The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Recumbent Bicycling

Cruisin’ the streets

  • DVD Player External Li-Ion Pack: A Pleasant Surprise!

    A friend mentioned a sale at Overstock.com (likely gone by now) that offered an Initial RB-270 9 V, 5.4 Ah lithium-ion battery pack, with a built-in charger, for $16. The pack was intended to keep a DVD player alive for long enough to avoid back-seat mayhem on long trips (for those toting undisciplined brats, anyway), but I saw it as a plug-in replacement for the NiMH AA-cell packs I’ve been using with the HTs on our bikes.

    The NiMH cells have been a major disappointment, as described there and there and there, with barely 1.5 Ah of capacity from nominal 2.4 Ah cells.

    Much to my surprise, all three of the Li-Ion packs delivered pretty nearly their advertised ratings. I varied the discharge level, but they’re all quite close…

    Initial External Li-Ion packs
    Initial External Li-Ion packs

    It looks like the packs include an internal regulator and over-discharge monitor, as the voltage is bar-flat right up to the point where it drops to zero. I’m mildly surprised at the regulator; I’d expect that they’d just deliver whatever the cells were producing, rather than waste any energy in the regulator.

    Notice that the 200 mA rate produced a lower total capacity than the 1 A rate. I’m guessing that’s power lost in the regulator over the protracted run time; 4.9 Ah at 200 mA added up to nearly a day of testing, far over the “up to six hours play per charge” rating.

    Let’s see: 5.4 Ah @ 6 hours makes the nominal load about 900 mA. So it delivered maybe 4.8 Ah at 1 A. Not what’s claimed, but much closer than those Tenergy NiMH cells.

    Next steps:

    1. Butcher the nice coily-cord cables to add Powerpole connectors that will click right into the bike radios
    2. Take one apart to see what bypassing the regulator would entail

  • Tour Easy Recumbent: Amateur Radio HT Mount

    Mary sewed up a new seat cover for her Tour Easy, so I dismantled the seat and cleaned things up. This is a good opportunity to show how I mounted an amateur radio HT on the bike…

    Bottle holder on seat frame
    Bottle holder on seat frame
    Clamp mount detail
    Clamp mount detail

    The general idea is simple: a water bottle holder attached to the lower seat rail with a circumferential clamp made from a chunk of half-inch aluminum plate. An aluminum spreader adapts the wider hole spacing on the bottle holder to the teeny little clamp.

    With the bottle holder in place, I put the radio in a wedge seat pack, atop a block of closed-cell foam to more-or-less cushion some of the bumps. The wedge pack seatpost strap secures it to the bottom of the holder and the rail straps wind their way through the holder and lash around the aluminum spreader plate. It doesn’t move very much at all.

    The radio is a long-obsolete ICOM IC-Z1A, bought specifically for this purpose: it has a remote head on the end of a coily cord. That puts the power, volume, and channel buttons out where you can actually use them.

    Radio in seat wedge pack in bottle holder
    Radio in seat wedge pack in bottle holder

    The lump behind the seat looks moderately suspicious in this day & age: a black package with wires! The grossly oversized red-and-black pair in the foreground is the power coming from a 6-AA pack attached to the rack with a Velcro strap; it’s a jumper with Anderson PowerPoles on both ends. Coily cord to the HT head, BNC-to-UHF adapter to the mobile antenna mount, one skinny cord to the headset and the other to the PTT button on the handlear.

    Other pieces of the puzzle:

  • Rudy Sunglasses: Back From the Dead

    Clear lens installed
    Clear lens installed

    As expected, the uni-lens on Mary’s Rudy Project sunglasses cracked right up the middle as that stress crack above the nosepiece opened up. The sunglasses came with interchangeable lenses, so I swapped in the clear lens.

    Having used urethane adhesive to mechanically lock the defunct gray lens in place, the broken bits were pretty firmly bonded. I applied a brass hammer and small drift punch to the remaining tabs, pried the debris out of the temples, cleaned the adhesive from the recesses, and snapped the new lens in place. Surprisingly, it popped in and locked securely.

    The nosepiece has never worked satisfactorily: there’s nothing locking the flexible blue-silicone pad to the straight-sided posts that are supposed to hold it. As a result, it tends to pop off at the most inopportune moments.

    Rudy nosepiece
    Rudy nosepiece

    I dotted the posts on one side with cyanoacrylate and the other pair with epoxy to see if either will bond well enough to make a difference. If those fail, I’ll try urethane, although I’m not sure what will happen as the urethane expands in the sockets.

    Anyhow, she now has glasses suitable for biking on cloudy and rainy days… which is much better than a sharp stick (or a bug) in the eye, as we see it.

  • Bicycle Tire Liner Abrasion

    The front tire (a Primo Comet blackwall) on Mary’s Tour Easy was flat when we rolled out of the garage a few days ago. While a flat isn’t pleasant at any time, it’s much nicer to find one at home, before the ride, rather than out on the road!

