Sansa Clip Plus

Bought a Sansa Clip Plus and almost immediately had some issues.  Important safety tips:

1. I deleted songs from the clip+ without emptying the "trash" bin and

2. I removed the clip+ from the usb port without selecting the "remove safely" option first.

This corrupts the DOS file system.  In particular the .Trash folder.  Fix is to delete the .Trash folder.

Bike ride with BB - Erricson's again ... Ice Cream

We made another bike run to Erricson's today.  This time we choose a route that is roughly 9.5 miles each way.  As always the ice cream was a treat and the ride along the lake very nice.

Bike ride with BB

Another wonderful spring day.  BB and I biked over to Erricson's ice cream in Maynard.  It turned out that there was a very nice route through the Assabet reservation.  Here's how we went:

It was a very nice ride of about 16.5 miles.  We stopped at Erricson's, of course, for ice cream then came back along the river before heading for home.  All in all a very nice loop.

This was the first chance I've had to use the new PN-40 software and maps.  All in all I'm happy with the upgrade.  Sadly, the USB cable continues to be a singularly doubtful proposition.  That said, the new software stores routes, etc. as conventional GPX files on a removable SD card so it's possible to just pop the SD card and use it directly.  Since it uses GPX files I can now use Google Earth to show the route, elevations, speed, etc.  I suspect it works both ways so I should also be able to store routes, etc from Google Maps, etc.  That opens up some nice options.

I took a video using the Flip camera Miriam gave me.  It's a bit rough but should give some idea.  Sadly, I fat fingered the return video via the river.

Recumbent wood bike

I've spent several days modeling the bike to avoid building and then changing things.  Along the way I spent some time learning a bit about Blender and Librecad.  Interesting but a bit of overkill.  In the end I mocked things up with Impress.  Here's the result:

The issue with this geometry is chain routing.  To get the chain to clear the wheel and frame an idler is essential.  Here's a commercial bike that illustrates the matter:

There is, however, an alternative ... drive the front wheel.  Curzbike makes a line of such bikes.  Here's one:

By driving the front wheel a number of problems are avoided including chain routing.  A bit of web research revealed several sites for home built versions.  This is the one I more or less followed.

RecumbentTV

Since this solves a number of issues, I'm going to switch to this design.

Bike ride with BB

Another great NE spring day!  BB and I went for a 10 mi bike ride.  My knee was a bit tender so we stayed in neighborhoods mostly on flats.

13.5 mi bike ride with BB

BB and I rode to Trombetta's Farm and back today.  Trombetta's is one of our favorite ice cream runs so on a nice spring day it was a good trip.  Here's Trombetta's and the route.

Trombetta's is a rather funky place.  There's ice cream, a nursery, a children's make your own toy shop, an indoor miniature golf facility, and an eclectic collection of stuff for sale.  The ice cream is good and there are some nice shaded areas to sit.

We did a stretch on rt 20.  It was surprisingly OK as there were good shoulders and sidewalks.  Unfortunately we were going straight into a strong wind.  On the way back we looped through some neighborhoods avoiding 20.  They were pleasant to ride in with wide well paved streets and no traffic.  We did have to cross a substantial 3%+ grade hill about 600m long to get there though.  Of course we got to coast for the next few miles.  I topped out at 30 mph coasting down hill!

We stopped briefly at Wayside Inn as they were having an antiques sale in a very large tent.  We looked at going in but at $10 per it wasn't worth it.  I must also admit to being a bit taken aback by the notion of having to pay to shop.

We're going to try to work up to 20 to 50 mile rides with a view to going touring.  My knee was a bit tender from the ride on Thursday but didn't trouble me and is no worse after today's ride.

All in all a great day for a ride.

Mixed day

Bit of a mixed day today.  AM rain but became nice in the PM.  After errands and a stop for ice cream BB and I took a 6.4 mi bike ride.

The vegetable garden is beginning to show some positive signs though the beans I'd started inside all died.

