35mm film

    Felt the urge to shoot some film a few weeks ago, finally got around to getting them developed.  I went to CVS and picked out some Kodak 400 speed color negative film, the only choice they had, and took a Pentaz P3n out into the woods, the Meshomaisic State Forest to be specific.  The lens on the camera is a short fixed lens and I just went around and took pictures of random objects that I saw.  The woods are far to dreary looking this time of the year for any landscape shots.  While I was at it, I figured I'd develop on of many rolls of film that I had shot some time ago, several years probably.  The one I randomly selected had a few images of an old and long since abandoned factory out in the woods at an undisclosed location.  I think they came out sorta cool.  Brooks brand film, forget the speed, and I think these may have been shot with a Topcon Unirex.

Just for fun.

 

 

 

 

The other set of shots.

 

Some snow

 Last Friday morning, we were surprised with a nice dusting of snow, here in north eastern central-ish Connecticut.  I decided to take the scenic route to school and I took a few rolling shots.

Of course is all melted pretty much as soon as the sun came up, but it turned out to be a beautiful day and as it would turn out, the snow was just a taste of what was to come.

 

 As anyone on the East Coast already knows, Saturday brought a surprising snow storm, laying down over a foot in some places.  I had to shovel about 7" off my car on Sunday morning.  I didn't take any photographs of the carnage, but carnage it was.  It was an incredibly heavy snow, even on Saturday the branches on trees were hanging quite low, and by the time Sunday rolled around there were power lines down everywhere.

Here's a couple shots from early Saturday afternoon.

  Hopefully, and I say hopefully as an overwhelmingly small portion of the population around here, that this is a precursor to another snowy winter.  Realistically, an extreme event like this will turn out to be an outlier, and can't really be a means of predicting the winter to come.  I did some research though, and NOAA is predicting another moderate La Nina year (like last year) which results in cooler than normal temperatures in the north central states, and a wet cell near the Great Lakes which often translates to snow storms in the Northeast.  La Nina may also mean slightly higher than normal temperatures and lower than normal precipitation in the Southeast states, which I'm hoping means favorable conditions for my Appalachian Trail thru-hike in the late winter and early spring of 2012.  As far as snow in the Northeast goes though, the bigger factor is the Arctic Oscillation, which is less predictable, and can bring large snow storms.

 This storm, for me, has just been a big teaser.  I'm already dreaming about gliding through the fluffy white stuff on my skis.  Perhaps sometime, relatively soon, the focus of this blog will detract from the bicycle trend that it's been on.  The thought of starting another, bicycle-centric blog and naming it "Ride the Gamut", has crossed my mind.  For now, let's enjoy the rest of the fall.

Newbaum's

Somewhat recently, I've become a huge fan of cotton bar tape.  The look, the feel, the smell, the price.  There's nothing not to like.  It's been used for years on vintage bike's and French brand's have long since been available, but in limited colors.  It's also on the thin side and is often way to short to wrap a full size set of bars without going to extremes to minimize overlap.  It's good stuff and I've used it for several projects. 

Sometime early this year I stumbled across Newbaum's on Riv's site.  Newbaum's is a newish company that produces high quality cotton handlebar tape, of all things!  Made right here in the USA to boot, you can check them out here.  This stuff is thick, super nice cotton, it comes in a staggering variety of colors, and it's long enough to handle wide bars or if you like to wrap the cotton over cork tape or something like that.  it's nice and cheap so you can change colors often, or wear out one color nicely.  I decided to order a few rolls to re-wrap the Nitto Noodles on my Trek.  Classy stuff, I wish there were more uses for cotton tape, because this stuff is that nice.  Broom handles, steering wheels?  Hockey sticks definitely.

So rather than tear off the old stuff (also Newbaum's), I decided to wrap right over it.  I liked the idea of thickening the diameter of the bars a little bit, especially with the beefy Tektro/Cane Creek brake levers.  After much deliberation, I decided to go with medium blue.

I finished it off on the ends with twine, which I think looks swell.  It's a classy touch, much more appealing to my eye than the standard electrical tape.  I also decided not to shellac the tape, which is common practice.  I had done so to the layer of tape under this one, and while the look, feel and weather-proofness was nice, the bare cotton just feels so nice.  We'll have to see if I regret this decision down the road.  I suppose I could always shellac them later on.

Cotton bar tape, good stuff.

360 view

 Stumbled across this neat 360 degree view of this guys really messy shop. I thought it was pretty cool.

