departing from the house

jay, john, dan and yours very truly set off saturday evening for some stealth camping.  upon arrival, i noticed with some chagrin that my chosen stop was kinda close to the road, a fact that went unnoted last time, cause there were leaves on the trees.  this caused mild paranoia, but we set up shop, started a small fire, cooked some grub, grilled some sausages, drank some bourbon and beer, and settled in for a quiet night.

quiet night. so far...

then the rednecks showed up.

and rocked our world.

we heard trucks/drunken shouting/music.  a tiny headlamp started to bob its way thru the woods.  we dowsed the fire by jumping on it, and killed our headlamps.  still, they kept coming.  in retrospect, they were looking for a quiet place to fire up the bowl.  in the interest of not getting beat or shot, i called out: did you smell the bourbon?  and they came running.  eventually about 10 or 12 of them showed up, one bearing a 3 gallon container full of drunkade, aka cheap cheap vodka and some sort of mango orange gatorade.  there was a mythical cooler of beer that they had supposedly tried to start a fire with, but it being white styrofoam, it rejected their advances.

soon, the drunkade was consumed.  about… a gallon of it.  this, after we had had a bottle of wine, a half liter of bourbon, and a couple few beers.  then the captain morgans came out.  thank god it wasnt flavored.  then the cheap ass weed came out.  and so the night progressed to fire jumping, and the eventual dissolution of our fire wood.

world. rocked.

after much yelling and laughing and much much drinking, they departed, and we slept the sleep of the dead.

now.  who’s up for some bob evans?

the morning after.

all fotos from jay’s excellent photostream.

you might have thought it was the 1st of May not the 1st of October?

Needless to say the part that broke was the carbon outer plate. Not the alu knuckles, plastic pulley wheels, ti and alu bolts, or even the steel pivots. The carbon bit!

So I was a bit pissed, and replaced it with a decade+ old all aluminum campy Athena 8-speed mech, which worked perfectly with the 10-speed Centaur cassette and Record shifter, btw. I looked into replacing the plate, which was $150, and decided I’d be better off buying a used Record or Chorus mech anyway. After chasing a few of those around the Czech internets for a week or two, I gave up and settled for the old alu bit.

But after a couple of months of seeing this broken expensive piece of shit in my apartment, I decided to take some action. So I ground-up/filed-off some mixed length (0.5-10mm) fibers from the cutoff from a carbon cross fork, and went to work laying it up.

The knuckle has a brass(?) sleeve pressed into the carbon on either end, and a steel pivot rotates inside each sleeve. The sleeve is what broke out of the carbon, so I figured I’d put it back. With some good Czech epoxy and the carbon fibers and a little patience (luckily as that was all I had to spare), I had built up a nice reinforced gusset on the forward sleeve and realigned/repaired the contact points for the sleeve. It took a bit of twisting and prying to get it all back together even though it was 99% aligned, but it seems to be working now, so we’ll see.

repaired record outer knuckle

In the end I was pretty happy with how the carbon came together. A very little bit of finishing work with a small file, so I have a reasonable amount of faith in its durability. But don’t think I’ll be repairing any handlebars anytime soon though.

But this week-end I (Cory) realized that it isn’t summer here in Prague anymore (hopefully it was just a cold windy week-end), and we need to get off our collective asses and get back on the blog.

So we will, I promise.
Soon.
(I personally have mountains of pictures to put stories to.)

I leave you with this one (which I promise will come up again in a future story.)
A short stop for a beer in Prague.

ouch!

ok, so I went for a short ride the other day to meet the misses after work, for a tool around on some city park paths. it turned pretty short, when on a steep little dirt climb my front wheel kicked up a piece or path debris (a stick or a rock, in the end I wasn’t able to determine which was the final culprit.)

