from the mind of a tinker

click to create an expanding circle, click to create a second before the first gets too big. press the anykey to undo a placement

I’ve tried this a couple times before, but I haven’t done it seriously before.
I am learning the Processing programming language. I’ve got a copy of Learning Processing, by Daniel Shiffman (ITP faculty), and I’ve made my first dynamic java applet.

Though these tasks, I will survive being underemployed.

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If you read this blog as a reflection of my status in life, one might believe that I’d dropped off the face of the earth. Such is not the case, however. I’ve been busy as always. A frantic August led to a frantic September which resolved into something all together different. It’s the middle of November, Thanksgiving is around the corner, Christmas is a month past that. The bike season has passed. I’m working less hours at the bike shop, which leaves more time for other things. Right now most of my time is taken up in a rebellion of torpidity. I’ve taken up a couple new projects. My girlfriend Taylor’s brother is a coder for a startup media blogging service called Jux. On this service I’ve begun a photo blog documenting my life for a year in a series of daily Self-Portraits. I’ve added it to the sidebar on this site, and it’s located here.

I built an enormous rack for my new commuter bike I scratched together for a few bucks just for the fun of it. It’s an early 80′s Bridgestone MB-1 that got dropped off at the shop as a donation. The rack ended up being a monstrous affair with a 12×19″ platform and some sharp curly-cues. The first utilitarian project that I did solely in my shop. It still hasn’t been finished, or painted, but it’s now on my daily rider so it’s very hard to take it off and take care of the finishing part of it. I’ve also been making pens, I just finished my second, and it is something that a serious amount of fun. There is a great accomplishment to taking raw materials and making something not only polished and shiny, but also well balanced supremely functional.  In my case, I start with a hunk of burly wood, a stainless steel tube, and miscellaneous bits of raw aluminum, and the end product is a utensil that is a piece of art second.

I have a new project kicking around in my head after this seasons cider pressing. A pedal powered press. I have the means, do I have the motivation?

It’s been a busy summer for me. Lots of playing outside, lots of working. There was a month and a half where I didn’t even open the door to my shop just because all my time was already allotted. I’m finally starting to spend a little more time with the lathe and torch. I’ve been working on a couple non-bicycle related project lately.

1. A belt buckle:

A friend of mine gave me a couple small chunks of a mystery burl-wood, which is quite beautiful. Dark red with interesting grain. I tried my hand at inlaying it. The buckle is made out of a piece of sheet metal for the body of it, Fender Stays for the hook and bar to hold the belt, Bicycle Spokes for the mountains, and the ring in the stylized sun is part of a campy cassette lockring. It’s all silver soldered together, as the parts are stainless, and then heated with Hydrogen Peroxide to give it a brownish patina and finished with heated linseed oil.

2. A pen

After seeing this posting about CW&T design studio’s Pen Type A, I was curious about these Hi-Tec C pens, and got a couple and a couple cartridges from jetpens.com (the only US distributor I could find online), and made myself a holder.

The grip is that same wood I used on the belt buckle, I might be kind of in love with it. The body is part of a Velo-Orange rack, 3/8″ stainless steel tube. I turned a small threaded fitting to match the threads on the cap of a different pen I had and bored it out to fit the point of the cartridge. I turned out very well, it has a nice heft to it, and the pen unit itself lives up to the hype, it writes very well. I just need to figure out how to make a cap for it now.

The new pair of lights. The larger one has the driver circuit inside, the smaller is a slave.

So I finally started making something useful on my lathe. Making a bunch of bits of aluminum that stick together is great, but there is limited utility in useless bits of practice junk. I’m making housings to fit two asymmetric lenses I got from SuperNova a while back to replace my current headlight setup on my bike. Over the my trip up to Vancouver Island last month one of the Led’s died, and it’s causing the hub to vibrate much more than it should, which means there is something somewhere that isn’t right. It still works, kind of, but it isn’t a positive thing.

So, new light. Single unit w/ single mode switch. No electronics in steer tube/switch on top cap. Neat idea, but too many wires and having a toggle on the top cap doesn’t actually work that well. It gets switched on and off accidentally, and having the switch that accessible isn’t necessary. You need to switch the light on/off maybe once a day, and usually…I just leave it on.

