Xtrakoram

Our second Xtracycle has been up and running for a while, and it's high time I got around to profiling it. Most of the specs are outlined here, except that it's for sure a 1990 and not a '92. Todd chimed in about the geometry in the previous post's comments, but I'm pretty sure I'm describing it correctly. The '90 Karakorams were not made for front suspension, and the 1x1 fork is suspension-corrected. I think this ends up increasing the trail, and the end result is that I like the handling quite a bit. It still has a tendency to pull into corners a bit, but the steering seems quite a bit lighter than Marge's. Speaking of Large Marge, I've gotten a 1x1 fork and new headset installed, but I don't have the new disk brakes hooked up yet—so no ride report.


Here's a family picture. Marge will also soon be getting some spiffy new cruiser bars with lots of rise and a shorter stem with more rise.


Here's some goofy front brake cable routing. That's a Cane Creek Freestyle Assembly (it's got a hollow top-cap bolt) whose star nut was really fun to install without the proper tool. I had originally purchased it to conceal the wire from the dynamo to the headlight on Woody, but it somehow ended up here.


And just in case you've ever wondered what it would be like to put a rear fender on the front wheel, here it is (click for big). The lower part of the fender where it would have attached to the chainstay bridge was trimmed off with aircraft snips and cleaned up with emery cloth. The fork crown bracket was custom-cut and drilled, then fastened to the fender with Pop Rivets. And no, I wouldn't have set it up this way without those plastic fender stay QRs visible at the dropout. Does handily eliminate the need for a mudflap, but not too conducive to off-road riding.

I bought this frame knowing it was too small for me, hoping that a combination of its size and the GT triple triangle design would improve the overall torsional rigidity. I have to say, it does feel less rubbery than Marge and I really like its ride quality overall. My only complaint is that my knees occasionally come pretty close to, and sometimes hit, the ends of the Albartoss bars in low-speed turns.

Can't wait to see how it stacks up against a Big Dummy...

Winter Returns

Here are a few pics from my Friday morning commute. Good to get the Moose out for a spin and put those studded tires to good use. Not a lot of cylists out this time of year—mostly the Hardpack Hardcorps.


The Yahara River from the Jenifer Street bridge at sunrise.


Monona Terrace Convention Center parking ramp corkscrew.


When we say "multi-use path," we really mean it.


A view from the catbird seat.

Hang on a Sec

It's been seen here and here; and from another angle here, and gosh, folks love the stoker bar. Lets the little ones ride on the back of the Xtra without fear of falling off. Wished I'd have thought of it, but I must confess, I stole it from this design.

It's very simple to make an Xtracycle stoker bar. Mine is simply a sawed-off, cheapie mountain bike handlebar, a threadless mountain bike stem, a seatpost shim and a pair of grips.

The most difficult part would probably be finding a seatpost shim in the correct size, but most competent bike shops should be able to help. You'll need to know the inside diameter of the threadless stem—in my case, it's a 1-1/8 inch, which converts to 28.6 mm. Then, find the diameter of the seatpost (26.6 in my case) and subtract to find the difference. The part that won't compute at most shops is that there is, for example, no 28.6 to 26.6 shim. So I just looked at the catalog at the shop and found a shim close to those two diameters that had a difference of roughly 2.2 mm. These shims are slotted their entire length, they allow some expansion or contraction of their overall diameter to get the fit you'd need. For $8 and a couple of days of waiting, I ended up with a shim for 27.2 to 25.4—both very common sizes, but only 1.8 mm of difference. A seatpost-frame combination won't brook that much difference, but the threadless stem that I used easily drew .4 mm of extra tightening and has been very secure. I pick up the bike by the stoker bars as a matter of course, and the seatpost will shift in the frame before the stem will budge.

I sawed off the ends of the old mountain bike handlebars with a hacksaw, cleaned up the ends with a file, popped the grips on and put it all together. Sheer joy for the youngsters.



More views of the completed stoker bar



and a close-up of the shim.

Other variants can be seen here, here and here.

Swap 2007

Yet another Madison bike swap has come and gone, and for the second year in a row I rode to the event with all my stuff. Yes, it's possible to haul the entire (if modest) contents of a swap table on an Xtracycle. On the left side is a dual-suspension mountain bike; on the right is a plastic bag containing 2 suspension forks and a rigid steel fork; in the cardboard box is a carbon fiber fork; in the box on the top are a couple of saddles, about 15 derailleurs, several sets of toe clips, some old seat bags for spare tubulars, and a bunch of other accumulated miscellany. I sold almost all of it and came home with just a small box and the mountain bike (anybody need one?)

I had to wait in a line of cars to get into the area behind the venue with the other exhibitors, and got a few looks when I rolled right in through the back door. The guy at the registration desk asked whether I had ridden there with all that stuff. Well, yeah, but it was only about 4 miles...

For the first time in recent memory, I went home with more money than I had come with. I didn't feel an urgent need to spend it all. I did get a couple of things I had been wanting for a while—an Axa integrated wheel lock and a second set of Reelights (batteryless lights that use the Faraday principle to power LEDs—will blog them at some point) some tires and a few other little things.

Saw quite a few people I knew and floated the idea of riding down to tour the Sugar River Dairy sometime this summer, which was quite well-received. It was a big event and a pretty good outing, all things considered.

On the way home, winter returned. Four miles of those sandy little snow particles driven into my face by a fierce headwind. In the absence of windfront tights, I can now recommend Carhartt's flannel-lined jeans. Toasty.

Kato! Not now!

I post cute pictures of dogs because I can.

