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Hot damn, I fixed it already. Went to my friend's machinist shop and borrowed a tap and cut an extra two threads. As the tap went in I felt it clear out a couple burrs I'd clearly missed.

Also, I was trying to make a 68mm spindle fit in a 73mm shell, and that just won't work; no, not if it was ever so. It's all better now; thanks!

As a boatbuilder (I make large wooden structures with lots of complex curves), I'm going to say; that's a massive undertaking.
Yes. Yes it is.

OTOH, the world might just need a pedal-powered Oughtred Sooty tern. You never can tell.

How about a recumbent using monocoque sections of like 3mm birch aircraft plywood in box beams, all epoxied and 'glassed together? Or how about a set of handlebars? That'd be a good chance to practise your steam-bending skills, and they'd certainly look very nice. Pick your stock carefully, attending to grain orientation and runout thereof, though.

Oh... the hell with it. Why not just build a boat?

So I got this sweet deal on a nice old Raleigh, the Super Course with the Nervex lugs, and blah blah blah insert impressive pedigree here. Anyway, I am having just one hell of a time finding a BB spindle that will work. Wait, back up: I am also having one hell of a time getting the fixed cup seated all the way-- it's still about 3mm out from the BB shell. Lots of solvent to clean the threads, even used a dental pick to clear out any googe in the thread valleys, and a thin layer of Phil grease to smoove things out-- all have had no effect on this. The threads are clean, no burrs or mangled threads... Is this normal? I've never really putzed around with fixed cups before. Do I just need to throw caution to the wind and let my biceps channel Chuck Norris for this?

Now, even accounting for this, my other issue is that all the spindles I am finding have their cone sections too close together; I need to screw the left-hand cup WAY into the BB shell. I mean, it is actually recessed into the shell before the bearings seat; obviously, this makes getting the lockring on somewhat problematic.

Now, Sheldon Brown says that the Super Course used British Standard threading in the BB, and given that I can run the cup so far in, I've got to believe that at least the threads are in agreement and that's kosher. But what's up with the spindle? Do I need a different spindle that has more distance between the cones? Or is there some oddball Nottinghamshire cup that accounts for this and moves the bearings toward the races?

What gives? Am I gonna shoot my eye out or something?

bump
Fixed link. You'll be able to forgive the photos of the nattiest of the riders preening onstage, I trust; there was a bottle of Glenmorangie at stake (EACH!!) for the dapperest gent and fetching-est lady. Certainly free spiritous liquors are understandably preen-worthy.

Photos to be found here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=61071373&o=all&op=1&view=all&subj=103417459694829&aid=-1&id=13912893&fbid=10100200898499730
Facebook style, if you don't have an account then I don't believe you'll be able to view pics, more's the pity.

Good time had by all. Thank you all so much for the inspiration and the kulcha!

P.S: The very handsome man in photo #57 is Yours Truly.

BLACK HAWK DOWN BLACK HAWK DOWN
Jeebus don't do that to me any more, OK? We'm be old an frail my son

A cheap alternative is a set of North Road ("sit up and beg") bars, installed inverted. I use these on my commuter bike and they give a very comfortable ride. I installed a steep MTB stem and it works out beautifully.

Even The Grinch thinks that bike's ugly.

DAMN THAT'S HOT

It sounds like Bobby Dids is gagging for it. Lookin' fer a good time, Thailor? ;)

Is it a productive use of my time? Certainly. I am, in addition to a Merchant Marine deckie, an owner of a small business, developing and marketing specialty tools for the riverine tugboat industry. My fiancee is a welder-in-training, and we are always looking for ways to integrate our skills and expand the business. In the Northern Midwest of the USA, oak and ash are a drug on the market; I can buy quartersawn white oak for about a dollar US per square foot, green, from my cousin the independent sawyer. Ash runs about 20% less. So for me to try this idea out in my fairly well-equipped shop doesn't cost me anything but my time, and I'm out there half the time anyway. If nothing else, it would show me what doesn't work, and helps me hone my steambending, jigmaking, and glueup/lamination skills. And I can always burn my mistakes for heat.

Drop bars? Sure, why not? Actually making them wouldn't be that hard. Setting up the jigs for the bends, that's the tough part. That would create lots of little plywood scraps, I think, while I figured out how to do it.

As far as strength goes, consider this. Remember the Olympics? Remember the parallel and uneven parallel bars? Wood laminate. Consider further that wood fails progressively; carbon explosively. If a stack of laminates starts to break, each ply fails before the one beneath it fails. Plenty of warning, and how much weight do you carry on your hands and wrists around the city anyhow? How often do your elbows and shoulders start to ache under the strain? Hardly at all, that's how often.