It nicely struck my rear derailleur, which is of course a Campagnolo Record 10 with a carbon outer plate. And with enough force to push it pretty hard. And to an insult to injury, I will have to assume that I had not conservatively enough set the inner limit screw, as the impact was enough to send the carbon mech spokeward.



It grabbed a spoke, snapped the carbon loops off the pivot and bent my alu hanger/slider a bit. So I trashed what appears to be a $400msrp derailleur. I looked up the part number for the replacement carbon outer plate from campy and it’s like $150!!

Needless to say, I bent the hanger straight and put an old all aluminum 8-spd Athena that was in a car accident crash on, and shifting is back to perfect for the 2×10.

As an added amusement, when I flipped the bike over to see how the hell I was going to ride home (which was suprisingly not a problem as long as I didn’t try to shift or do any drops over 8″) I found that my no-good-drunk mechanic didn’t tighten my fancy campy record aluminum chainring bolts very tight. 2 were missing. 60% of them were there, though; and that’s passing.
He still gets a D for that one.

And I’m gonna stop paying him in bourbon and Pilsner Urquell

I helped put together a Rapha Continental Ride, as the spoke card below denotes.  Some editors from Bicycling magazine showed up and rode it as well, and wrote it up, and gave a shout out to not only this humble, dust cover’d blog, but also to the neglected but viable dirt road database.  We thank them for that!  Here is a link to the main article by David L’Heureux aka Laroo, some quotes, and I will have links to the Rapha imagery as soon as its up, and mine, ditto.  I am developing the B&W in my kitchen as we speak. Wait! I got some scanned in.  Here is a link to the bikely map and cue sheet for the whole shebang.  Find more delicious dirt roads @ the dirt road database wiki.

“Speeds on the descent were almost scary as we tip toed the line between in control and over cooked. At the bottom we patched flats and egos, then turned around to ride back up to the ridge for and even longer and more hair-raising descent back into the valley.”

“I’d never ridden here, so word of mouth was the only thing to go on. I’d been told the ride would be stunning. It was.”

“We were riding by horse-drawn buggies through picturesque farmland almost instantly.”

Colour shots as soon as the get developed, to tide you over here (and here) are some colour shots from past Centre Rambles.

More soonish!  Flickr set, including images above, here.

For the photo dorks:  fuji neo pan 1600, yashica electro gsn 35, red filter.

“You know why else New Mexico is cool? The Shins are from here.
4:11 AM Apr 30th from TwitterBerry

Good morning! Feeding kids and getting ready for school. Luke has the math portion of the TAKS test today.
1:57 PM Apr 28th from TwitterBerry

I remember coming to Moriarty, NM in 1989 and trying to break Mike McCarthy’s junior 25k time trial record. Mom and I road tripped it here.
3:51 AM Apr 29th from TwitterBerry”

So, as you can see it’s mostly drivel, just like every one elses “tweets” that no one reads. But I did want to RT (re-tweet) the pics he posted yesterday of some Shepard Fairey painted bikes that he’s going to be riding in the Tour of Italy.

i finished my roll of film in my 1935 agfa plenax.  while i do dishes tonite i will develop it, see what comes out.

(note, it was full of light leaks from the bellows)

i spent friday wandering baltimore, where i used to live, these slums, this white trash lower section of town, which was really blue collar when i was living there, but now of course my old house has been transformed into some sort of mini-shit mansion, with ornamental grasses where there used to be concrete, cracked and stained.  a brick walkway, a deck on the roof, but peeling paint on the trim.  its quite an effect.  it looks out on the train tracks.  which are maybe 25 from the front door.  so a train really did practice parking there, and it was less noisy/shaking than this wind, which is just tearing thru the town, making trashcans disgorge thier contents like drunks in an alley and spin thru the streets like new years revelers the wrong side of sober.

