I was going to write a roundup tonight, while I’m here here on the deck with a whisky and a beer and Miles Davis and my netbook, but even though it’s after midnight it’s still too hot for thinking as well as for sleeping.
But I do want to tell you how much I love my Wald folding grocery baskets. Even if my boxes of, say, more fans are too big to fit inside, they make a nice big platform to strap things to.
Filed under: BikesHalf a 15mm combination wrench with a tire lever ground into the cut end, fits in an Altoids tin tool kit. I left my old one sitting on a Jersey barrier on Saturday night, after getting off the GO bus at Union Station and finding a nail in my tire. I hope a bike messenger finds it.
It’s short and doesn’t get a whole lot of torque, but I just use my foot to break a stubborn nut loose or tighten it down.
While mine would appear to lack the mandatory bottle opener found on commercial tools, it’s a lot easier to open a beer with a metal tire lever than it is to change a tube with a bottle opener, and the beer can wait until I get home anyway. Everything was done with a rotary tool and a cutoff wheel. Fabrication pics follow. (Read on …)
Filed under: Make stuffI havent had a good chance to try it out on the bike yet (it rained during the week, and I spent a quiet weekend at home with an ice pack and a bottle of methocarbamol) but here are some initial impressions of the Colorado 300, currently on sale at MEC.
While I was waiting for it to arrive I read a lot of mixed reviews, and thought maybe I should exchange it for a 60CX I’d initially wanted. But the latest firmware seems to address a lot of the issues and adds a few neat features. It’s got a nice big high resolution screen, which is good since I’ll primarily use it as a map on the bike. Reviews say it’s a bit dark due to the high pixel density and I guess it is, but barely darker than my brother’s Edge 705 bike computer. It’s a bit hard to see with sunglasses on, but legible. I keep wanting to poke it to scroll the map – a touchscreen is a little easier to move around, but I wonder how rugged even a rugged touchscreen is, and the Colorado’s wheel is probably easier to use with mittens on.
Some people find the bike mount is slippery and maybe it is on a smooth handlebar (in which case, wrap a bit of rubber around it first), but it’s solid enough on my rough finish stem, even riding over roots and rocks. I really like that it has a stem mount option too, because that’s the best place for it and it leaves the bars free to mount other things:
One really neat feature is custom maps – you can georeference an aerial photo, trail map, or whatever else you can turn into a jpeg by making it an image overlay in Google Earth, and save it to your GPS which sees it as a map layer.
I even went and found a geocache:
Which is slower — Canada Post delivering my on-sale Garmin Colorado 300 plus bike mount (costs less than a Legend HCx at MEC right now) or Rogers Cable throttling my bittorrent of the Ibycus free Canadian topo map pack?
Update: Canada Post is slower.
Filed under: Other Stuff
The cherry trees in High Park (a gift to Toronto from Tokyo in the 1950s) have started blooming in force. It was supposed to rain this weekend, which can knock all the petals off, so I rode out there on Friday afternoon to have a look. A lot of other people seemed to have the same idea.
Also, here’s a free bonus goose. High Park geese are smaller and friendlier than the geese in my end of town.
BSNYC Product Review: Walmart’s Mongoose Cachet “Fixed-Speed” Bicycle.
Apparently “Fixed speed” means single speed as suspected, but it comes with a fixed/free flip-flop hub. Sounds good, but also as anticipated the quality (or at least the quality control) appears to suck, bite, and blow all at the same time.
He also reviews the Surly Big Dummy (carries things, hard to wrangle indoors).
Filed under: Bikes
As often as not we get a last bit of snow at the beginning of April, but this year it’s been almost summery, so on Friday I rode up to the electricity farm way out in the suburbs. I figured the waterfront and downtown would have been nightmarishly crowded on a nice Eostre weekend — and I was right since apparently there were fistfights to get on the Toronto Island ferry, which is still on its winter schedule — plus it’s still cool near the lake, because the water’s still ice cold.
It’s a pretty poor excuse for a ride, but it’s usually quiet when the beach and downtown are crowded and it goes through some interesting industrial areas along the power line right of way.
It’s a pretty poor excuse for a photo, too, because spring sucks for taking pictures. Everything looks like it’s spent 3 months under a dirty snowbank even if it hasn’t. Here’s one of the bike path in greener times: (Read on …)
Filed under: RidesWhile I think Grant Peterson from Rivendell (and Bridgestone before that) is an important foil to the high tech side of cycling, and he’s done a lot to bring back practical road bikes after the skinny-tired dark ages of the 1990s (when there was very little in the happy middle ground between touring and racing frames), I’ve learned to take his technical pronouncements with the same grain of salt I take Bicycling magazine and I usually find happiness somewhere between them. But this article on the drawbacks of carbon as a frame material (specifically its catastrophic failure mode) are pretty close to my thoughts on the matter – at least with regards to the outsourced, made-for-a-price-point carbon I can afford. I weigh 180 lbs when I’m in shape so I’ll stick with steel forks and aluminum bars, thanks. Also see the Busted Carbon blog.
Filed under: Bikes
Well, they call it a Fixed-Speed Bike so it’s probably just a freewheelin’ one speed, but I still hope this foreshadows the imminent implosion of the fixie fad. Partly because after evangelizing fixed gears since 1998 I’m almost embarassed to be seen riding one now, but mostly because it’ll mean lots of nice cheap track hubs flooding the market. I like the irony of naming it the “cachet”. I also like how it has all the hipster kids who ruined fixed gears up in arms about how it’s ruined fixed gears.
I jest, but I think it’s actually good that they’re offering a simple, cheap bike that has little to go wrong with it, instead of the $200 full suspension “mountain-style” bikes that department stores usually foist on the unsuspecting. update: apparently it’s still junk.
40 lbs shipped, though… I really hope it comes with 15 pounds of packaging.
Filed under: BikesThis time of year the weather can be pretty much anything, and I’ve learned not to get my hopes up too much about nice days in March… but sometimes you can tell when the weather’s really turned. For the past 3 weeks I’ve been seeing definite signs that it’s really spring.
One sure sign is that the idiotic whimsical concept bikes are hatching after spending the winter as larvae deep underground below the frost line (thanks BSNYC). Now you know where potholes come from.