Nothing, nothing can take as many load cycles as wood can. Not ally, not steel, certainly not CF. Never crystallizes, never rusts, never corrodes galvanically.

Wood is an excellent material for some engineering applications. To get a better strength-to-weight ratio, one can't do better than Sitka Spruce or Douglas Fir (I believe you lot call it Oregon Pine) with a layer of fibreglass over it until you start getting into the true exotics like CF. So yes, weight is an issue (though I can't help but think wood bars would really help absorb the high-frequency vibration and might even flex a little over the big bumps) but not as much as you'd think. The Mosquito bomber was built of plywood and solid lams; I don't anticipate pulling 6g with a ton and a half load at 400 mph with my handlebars. The Fairey Swordsman race boats were plywood, and they won the Round Britain race several times.

Nothing on a bicycle turns fast or takes heavy loads, by aerospace or maritime or industrial standards. Wood handlebars would actually have a pretty easy life. As far as crashworthiness, what profit it a man if his handlebars hold but break his wrists?

Ugly as a war wound, for one. For two, they cost the eyes out of your head. For three, unless you're a Cat 1 racer, they're for poseurs. For four, they're ugly as a war wound.

Lastly, you'll never get any sort of warm-n-fuzzy feeling knowing you're controlling something you power with your self with something you made yourself. Something doesn't have to boil an egg or dig a hole in order to be useful.

Guess I'm probably right then ,maybe ;)
Maybe, maybe not. At least empirical evidence points to even a soft wood like Sitka Spruce being strong enough: look at the sweeps used by oarsmen. The neck of the grip, where it meets the loom, isn't much if any bigger than an inch (25.4mm) through.

I think a layup of 3 mm veneers, particularly if sourced from live-edged stock and resawn to follow the grain as closely as possible, avoiding runout, with a single layer of 6-ounce unidirectional E- Glass through the middle, and glued with a good epoxy (West marine, System Three, Silvertip, Raka) would be overkill for strength. You'd want to finish it with a good spar varnish to avoid UV degredation of the epoxy, but you'd want to do that anyway. Why paint something nice like that?

I've thought a lot about this, but haven't been able to act on it since my vacuum clamp sucked epoxy last year. I believe that a person should be able to do this in two steps:

First, make a clamping jig, with the bends and sweeps and rises exaggerated by about 10% to allow for springback. Saw your veneers out as described above (n.b.: the thinner your veneers, the greater the waste to the blade. Veneers as thick as the blade will give 50% of your stock going away as sawdust; but the more plies in your glueup, the greater the strength. Choose your own compromise.) and then pop them into a steambox. Pull then after 20 minutes or so, stack them in the jig, and tighten the clamps. Walk away for four or five days to let them dry in their new postion.

Second, release the clamps, get all stickified with the glue, and clamp back up. A vacuum press is the tool of choice here, you don't want to starve an epoxy joint with too much clamping pressure; good, even contact is all that's required and necessary.

When the glue's dry, about a day, sand and finish with spar varnish. Ther'es an opportunity here for aero shapes and fancy face veneers of exotic woods for extra bling.

I want to try this with spruce inner veneers, quartered white oak face veneers, and brass fitments to go with the steel Specialized Allez frame I gun-blued last week. I think it would knock the eyes right outta yer head.

I have Been informed that Northern Midwest women don't much appreciate what I said about them in the first post.

Everyone reading this probably already knows, but if you don't it's a good idea to pull the rim strip and check the inside of the rim for sharp spoke ends poking out of the nipples.

Heh. I said, "Nipples."

A vacuum press would be a welcome addition to any tool shop. I know that some of the marine supply houses sell prepreg CF in appropriate weaves and weights, though I'm pretty sure that stuff is heat-activated.

you've actually done a great job throughout these threads at phrasing like a brit. gotta say.
Thanks! :) I post on a forum where a good number of the members are from your side of the pond, and it kind of rubs off.

ollie - you're right. some of these kids could use a dose of htfu
We all do.
anybody who used to complain about being cold at east drinks and wanted to go inside should NOT go on this ride!

anybody with some sterling to burn who wants to come over to philly and road trip to the midwest....... i could be persuaded.... this race sounds ridiculous.
Oh, it is. It will be a cold, snowy winter, I believe-- today the high temp is forecast to be several degrees below freezing and me ol' gran used to claim that 'When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen"-- and early rumours (Hey, where did that 'u' come from?!) are that the race will NOT be made any easier to reflect this.