 Click on it for full screen, it's way better, and if you click on the 360 cities logo in the top right corner you can see more 360 shots.


George from Parts Unknown in Toronto

Here's a cool one from the Vrsic Pass in Slovenia.


Vršič (1737m) in Slovenia

One out, two in.

I took the Trek out a while ago as sort of a last ride before I convert it back to the original parts.  I hit a couple of my favorite dirt roads and headed over the the Depot Campus, which is always pretty spooky, and curious.

It houses the Center for Clean Energy Engineering, Human Resources, a couple other curiously named cottages of unknown function, and Uconn's mutated step-child in the attic, the Ballard Institute of Puppetry.  Yes, form what I've been told, you can in fact be a puppetry major.  A solid plan B for anyone.

 Mostly what is interesting about the Depot Campus is a collection of super old looking and long since abandoned buildings.  Stone and brick buildings, overgrown and covered with ivy, riddled with broken windows and the like, dot still mowed and somewhat maintained lawns.  I found this blog post with some interesting information on the history and current status of the Depot Campus.

  Shortly after the final ride, I started away at replacing all the what I felt were more practical parts on the bike, with the original components.  Off went the 700c wheels and 32mm tires, compact double crankset, tall Nitto stem and bars, making way for all the original goodies, which basically consisted of nice, mid-range alloy Japanese components.  The original catalog from '82 can be seen here.

  I think it cleaned up really well, all I need is the white Trek water bottle.  The only unoriginal components are the brake lever hoods, tires, chain cotton bar-tape and of course tubes, cables etc.  It rides great like this too.  The reason for the leap back in time is because I'm passing it on to another vintage Trek fan in Florida.  It hurts to have to see it go, but that's how it goes.  If I had it my way, I'd pretty much never sell any bikes and just accumulate them, but that's simply not logical.  After watching Rivendell's fabulous bike packing video, I got to work and turned this..

Into this..

 

  Of course this bike, having been my primary rider, couldn't go unreplaced.  

 
  A couple of weeks ago, this big 'ol box was waiting on my doorstep courtesty of Rob at Ocean Air Cycles.  Naturally, I couldn't wait to dive in, utility knife in hand.

 

  The more observant of you will notice that there are not one, but two frame in that box.  That's the old law of n + 1.  For however many bikes you have n, you need one more.  Realistically though, I got a super deal on these frames, and they will effectively replace that 613 and allow me to make some money off the beautiful, largely original example that it is.  To keep this from being long winded, I'll build the 311 (the blue one) with the majority of the parts that were on the 613, and the 630 (the gray one that looks similar to the 613) will be a winter project of sorts.  You can't see it, but the frame is slightly tweaked and I'll have to build a fork for it.  It is a crash victim.  I build the 311 sort of quick and dirty.  Still waiting on shifters, so it's sort of a single speed now.

 

  So one out, and two in.  If you haven't checked out these early Trek frames you really ought to.  Super versatile and the 24" versions are a really great fit for me.  High quality, American made, investment cast lugged, silver brazed, lightweight steel bicycle frames.  How can you go wrong.

Bike Lights

  While I don't often ride my bicycle after dark, I think it's pretty useful to have a bike that's outfitted with lights.  This is especially beneficial if you commute on a bike.  Last year when I started riding to school a lot, I would occasionally find myself leaving my studies early so I could ride home before it got dark, or I would just ride home in the dark.  At that point I had a small single LED tail light, just so I was visible to cars.  Much of my commute at that time was light by streetlights, so being seen by approaching cars was really the only lighting I needed, though there were a few particularly dark nights where I'd be riding down one of the unlit stretches of road thinking, "gee I sure hope I don't hit something."  Occasionally I would remember to bring a headlamp to school, which worked quite well.

  After I decided to build the Trek as my do-it-all bike, I felt inclined one day to go get some lights I could permanently mount.  My original idea as to buy a high quality flashlight, like a Surefire or Fenix or something, and make up a mount for it, so I could have a good bike light as well as a really nice flashlight.  I briefly looked into that, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of super high tech flashlight information out there.  There's entire forums (like this one here) dedicated to this stuff, and the degree to which theses guys analyze flashlights is far beyond my capacity.

  So I went to EMS and bought myself what looked to be the best combo they had, a Princeton Tech Push headlight, and a Planet Bike "Blinky 7" taillight.  The Princeton tech was by far the best looking headlight they had, and from my minimal understanding of flashlight technology, seemed to be pretty decent too.  It takes three AAA batteries, pumps out 100 lumens (which I deducted was adequate for my somewhat limited night riding) and it has an advertised burn time of 63 hours, which seems crazy.  Here's the link to the Princeton Tec site.