Saw several humming birds today.  The ones we have are rather plain but still neat to watch.

Recumbent wood bike

Spent much of the day working on the seat for the redesign.  The key here is to make sure I've good good seat measurements.

I rounded the seat edges and made a template for drilling holes to lighten the seat.  I also modified the seat testing jig to mimic the actual frame angles.

Using this test jig I was able to test the seating angles.

Here I've clamped the crank assembly to test the pedal position.

I've decided to reuse the drop outs from the previous design.

Here I've test mounted the rear wheel.

I'm generally comfortable with this redesign though it's in many ways a return to the original buckboard concept.  After the previous experiments I'm inclined to think that I was rather hasty in abandoning that design based on what I thought at the time was inappropriate seat angles.  The point behind experiments is to experiment so the effort was not entirely wasted.

Bike redesign

Given recent events it seems a good time to do a redesign of the bike.

I've used Freecad (unstable but still usable) to redesign the bike this time paying attention to dimensions so that there are fewer surprises during the build.  It looks like this now:

I used the sketcher workbench in Freecad so there are MANY dimensions, angles, etc restricting the design. One measure that's not visible is the fork to rear axle (~900mm).

I also prototyped a seat to check angles.  Here are some photos:

A seat back angle of around 30+ degrees seems comfortable.  I do need to work on the shape a bit as some of the edges dig into my body.  A bit of checking suggest the seat ought to be somewhere between 24cm and 32cm.

I also checked my leg length and found a seat back to pedal max of about 1122mm.

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Short bike ride with BB

A sunny afternoon prompted a short bike ride with BB.

I've put some handle bar extensions on my bike to allow a more upright riding position.  They work well but I think I've left/right interchanged.  I'll swap them and try again.  While I'm doing bike stuff I'll add a mirror to my bike and move BB's to her small bike.

Bike headset failed

I've fabricated one seat but it didn't work out.  Unfortunately while testing the seat I heard a crack and the steering mount failed.  Back to the drawing board.

Pulled the front fork and disassembled the steering mount.  The mounting holes are rounded and there are some cracks in the wood where it has failed!

You can see that the holes are rounded and if you look closely at the top photo you can make out two stress cracks - lower & upper right where the grain is broken.  Examination of the plywood also shows some failure.

I'll have to use a stronger wood for the mount proper & buttress the plywood to take the stress.

Bike Project

Work continues on the bike project.

I've spent considerable time working on mounting the headset.  The first design was based on a block with some aluminum pieces to hold the headset races.  It looked like this:

With the front fork mounted I was able to fabricate a mount for the rear wheel so the frame looked like this.

From there it I was able to align and mount the wheels.

The bike is beginning to look real!

The first headset worked but was incompatible with the front brake cable which wants to run just in front of the steering tube from a bracket mounted on the steering.

So I made a new mount that looks like this.

The basic frame is complete so it's on to the seat.

Seat Profile

CM profile for seat

1	6
2	5
3	4
4	3.5
5	4
6	3.4
7	2.8
8	2.5
9	1
10	0.8
11	0.6
12	0.4
13	0.2
14	0.1
15	0
16	0
17	0
18	0.2
19	0.3
20	0.4
21	0.6
22	0.8
23	1.1
24	1.5
25	2.1
26	2.7
27	3.2
28	3.7
29	4.2
30	5
31	5.5
32	6
33	6.4
34	7.1
35	7.6
36	8.2
37	8.8
38	9.1
39	9.6
40	10
41	10.4
42	10.8
43	11.2
44	11.6
45	12
46	12.4
47	12.8
48	12.2
49	13.5
50	14
51	14.4
52	14.8
53	15.2
54	15.6
55	16
56	16.7
57	17.3
58	17.9
59	18.6
60	19.5
61	20.2
62	21.3
63	22.2
64	23.4
65	24.6
66	25.8
67	27.2
68	29
69	31
70	33.3
71	36.5
72	40.2