but back to baltimore.  these back alleys i used to travel, on foot, with camera, 8 years ago, ages ago, the alleys are maybe 2 feet wide, covered in trash, backyards butting up with chainlink fences and worn out tired toothless wooden fence slats with huge dogs so mean they dont even bark restrained by the concept of the fence but clearly not its actual structural properties.  backyards piled high with random cast offs from a plastic consumer society, broken childrens slides, rusted grills, broken bikes, disassembled mopeds, kites, rolls of astroturf, broken lawn ornaments.  its rich in texture and decay.  i grew up in dusty antique shops and going to yard sales and stealing from junkyards with my dad, and this is just an extension, instead of buying or borrowing i just take photographs of these backyards with my vintage camera.

the alleys twist for miles, you basically just emerge to cross a street, and are back in this warren of undulating passageways, forgotten and neglected and disused except by stray dogs and bums, who both use it for the same purpose, scat strewn over the refuse and broken concrete.  i round a corner and suprize a bum pissing on a brick wall, the urine running around his foot, deep yellow.  around the next corner i look around futively and do the same.  3 cups of coffee…

the air is clear and clouds are scattered, the wind has whipped away the smog like an old lady shooes a cat.   i wind my way back to a lunch counter of the old school, neon sign, abrupt waitresses.  i met an old guy, tom something, with a beret and long fingernails and a faded jean jacket.  before he speaks i peg him: old photographer.  he sees my yashica.  names the model just by seeing the back of it.  i try to keep the conversation short but get pulled in, and soon am in a 20 minute conversation about photography, art, art school, we both went to the same place, albeit 30 years apart…  we parted on good terms, my wallet is .3 grams heavier due to his business card.

a brief car trip north of the city brought me to hamden, a street of shops and foodie places interspersed with antique shops.  i got a hot tip on a vintage camera store, knock and enter and up some dusty steps and casper, 18 years old in 1941, bombing of pearl harbor and a draft notice as an 18th birthday present, stands there with infinite knowledge of movie and still image cameras, definately almost blind with cracked yellow fingernails and a worn red cardigan over a red plaid shirt, he holds my(starmers actually) rolleicord from 1950 and without even looking down knows what lens it has, what its aperture is…  we talk about the war, about how to dispose of vintage film (which turns into nitrate, powdered dust, explosive on contact with air, so he would take excess/cut movie footage and dump it into the river at midnight), how 35mm was invented, tube amplifiers, white people in advertising, and wood paneling.

i buy a 7 dollar vintage dark room timer from him.  it works beautifully and has a much nicer alarm ring than my soulless digital timer..beep beep beep beepppp… which makes you feel like you are dying in a hospital everytime you change the chemicals.

The Happy Yum Yum Ride will start at 5 East 7th street, where you will indulge in coffee, tea, hot chocolate, peppermint schnapps, whiskey on the rocks, (AC/DC?) cocaine…we’re gunna roll outta here, like pedal to the metal, at like…. 9.30…that’s AM, slacker.  Um we’re gunna ride some, a little bit, go up some hills (not really.  Ed)  We’re gunna pass a cow maybe, probally a cow in a barn, cause it’s cold.  Maybe you need to wear your booties, maybe you don’t have any booties.  There is a secret stop.  We’re gunna eat like italians with the walkersvillians, we’re gunna eat like the walkersvillians like the italians with the walkersvillians.  Sorry.  (huh? Ed)  Uhm.  Then we’re gunna come back and that’s two yums. Yay!

Details: no dirt (mel said, and i quote: there will be a cough of dirt), sub 30 miles.  There is a spoke card that Mel handcrafted with sharpies.  You will get one.  She will sign it for 3 dollars.  Bring: something. (tasty. Ed)  For example: peppermint patties.  When?  Oh you want real details!  Well, there are some days availible: here they are.  Jan 25, Jan 18, um, Feb 1st.  Who is down?  When is who down?  Comment it up.

THIS IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR THE TINY ISLAND RIDE.  This is a different event.  The Tiny Island Joint is gunna roll later, but not much later.  Feb some time.

mmmm black sausage: