completed the mission. No surprise: after nearly a quarter-century of sunlight exposure, polycarbonate loses a lot of its durability.
Now, to be honest, we both ignored the Dismount before crossing road sign at the intersection. Over the years, I have seen a few cyclists stop and dismount before walking through the trail’s at-grade road crossings, but they are most certainly the rare exception; we all stop while waiting for traffic to recognize our presence, then ride through.
Rail trail maintenance has always been a low priority and the County’s “Vision Statements” over the decades have been largely irrelevant to what actually happens out on the pavement. ADA strips at trail crossings have been decaying for years and I expect that to continue for many more.
After about five and a half years, the OEM shift indicator in my rear SRAM Grip Shift failed, so I replaced it with a piece of right-angle polypropylene backed with hot pink vinyl:
All done by hand, because it’s easy.
I’d used up my stock of genuine replacement indicators long ago, but they’re now down to two bucks (probably because Grip Shifters are obsolete) and I’ve stocked up in anticipation of future need.
The pebble caught in this crater has worn flat on the outside and started cutting through the tire carcass into the tube:
Schwalbe Marathon Plus – Stone gash
Gotta love those Marathon Plus tires!
So my bike now has a new tire, tube, and rim on the back.
The old spokes looked OK and tightened up without incident. For the record, the Park TM-1 tension meter puts the drive-side spokes at 25 and the other side just under 20, with the total runout & wobble under a millimeter.
Having now replaced all four rims on our bikes over the course of two years, I sawed the three rims still awaiting recycling into samples:
Tour Easy – 30 k mile rim wear
Unlike contemporary bikes, our Tour Easy recumbents have rim brakes and those original rims are pretty well worn out; they’re not supposed to be concave like that.
This required her to take her left hand off the handlebar to fiddle with the assist level and, as it turned out, used her thumb in position causing some distress. Given that changing the assist level happens a lot as we ride, it was time for a change.
So I replaced the 500C with a DPC-18 display like the one on my bike, with the key advantage of putting the buttons on the handgrip:
Tour Easy Bafang Controls – DPC-18 buttons
She preferred a higher position for the buttons than I do, with the PTT button for the Baofeng amateur radio below the housing.
That location requires a bit of dexterity, but let us move the twist-grip shifter upward on the handgrip where it is more comfortable. She rarely uses the throttle, so we’ll try this for a while.
The DPC-18 has an awkward portrait-mode display with an incredible amount of wasted space, with the side detriment of displacing the blue Camelbak hose. After a few iterations, we settled on a receptacle to catch the mouthpiece without requiring any fancy snaps / clips / fasteners:
Tour Easy Bafang Controls – Camelbak nozzle catcher
The solid model descends from the Zzipper fairing mounts on that same aluminum bar, with the bottle simply jammed into the big hole:
Zzipper Fairing – Camelbak nozzle catcher – show layout
There being no real forces on the holder, I omitted the aluminum load-spreading plate across the top and just epoxied four threaded brass inserts into the bottom part.
Early reports suggest a happier thumb and no problems stashing the hose, so it’s all good.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 