    I figured the tire ate something sharp that managed to work its way through the tire liner and into the tube; that’s rare, but it sometimes happens. These two pix of the tread show why we use tire liners: sidewall-to-sidewall nicks, cuts, gouges, and gashes, despite the fact that the herringbone tread has plenty of life left in it. Click the pix to enlarge, if you dare…

    Tire cuts 1
    Tire cuts 1

    And another section; it’s like this all the way around the tire. I think this one is the better part of a year old, so it has maybe 2000 miles on it. It handled 200+ miles along the Pine Creek Gorge rail-trail this past summer, which was sharp crushed gravel, but most of the cuts came from roadside debris on our ordinary utility rides around home.

    Tire cuts 2
    Tire cuts 2

    As it turned out, the tire liner had prevented all those punctures from reaching the tube, while killing the tube all by itself. The sharp edge where the the two ends of the liner overlap had worried its way through the tube.

    Abrasion from tire liner
    Abrasion from tire liner

    The tire liner wasn’t a genuine fluorescent green Slime strip, but some translucent brown thing. The difference: Slime liners are thinner and don’t have nearly this much abrasive power.

    Alas, I didn’t have a Slime liner in my stash (remedied with the most recent bike parts order), so I put the brown liner back in with a few layers of genuine Scotch electrical tape to build the end up a bit. There’s really no good way to feather the end without making it into a ragged knife edge.

    New tire and tube, of course. I’m not that crazy!

    With any luck, the liner and tape will behave for another few years, until the tire wears out, and then I’ll replace everything. Other than this event, flats aren’t a big part of our riding experience.

  • Terracycle Chain Idler: Status Report

    Stainless idler shaft in November 2009
    Stainless idler shaft in November 2009

    The 6 mm stainless steel shaft I installed in late June, for reasons described there, has been working just fine.

    Although the shaft has some discoloration, the idler bearing slides freely this way and that. No complaints about noises or bad shifting.

    I spritzed some silicone lube on the shaft and it’s way slippery again. That’s better than petroleum lubes that tend to turn road dust into grinding compound.

  • ICOM IC-Z1A Tone Squelch: Fixed?

    ICOM IC-Z1A HT with UT-93 Tone Board
    ICOM IC-Z1A HT with UT-93 Tone Board

    A few days ago I rode off to an eye doctor appointment and my ladies rode off later to meet me at the grocery store after they stopped in the garden to harvest root crops. This sort of thing is easy enough to synchronize with amateur radio, but this morning I didn’t hear a thing until they rolled up beside me in the store parking lot.

    It seemed they could hear each other and me, but I couldn’t hear either of them. We’re all on 144.39 MHz, the APRS data frequency, with 100 Hz tone squelch to keep the robots out of our ears. Our daughter has the GPS APRS tracker feeding data into the mic input, which is why we’re using a data channel for tactical comm.

    This has happened once or twice before, but it’s very intermittent. I now had sufficient motivation to disconnect the radio, an ancient ICOM IC-Z1A, from the bike and pith it on the Electronics Workbench for examination. The UT-93 Tone Squelch board is unplugged & flipped over, resting on the front half of the radio body at the lower-left of the photo.

    Turns out that there’s nothing visibly wrong in there. I suspect it’s a molecule or two of oxidation on the (gold-plated!) connector between the UT-93 and the main board, because the UT-93’s held firmly in position by the black foam square you can see in the lower-left of the photo. The small white plug near the top of the UT-93 mates with the equally small socket on the main board, just to the left of the lithium secondary cell in the middle.

    It’s all CMOS logic, of course, and there’s no actual load current involved. That’s the worst condition for contacts, as a dry connection simply doesn’t produce enough energy to burn through the least hint of oxidation. That’s why they use gold plating on connectors, but it’s been a long time since that board has moved at all; the foam square is deeply indented.

    So I wiggled & jiggled all the ribbon-cable connectors while I was in there, buttoned everything back up, and the tone decoding works again. I hope this will continue…

    Memo to Self: remove only the four black corner screws on the upper case, plus the two silver screws near the very bottom inside the battery compartment, and the two halves pop apart. No need to remove the mic and earphone plugs, whew!

  • Here’s Looking (Back) at You

    Walkway Webcam on Railing
    Walkway Webcam on Railing

    There’s now There was a webcam [Update: dead link] watching the recently opened Walkway Over the Hudson, put on by the Dutchess County Tourism folks.

    I couldn’t quite figure out where it was, though, because there aren’t any tall buildings or towers near the Walkway. The area used to be hard industrial, with plenty of smokestacks, but those days and those structures are long gone.

    On a recent trip I parked the bike at the end of the chain-link fence on the north side of the bridge, eyeballed back five-and-a-half sections of fence on the south side, and spotted what I’d been missing.

    The camera is a bit more than half a mile away, atop the Interfaith Towers building at 66 Washington St, on the northwest corner at Mansion Street. The Google overhead view isn’t up to date; the Walkway’s concrete decking is done and they’re tweaking some of the electrical work even as I type.

    The camera’s gooseneck mount lets that loooong telephoto lens vibrate in high winds. When the webcam image looks broken up, new weather is on its way!

    The picture is a crop from a larger image, with a bit of color correction and gamma tweakage.