Archive for September, 2010

We got a new kitten! This is Kika, a marble colored Bengal.

I miss Piper, our Siamese a lot. She has yet to come home. I told Louise I didn’t want a new kitten to replace Piper, but she said we could just have two cats if Piper comes home. So, we got Kika.

I recently spent some time powder coating some of my unicycles. Here’s my Kris Holm 26″ Mountain Unicycle with a Schlumpf geared hub, 2.3″ tire, and the KH handlebar:

I powder coated the frame translucent purple, which first required a base of mock chrome:

The pedals I also did metallic red, taking the bearings out before baking them.

The spokes are also done; I taped them to a piece of aluminum that I cut out:

and then clamped it to another piece of aluminum with a few c-clamps and wired them (at an angle) to the oven rack. This allowed me to suspend them in the air to shoot the powder onto them, and also protect the threads. Bronson gave me the idea to use some type of clamp; my original idea was to tap about 10 holes in a piece of aluminum and thread them in; however, it would have taken forever to do the tapping (plus, I don’t have the right spoke tap).

Sparkly metallic red:

I also used metallic red over the black rim, and it turned out pretty cool:

Louise’s frame looks even better; a chrome metallic base, then a candy orange on top, and finally the metallic red on top:

Coker and Coke

My rims started out like this, with a bunch of rust on the sides and white painted part:

I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to clean them up, but I was wrong! After some rust removing and stripping, I tried cleaning one up and almost decided it was pointless. There was just so much rust and it would take forever. I played around with photoshop dropping in the white wall tires with various rims that I could buy. Here are some EMPI 8 spoke GT wheels, white I like quite a bit, but don’t 100% go with the classic white wall look.

I’m already committed to the white walls, since I already bought them, so I figured I’d do some more stripping and rust removing on the original rims to get them up to some better condition. Heck — I can easily buy new rims anytime later, should I choose. Here I am thinking about painting the center rims red:

So, after more work of stripping, rust removing, and sanding I got the rims cleaned up quite nice.

I decided to powder coat the back half to make it more durable. In hindsight, I probably could have powdercoated the whole thing and used that as primer for the red; however, I would have still had to shoot some gray primer as a base color for the red.

Here’s the prepared rim:

Then shot with gloss black powder:

And after baking for ~25 minutes:

Fast forward a bit with two coats of gray primer (sanding between coats), two coats of the same red as the car, and two clear coats and we have:

Then I got them mounted on the wheels and they look great!

I just ordered a new set of hub caps; two of the old ones are dented, and I wanted some of the “dome” ones.

I had an awesome time at the “California” muni weekend, hosted in Vancouver, BC, Canada, by the VanUni unicycling club and dubbed the Vancouver Muni Weekend. It was announced via the Unicyclist forums.

Here is a collection of pictures from Nathan Hoover on SmugMug. Here are some of the highlights that include me, and my notes so I can remember what I did and have one place to find all the links I’m interested in.

Friday we did an informal ride at the North Shore (Mt Fromme) on a trail called Ladies Only. Tim Lee got a picture of how Ladies have a double black diamond technical difficulty rating:

Here’s a video from Nathan:

Saturday we rode the CBC trail at Mt Seymour. Here’s me riding a skinny: (Photo by Nathan Hoover):

A picture from Facebook via Tim Lee:

One of my favorite movies from Nathan — a cool teeter totter:

Monday we went up to Squamish and road by the Alice Lake area. It rained lightly, but cleared up in the afternoon and was also a blast. Here’s a video of some of the scary stuff (from Nathan again!):

Tom Holub also put up some great Vancouver Muni Weekend pictures on flickr.

A youtube collection from Nick — lots of footage of Tom, Justin and An’So. I think I was ahead of them, as I didn’t get a chance to really ride with them on Saturday.

An electric motor doesn’t need a big flywheel to keep the engine running. It also doesn’t need the starter gear teeth around the edge. In fact, all it really has to do is engage with the clutch disc via the pressure plate. I’m not sure how beefy that needs to be, but I decided to take down a bit of the flywheel size on my old south bend lathe.

Here’s the tranny, coupling adapter, and flywheel:

I bolted the coupling adapter to the flywheel; it didn’t come with the right bolts, and I had bought some grade 5 bolts that didn’t quite fit on it either, so I turned down the coupling a little bit to let them attach. Later I replaced it with an hex head bolt.

I put the coupling/flywheel in the four jaw chuck and centered it on the lathe:

The teeth were probably hardened, as they weren’t cutting too well, so instead I just did a bunch of plunge cuts on the fact and cut the teeth off:

It had taken a while to do that, but after it was done it was just a matter of setting the machine up and letting it cut over and over again:

I only took off material from the side; I could probably have made the back thinner too, but I wasn’t sure how much and if it would be worth the time. Here you can see a bit of the material that I cut off:

Then a sample test fit on the motor with the adapter plate. The adapter plate was all rusty looking; the machinist that made it did a terrible job on the steel, and had literally painted over some rust. I cleaned it all off as best I could and powder coated it red to match the motor:

I then dropped the flywheel off at a machine/transmission shop (Clarks Machine Shop in Cupertino) to balance it, since I have no idea how to do it and I wanted it to be done right with no vibration. They have had it for almost two weeks; they need some kind of axle or something to mount it to their machine and were supposed to borrow one a week ago. Hopefully I’ll get it back next week, and then I can actually put the motor in!

I’ve had a few questions on where I got my zip line stuff.

Here’s what I got:

1. Petzl Tandem Speed Pulley 30113 – $ 79.95 from http://karstsports.com/, free shipping.

2. From ZipLineSupplies.com I ordered the following. Note that they appear to be a front for “Fehr” - http://www.fehr.com, and you could probably order directly from them too.

So, $245 for a lot of fun. The “speed” version of the pulley probably wasn’t necessary, as the thing goes damn fast.

A good resource for setting up zip lines is available at: http://www.outdoorfunstore.com/zipline.asp — they also sell zip line kits, but are rather expensive.