This new system is a separated pair, a master/slave configuration. One light on each side of the wheel in the classic Schmidt E6 Duo style. The taillight is going to be a separate entity, which is a departure for me. On all of the other light systems I’ve made the taillight is part of the headlight circuit, one unit. I’m changing this so I can run a single wire to the taillight. AC power, not DC. That, and another feeling that I can’t put into words….hmm…

I found this post recently on the candlepower forums with a slightly modified version of pilom.com’s circuit 6, splitting the tuning cap’s to save on space. Having 4 smaller ones instead of 2 large ones. It’s a great idea I hadn’t thought of and does save a lot of space.

I’m using Cree XPG’s that SuperNova shipped me with the lenses. I think it’s the R5 bin of emitters, so 1500mA max.

Havn’t gotten it all wired up yet, I need to do some modifications to my rack and the current light mounting system. Drill some holes for wire routing and shorten the current light-arm and add another one on the other side of the tire. Now pictures.

All the parts lined up. From left to right: Front section of house, O-ring, Lens, LED, Backing plate/heat sink, Spacer/driver housing/Driver, Switch, Back portion of Housing

All the pieces from a different angle.

Driver slips inside of a pvc sleeve, which acts as an insulator and a spacer to pre-load to the lens/LED stack.

Lenses from Supernova, LED's are XPG's, mounting/heatsink backing plates are cut from a salvaged handicapped parking sign. The lens orients the LED with the three legs and holds it the correct distance from the lens to get the focal length correct.

How it all fits together.

The pre-load spacers.

I’m going off the grid for a while for a bike tour.

I’ll be leaving voice messages on my tumblr blog here:

http://kinasmith.tumblr.com/

Got some work done this weekend. I’m taking a trip coming up here in the beginning of April that will last a month and a half or so. Corey needed a couple little chain-stay mount taillights for some rando frames he’s building, so I took care of those. These are ebay housing’s, I’m just doing the ol’ gut replacement, putting in the LED’s. I’ve done a couple of these style of lights (look back a few posts to Andy’s lights), but I got a bag of 4 off ebay a while ago which have aluminum bodies that are a little larger. This created some issues, as the lens was just a hair larger than the 20mm led star boards that I use. I turned down a little spacer out of pvc (non-conductive) to slip inside and hold all the electronics snugly. I’ve got to say, having a lathe makes some projects so much easier.

Another project this weekend was re-building the driver for the light system on the bike that I’m taking on this aforementioned trip. I’d been struggling for a while with a few kinks having to do with storing these electronics inside of the Steer Tube of the fork, for one, where do you put the switch? Singer made some bicycles with a rotary switch on the top of the stem. Tempting, a lot of work, but slick. Previously I’d had a bmx type expanding star nut with a hollow bolt for running the front brake through the steerer to enable bar-spins. I poked the wires for the switch out of that hole, and then electrical taped the toggle to the side of my stem. Less than elegant. I recently got an expanding headset spacer type pre-loader, doing away with any need for a star nut. I can’t use a star nut because the bottom of the fork is semi-closed with a plate for facilitate fender mounting, and I need some way to get the guts in. So I’d taken the switch off, and just soldered the wires together, doing away with it entirely. It was January, when was I ever NOT going to need a headlight? Over the weekend I punched a hole in the top cap (press in, o-ring thing) to fit a switch (center isolating SPDT, it’s important later). I did away with the high/low selection and just left it on low. Low is bright enough.

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Yesterday was glorious sunny cold day, and I spent all of it in the shop. Granted, it had lots of windows, which was nice. Winter in Olympia has it’s challenges, and the grayness of it is one of them. We revel whenever the sun peaks through. I started on the project of building detachable low-riders for my Kogswell that fit onto my current convertible porteur/rando type rack. When this is done it will be one crazy shape-shifting piece of design.

Things overall went off without a hitch. I started it off by tacking pieces on, building it up piece be piece. The first piece had to be the vertical that connected the parent rack with dropout. Then the horizontal cross-piece where the rack attaches, then the bag support/lower portion. That was a fun portion because I got to make a hack-job tube bender out of a piece of plywood. From there, it was just a couple fiddly supports and viola.

Pictures below

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I got the light system installed on Callie’s bicycle last week. Very pleased with how it all came together, especially the taillight. For next time I need to make the electronics compartment larger to I can use larger smoothing capacitors, it flickers more at low speeds that I would like.

I’ve posted a couple cryptic bits of media without explanation showing of this strange box covered in buttons and blinking lights. I would like to remedy that. That box is called a monome. It is an alternative human/computer interfacing device.

This video does a good job of explaining exactly what it is, what it is for, and the underlying basics of how it works.

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