It's still a couple months away. Plenty of time to go simply Maaaaaaaaaad and need a change of scene; Ibiza's played out. Minorca is for berks, and haven't you always wondered what the frozen prairie looks like?

Especially if you're having to ask a bunch of retards in London for advice...
You lot of windowlickers are different to my lot of windowlickers. Just as retarded, but the spelling's different.

Yes, but not common. Look, I'm not saying it has to make perfect sense. I'm just trying to get a certain "feel" going here. I may relent and accede to 12 speeds, if the rest of the bike is in good form. I'm just trying to not have people show up on a 5-year-old Surly LHT and call it "vintage."

OOooh, inch-sized tires only! No 700C allowed!

C'mon, c'mon, make with the jibber-jabber for checkpoint tasks! Do all my hard work for me!

Doesn't Campy use an oddball BCD? And don't you think 175mm arms are a bit long for fixie?

Just askin'.

Having very good luck with the Panaracer T-serv on my SS. Also the Kenda Kwik, though those are heavier than a lead wedding ring.

I'm turning over the idea of organising a vintage-only alleycat race for the springtime, here in Minneapolis. Thus far, this is what I've come up with:

• 1977 cut-off date. Nothing made after that.
  
• All frames must be steel (Easily checked with a magnet)
  
• Geared bicyles welcome, but limited to internally geared hubs, or derailleurs and 10 speeds. Not 12, not 14. 10 speeds.
  
• No index shifting, friction only.
  
• SS/fixed bikes must have cottered or one-piece cranks.
  
• Points awarded/time slashed for mechanical oddities. Anyone with a Positron derailleur gets a minute off their overall time, anyone using the Integer freewheeling crankset gets a minute off. Like that.
  
• No dual-pivot sidepull brakes. They bug me.
  
  
  

I'm having trouble coming up with ideas for checkpoint tasks. I don't want to make them annoying, but they should be challenging. Any and all ideas welcomed, though if it's fookin stoopid, it will of course be mocked.

Thanks,
Blight

Or flywheel if not

My raving-lunatic best friend and I have discussed this at some lenght. What we've come up with is an idea for a health club that is nothing more than a series of stationary bicycles linked to shafts that are geared to spin a large flywheel. Efficiency actually works out to about 85%, every time you run power through a geartrain you los a little... but 85% isn't all that bad. Anyway, have a coin box on each bicycle. Feed it a small amount to start using it. Every 5 minutes, one of the following things will occur:

1) If you're not pedalling hard enough (say, < 100 watts), you need to put in more money.
2) If you're pedalling just hard enough to keep up (say, 100-125 watts), you get to continue free of charge
3) If you're really working hard, say 125 watts and up, the machine starts dropping coins back out at you.

Given two dozen pedalling stations, a fairly heavy flywheel (something on the order of a couple ton) running in good bearings and turning a generator head, you could fairly reasonably expect to be able to keep the lights on most of the time. Low-voltage LEDs would be the way to go, of course.

When I build my home, sometime in the next three years, I don't want to use anything higher than 12V DC in my home. Heavens, here in the States, there's an entire industry for mobile appliances: I can buy refrigerators and microwave ovens that will run on 12V DC, and recent advances in LED technology make using them for home lighting a viable alternative. They require smaller wiring, too, reducing cost that way as well. Not to mention that the risk of an electrical fire gets vanishingly small. I'm pretty firmly committed to making all my own electricity, and so when I bought the land on which I wish to build, I was delighted to find a waterfall on it! It isn't much for flow, perhaps 25 gallons/minute, but it's over an 80-foot drop. I know I can power a turbine with that, perhaps in two stages (two 40-foot drops).

Now all I have to do is win the lottery!

Regional dialectical variation of two nations separated by a common language. I actually thought of using the Eastern Atlantic spelling but thought I'd come off as a bit of a toff for so doing.

Thanks for the book recommendation, and I really shouldn't be making light of the British soldiery. My God, whole villages decimated or worse of their young men in the trenches in Belgium (Wilfred Owen was right) and then what you lot went through in first Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, and the Battle of the Atlantic-- it would bring tears to a glass eye.

SNNFF damned allergies....

One thing: For anyone who wishes to come play in the snow with me and my friends, and brings their own bike, give some thought to mudguards. It's always a toss-up toward having them, with the extra weight accumulating as snow packs in then starts rubbing on the tires... It's very tiring.

Also, the wind can be something otherworldly here. At zero degrees F (Hey! It's zero, no temperature out there at all!), in a 12-mph wind, wind chill makes it feel like about 17 below. It's very common to have to use ski goggles that your tears not freeze in your sideburns.

I'm really not doing a very good job of selling this thing, am I? Hmmm...