A reusable grocery bag!

It took 7 seatpost bags to make this one bag.  I like the way the straps look with the logos on them.

I tried to make this bag in a convenient size while producing minimal waste.  Job done.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the drawstrings and cordlocks.

Matt

I named this post using the year and type of event for the purpose of wading through all the future piñata posts.  I can only hope for many more piñatas.

This was a Piñata for my Birthday/Housewarming party.  Thus the house shape.

It started with a plan:

It ended in ruin:

More views:

It took 5 or 6 people to take this little house down.  My sister was filming it with my camera, but it was in the wrong mode, so we just got a few still photos.

It was a good time.  More Piñatas to come…

Matt

I salvaged the red velcro from a kayak tie-down system for the roof of a car.

The zipper came out of an old worn-out pair of pants.

The main shoulder straps are made from product packaging.  The blue straps with the black edges are material scraps from Burley trailers.  When you get a Burley trailer in a box from the factory, the wheel dropouts come wrapped in excess fabric scraps.  I saved them and I used them in these straps.  The Mesh part of the straps I believe came from some SIXSIXONE kneepads that were packaged in a mesh bag.  The USPS chest strap was from a free promotional keychain neck strap.  The plastic bits and nylon webbing are reused from old worn out bags.  I save those too.  You should see my collection of old helmet buckles.

The Camelback Unbottle came from the rep.  He was selling off old inventory cheap.

I have used this thing a few times since I found it, and I forgot how much I like it.  Of course I do enjoy the appropriate nature of having a nautical themed bag to be a vessel for water.  Haha.

Matt

I made a little stop motion animation for fun.

I made this for Christy's birthday.

Backside

Here is a jacket that I made a while ago.  The sleeves are not finished and it is waiting for an owner.

This is the rain jacket that I have worn for probably the last 10 years.  It is the same pattern as the jackets above.  I bought the pattern at The Rain Shed in Corvallis.

It is all dirty and old, but it has served me well.

I once rode my fixed gear for 8 hours in the rain and it kept me totally dry.

I was worried about the thin reflective layer letting water in. So I backed it with Tyvek Home Wrap.

This is a thermal cycling jacket.  I made the pattern from a thermal jacket I already had, but was too loud to wear all the time.

Pretty straightforward and simple.

Shortly after I made it, I crashed my bike on the road and ripped holes in the back.

I use this one for stuffing in jersey pockets and wearing during training rides.  I cut off the sleeves because my arms sweat a lot apparently.

It's windproof!

This is made of a material that backpackers use as a ground tarp. It is really lightweight and packs down small.

I am planning on making a few more jackets this winter, so I’ll post those later.

Matt

Here is the top of a proprietary headset that has been channel-locked to hell.  I figured I could turn it down and get rid of the plier marks.  I mounted it on one of the many short pieces of steerer tube that I have collected over the years and chucked it up in the drill.  The drill went in the vice and…

…it’s all done!

It isn’t totally round, but it doesn’t need to be.  I’ll get a real lathe at some point.

Matt

First I had to figure out how to turn it because I have no lathe and no tools to do this.  I knew it would have to be solidly fixed to some spinning apparatus.  So I took an old 130BCD crankarm with bad pedal threads (no sense in ruining something good) and cut the arm off.  I found an old bench buffer/grinder at the shop that we really don’t use and mounted the modified crankarm and chainring to it.

I don’t have any tools to shave metal off, so I took an old U-lock with no key that was laying around and sharpened it on one end. The hardened steel will keep its cutting edge pretty well.  I thought I would be able to just shave material off with the U-lock, but it was easier to break the teeth off with pliers and then use an angle grinder to get the ring down to roughly the diameter I wanted.

Ready to grind

Grinding

There it is.  A perfectly good 48T Dura-Ace chainring ruined repurposed as a guard.  I also made one out of a worn-out 53T Dura-Ace ring and put it up for sale at the shop.  We’ll see if anyone wants it.

Toothless.

I think if I do more of this in the future, I should get a band saw and make a jig to cut the teeth off quickly and then turn it down.  This pliers/angle grinder method is okay, but it could be streamlined a bit.

I might get back to carbon chainring guards once I get the shop up and running.  I’ve got all the wood I need for the shop bench.  Now, I just need to, as Tony would say “get in the game.”

More to come.

Matt

For various reasons, I have not posted anything in a while.  Holidays, bogus internet, SuperSecretProjects, among other things have taken my time and kept me away from the blog.  But now I am back in full force!

Dura-Ace 7700 carbon!

One of my old projects that many people have seen on my bike is the carbon fiber brake lever.  The concept behind this project was to make a superlight left-hand brake lever (not for use as a shifter) to match the right-hand Dura-Ace 7700STI lever that I had on my cyclocross bike.  Back then I used a single front chainring with a guard, so there was no need for shifting up front. I also really disliked the idea of using some random left-hand lever or using the full STI with all the shifter guts weighing me down on those long run-ups.