Grasshopper Weather

My daughter and I are reading the Little House on the Prairie books (well, I've been reading them aloud and she's been correcting my occasional misread.) In the fourth book, On the Banks of Plum Creek is a chapter entitled "Grasshopper Weather," which describes how their summer lasted an unusually long time into the fall. Kinda like how I felt on my commute today, except that the Ingals family had winter weather by Thanksgiving. Not so much around here. I don't think the ground is frozen—or maybe it's thawed...

Waiting for Dogot

Rest in peace, Mocha and Willie (but not you, Kato—you're not dead yet...)

Coupla Things

For those of you interested in the whole winter bike thing, Tarik offers a review of the 26" Nokian Extreme 294 studded tire over at his place. There's been a fair amount of chatter about these on the Icebike e-mail list over the years, and Tarik's review is a welcome addition.

Then, it's almost time for the 16th annual Cronometro Bike Swap, organized by the Brazen Dropouts Bicycle Racing Club. It's been a really good swap for the last couple of years and has grown to be one of the larger swaps in the country. It's happening at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison on January 13th, from 9:30 to 4:30. Read all about it here.



It's 35 degrees and sunny today, so I went to the garden and puttered around a little. I turned all my compost piles, dug a few carrots (going to try adding some parsnips this year) and mulched the garlic, which is about 3 inches tall. The ground really still isn't frozen yet—or maybe it thawed—so the clods from the spading I did in late October are dissolving. The 27 wheelbarrow loads of leaf compost are settling in and I'm looking forward to a more productive season this year...

Bullwinkle Unleashed

This is my dedicated winter bike, the Moose. It's a late-eighties Trek 800, originally purchased at a garage sale for $15. Mountain bikes of this vintage seem to have been made to be ridden in the snow. The long wheelbase and slack angles add up to a slow but steady cruise, well-suited to keeping the center of mass going in the right direction over unpredictable road conditions.

The seat post is stock, but everything else is a mix of hand-picked new and trash-picked old. Nitto Albatross CroMo bars (new) with SunTour BarCons (trash); Zefal Safari 3 (new), Lee Chi 4-finger brake levers (trash), bronze-colored dirt-drop knockoff stem (garage sale, but like new) and huge cheapie BMX platform pedals (purchased new, but now trashed.) Note an ongoing obsession with a big front mudflap that falls between the roostertail of front wheel slime and the crank assembly. Really cuts down on the wear and tear on the (trash-picked, except for the chain) drivetrain. That's a 110 BCD crankset, but it's geared more like compact drive—44-34-24, if I recall. The current rear wheel and its predecessor were both sourced at my local CurbMart (trashpicked.)

Currently running IRC Blizzard 112 studded tires front and rear. Remember those? The 56-stud version was the only commercially-available studded tire I can remember from back when I started riding year-round back in 1989. They're big and heavy, but the studs don't seem to be wearing out after 6 or 7 seasons—even with a fair amount of pavement riding. The best thing about them is that a neighbor who was moving to a warmer climate gave them to me, unused, for free.


This is my other dynamo hub headlight. It's the Shimano NX-30 laced to a Sun CR-18 rim, powering a Lumotec Oval Plus 3W halogen headlight with LED standlight. The whole show is run by Shimano's Nexus automatic switch (visible immediately behind the fork crown.) From what I've read, the automatic switch packs a dizzying array of circuitry for its simple job, but it works remarkably well. Occasionally, early in the morning before the sun is completely up, it will turn out the light while passing over patches of snow on the road surface (the sensor points at the ground) and back on when darker pavement is reached. At night it's perfect. I have plenty of blinkies to attend to, so it's nice that at least one light smart enough to keep up with the task at hand.

Also note the Tirefly on the Presta adapter. Don't see that every day.

The Lumotec isn't as bright or as focused or as wide as the Inoled I'm using on Shirley the Woodpecker, but it's a much cheaper light and was quite good when I purchased it back in 2001. It's been quite good for winter use.



Here's a view from the catbird seat. Coupla blinkies, since I'm a big believer in redundancy. Those Nitto Albatross bars do have quite the span, and lordy, do I love the fact that they'll take bar-end shifters. Thanks Grant! Also should mention that you'd want to get some stretchy grips for this setup, since the shifter cables need to run through them somehow. The old WTBs I have on there had just enough give.

I dunno, maybe I'll get me a Pugsley someday, but this'll do for now.

Schnowschtorm

We're getting about 2 or 3 inches of the big snowstorm that's hitting Chicago right now. So of course, I rode:



Saw a guy on a bike fall down on the street adjacent to a bus stop—a combination of a steeply-crowned Jenifer street and an ice patch created by bus tires. Had to wait for a dual-unit, 30-car Wisconsin and Southern southbound freight to cross North Shore Drive, then rode sorta parallel to it as it faded gray into a wall of driving snow. Turned off North Shore into what seemed like a gale-force westwind. Sirens echoed throughout downtown as emergency vehicles responded to crashes. Watched a huge pickup truck pulling a skidloader on a trailer burn a half a gallon of unleaded spinning its way up a tiny hill, leaving a blue cloud of burnt rubber-smelling smoke in its .0005 mph wake. The Ford Escort behind it couldn't make it up the hill either. Long lines of single-occupant motor vehicles just about everywhere I went. Rode faster than many of them, even on the unplowed bike routes.

Typical snowstorm.

Shirley the Woodpecker performed swimmingly in his/her maiden snow voyage. A little squirrely, but confident overall. The only problem was Tokay hill number three, where I couldn't stand up to pedal because I'd lose traction out back. Had to sit and grind it out, which was fine today, but might become a problem on days when I'm not feeling quite as studly.