  I decided to mount it on the fork, rather than the handlebars for a cleaner look, and it seemed to me to be more effective at illuminating the road when mounted lower on the bike.  It comes with a handlebar clamp with a slot/tab mechanism with sort of a quick release.  I took apart the mount, and attached the mounting slot to the right fork blade with a p-clamp that I had kicking around my toolbox.  It's high enough so that I can easily reach it from the saddle, and it mounted up pretty sturdily. As it's mounted now, the light is on it's side, compared the the way it should be mounted, but so far I don't see any issues.

      This light has gotten a lot of pretty lousy reviews regarding construction and durability, but I haven't had any problems so far.  I've been on a couple rides since mounting it, most of which involved dirt roads and being stuffed into the back of a station wagon, and the mount seems to be holding up fine.  Perhaps there's a benefit to mounting it sideways..

  Anyways, for the price I think it works great, so long as it holds up.  It's real bright for my needs, and it's got these neat windows along the sides that blink red just for additional visibility, a feature which can also be turned off to save battery life.  As far as modes go, it's got a bright, a less bright, and strobe, which I don't see myself using too often.  The way it's mounted casts a shadow of the tire, but it's tolerable, and the whole wheel is lit up so it looks pretty cool when it's spinning.  Mounting it on the left side may have been more effective, but I though I'd rather have the right side of the road more illuminated than the left.  As soon as I get myself a front rack, I'll mount it there.

 

  Taillights are a bit easier, and I chose the Planet Bike "Blinky 7" because I was fairly certain I'd read about it on several bike commuting blogs, forums of the like.  It's got a total of 7 red LEDs all pointed in different directions, and they all blink wildly.  It's quite effective and I'm wishing I had taken some night shots.  I might do that later just for fun.  My Rivendell Brand V seat bag has a nifty little strap to clip the light onto rather than fool with mounting on the seat-post or stay or something.  The bag is great by the way, maybe one of these days I'll do a little review on that, and I'd really like to get the accompanying handlebar bag.

 

Motobecane Super Mirage

 Perusing the local Craigslist a week or so ago, I stumbled across and older Motobecane 10-speed.  Comparing the low quality photo of the bike with various catalog scans available online, I determined it was a Super Mirage, a lower end, but still very decent quality bike.  It appeared to be my size and it was listed for a garage sale price, exactly what I like to see.  I contacted the seller immediately and I was on my way to pick it up.

As found.

 The catalog scan, 1978

It's a pretty sweet bike, 2040 tubing, nothing special but decent, nice high-flange hubs with alloy Weinnman rims, and upgraded derailleurs (although the original Suntour units would have been fine with me), and very decent paint.  After a good cleaning, a quick tune-up, new tires, levers a bar tape, it's looking like a new bike.  I even found some nice new red cable housing to go on it when I replaced the cables.

And the final product.

 I've ridden it to school the past couple of days, and I must say it's a real sweet bike, my first french bike in fact.  It's not the lightest thing I've ever ridden, but it handles great and there's a ton of room for tires and fenders.  It also shifts super smooth thanks to that nice new 105 rear derailleur and a low mileage Suntour Winner 13-32 freewheel.  This one will probably have to go to the market, but another one, ideally a Grand Touring or a Grand Jubilee which from my understanding have the same geometry but better tubes, is definitely on my short list of bikes to own.

A Few Trip Photos

  Well Hadlai and I have long since been back from our cross-country journey, and no one has even seen any pictures.  As you may imagine there are hundreds to sort through so what we did was quickly look through and selected a few that were really striking, either subject or photography-wise, and uploaded them as a teaser of sorts.  Just a taste.  What I intend to do, is eventually put together post including photo's and a full description of our stays at the various stops we made across the West.  I managed to keep a journal the majority of the time, so there's some pretty solid written accounts.  We'll see how far we get with that.

For the time being though, here's a few.  Check Flickr for the rest of 'em.

Dusk at Badlands

Campsite at Yosemite

Sonoma Coast, California

Some American Iron, Crescent City, CA

Roosevelt Elk, Prarie Creek State Park, CA

The Mighty Coast Redwood

Afternoon thunderclouds over Sunshine Peak, San Juans, Colorado

Squirrel, Crater Lake

Bunson's Peak, Yellowstone

Some old dead tree, Craters of the Moon

Some grassy river basin, Yellowstone