Sometimes humans amaze me. Take this bicycle designed to let the blind ride solo. I’ve seen tandem set ups, but this is the first single-rider machine I’ve laid eyes on.
Steve Levine’s Personal Website
BLDGBLOG has an interview of SimCity lead designer Stone Librande. In that interview is this gem and it says a lot about the way our world has become dedicated to storing our stuff. Specifically stuff that is out of scale with human lives. I’ll let the excerpt speak for itself:
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
’nuff said.
Honourable mentions this week. Last night I was walking along College Street in Toronto and noted that the nice weather had brought out a delightful number of night-time cyclists. Unfortunately it has also brought out the louts. Once again I reiterate the phrase “not every basket is a waste basket.”
I know the lock rings well enough to know these two were not abandoned steeds.
…and another.
However, the weather had brought out another rare sight — A Moulton Spaceframe in the wild! I feel a bit like a nature photographer taking photo trap snaps of unsuspecting wild-life.
Copenhagenize Design Co. just released the 2013 list of bicycle friendly cities. Hey Toronto — see who didn’t make the list?
Sounds like a dirty movie gone horribly wrong doesn’t it? In fact, that roughly describes my day. I repacked not one, but TWO bottom brackets today belonging to my English 3-speeds (the recently featured and still largely disassembled Stowaway and my 1969 Superbe). No photos because the operation really didn’t allow me to pause and shoot.
Both bottom brackets conform to the Raleigh standard of requiring 11 1/4-inch ball bearings per side. 22 balls per BB.
The only casualty in the whole affair was a single, solitary cotter-pin. I must now find a suitable replacement. In the meantime, however, I’ve ticked off yet another of my “bicycle maintenance bucket-list” tasks. Only one remains – wheel building. Correction two … I also have yet to work on headsets and steerer tubes with any seriousness.
For now though, two English 3-Speeds have lovely new bearings and are in desperate need of riding.
After scrubbing the frame and applying the primer and base coats I went about applying my vinyl cut-outs sourced from TheLetteringShop on Dufferin here in Toronto. Duncan and Arlene were very helpful in getting what I needed sized correctly and printed. Highly recommend their work.
Anyhow I masked off the bike except the sections I wanted to add the detail stripe and nameplates. Once the masking was finished, I started spraying. Everything seemed to be going well. Unfortunately when I pulled back the masking it became clear that the paint had wicked under the masking. This grated on me. I’d masked carefully – so I thought. At first I thought the paint had soaked into the tape. Nope it had actually gone against the pull of gravity and travelled UP from the point of masking.
I also found that somehow the rear chainstay had a chip in the paint where the original base coat went down. Grrrrr. I decided to mask up the graphics and re-apply the base coat. more wicking. #$%&*!!!
As you can see in the photo, there was wicking going up the fork — but the areas that the decals covered was nice and crispy.
The good and the bad … the Raleigh down-tube text was superb. and then the pain bled around the mask.
Awesome. The one piece that really blew me away was the chainguard.
I gave up. This was never going to be perfect on the first attempt. So I clear coated to preserve my mistakes. Next time I pain a bike decals will be stuck on and not painted. The need for lazer sharp edges precludes my use of spray cans it seems. Oh well. Lesson learned.
Oh the other thing you might have noticed is that the Twenty has a name now. Viginty Prime (Twenty Prime). The classical latin pronounciation is supposedly Wee-gin-tee. Get it? Weeeee!
Hopefully this bike will be as fun to ride as it looks. The next photo series will hopefully be about assembly.
For my next trick I build the wheels — I’m going with some BMX alloys that I had sitting around in the garage.
Was locking up to a bike-ring and someone had become so fed-up with the garbage left in their basket that they just left the basket as an impromptu “waste bin”.
It seems they didn’t like the Tim’s cup as much as I did.
… well stencils. Having applied the primer and base coat I’m getting the stencils cut in the spirit of period-appropriate Raleigh decals for the Twenty and Stowaway series. Without access to original paint work I decided to create an homage with an original colour scheme. I took images from suitable period Twenties and Stowaways and traced out vector images of the desired labels. A screen shot of that work is below.
All that’s left is to send it to the printers.