I needed some way to mold an existing Left-hand Dura-Ace lever and make it look exactly like the real thing, but with a carbon fiber finish.  I went to TAP Plastics on Sandy Blvd and got some molding supplies.  The first thing I did was mask off an existing lever so the silicon molding liquid wouldn’t get into the inner shifter parts.  I mounted the masked lever and suspended it in a box.  I mixed a catalyst into the liquid silicon and poured it into the box.  Let it cure, pull out the masked lever and you get:

silicon mold

Now I mixed some molding compound and poured it into the silicon mold.  This stuff is liquid, but it cures all of a sudden.  Like about one second.  Don’t get your face too close while its curing or the vapors will burn off your nose hairs and vaporize your snot.  I don’t love snot or anything, but I prefer the non-chemical method of removing it.

So when that cured, I pulled it out of the silicon mold and got this:

This is the hard mold of the 7700 LH lever.

Now I used this hard mold to make the two halves of the final mold.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just use the original lever as a hard mold and go straight to the final mold.  Well that would have ruined it you silly goose.  What, do you think I’m made of money or something?  Besides, its more fun.

So now I covered the hard mold with PVA mold release and mounted it on the inside side of a shallow box and poured more of the hard mold compound in so it covered half the part.  It kind of looked like this:

Half of the final mold.

I let that part cure and covered it with more mold release, poured the other half of the mold, let that cure and I got this:

Final mold halves

Now the way this works is, I put these two halves together and clamp them really tight with bolts that go through those holes you see in the picture.  Then I cut strips of carbon fiber cloth from this:

carbon fiber cloth

I decided on a lay-up schedule and oriented the fibers so they had strength in all the proper directions.  I used marine-grade slow-curing epoxy so I would have time to work.  Ian Brown helped me with all the prototypes we made.  One of us would wet-out the cloth and the other would lay it in the mold.

When all the pieces of carbon cloth were wetted-out and in the mold, we put in a thin layer of ‘peel-ply’.  This is a thin permeable synthetic cloth that allows all the excess epoxy to pass through and get absorbed by the ‘bleeder’.  The bleeder is basically a cotton material.  This way you remove most of the resin, which is heavy, but leave just enough to bind the carbon together.  Resin is heavy and weak and carbon fiber is light and strong.  To maximize carbon, minimize the resin and get the carbon pushed into all the nooks and crannies of the mold, pressure is required.  So I built a pressure box to house the final hard mold.  It looks like this:

pressure box

With the peel-ply and bleeder in place, we jammed a 700c road tube with a 60mm valve into the mold and filled the pressure box with the rest of the tube.  We clamped the lid securely to the box and pumped it up to 80psi.  It took a few tries to figure out 80psi was the right pressure, but when we got it right and opened the box:

This one has a small hole in the front, but can be patched.

Not bad for just making it up as I go.

Ta-Da!  Dura-Ace 7700 carbon fiber brake lever.

Now this project was never finished.  I used a more rough 3-piece prototype on my bike several years ago.  This was meant to be a lighter and better looking one-piece lever.  It was difficult to get enough material in the clamp/pivot area, so they were too weak to use.  A little bit of figuring will solve that problem I’m sure.

I will come back to this project later.  I made a left-hand 7800 mold as well, but never used it.  I would like to make a right-hand 7800 lever also and use them on my SS cyclocross bike.  The 7800 was probably the most comfortable lever I have felt, so I think its worth doing.

One of the reasons I stopped working on this was that I gave up the single ring set-up on my geared bike in favor of traditional gears.  Another reason was the lack of a proper work area with venting and whatnot.  Sure, my nosehairs grew back, but why risk losing them forever?  One of my current projects is to turn this…

What a mess!

…into a workable area.  Once that happens, LOOKOUT!  I will be unstoppable!  Maybe I’ll even make some extra carbon levers that could go on someone else’s bike.  Hey it could happen.

Matt

All I made today was toast.

I do have another project brewing, so stay tuned.

Matt

Now, lets talk about real shit.  We were encouraged to make something to eat and share at the team meeting last night.  I couldn’t think of anything better that Stallone Cuts.  That’s what the profs eat lil’ dog.

Ugly meat, veins of tangy mayo and wrapped tightly over it all, a thin skin of sweaty pinkish cheese.

I made them vegan so Tiny could have some.  They were handcrafted with vegan lunchmeat, vegan mayo and vegan cheese.  I didn’t think anyone would eat them.  I figured the dog would get a crack at them at the end of the night, but the dish was clean about half-way through the meeting.  And it wasn’t the dog.

And just to prove it:

I can't even eat one fish tittie because I had too many Stallone Cuts

Matt