Treehouse!

We have been busy building a treehouse.  Well, it's more like a 10' wide deck 8' off the ground between two trees.  The kids are loving it.

Daniel and I slept out in the treehouse over the weekend.  The cows were right below and were full of noises throughout the night.  Don't they sleep?  I kept hearing them getting up/down, eating, and pooping.  It was fun.  I slept good the next night.  :-)

 Testing the slide.

Ready for fun.

Daniel's Toolbox Project

Daniel went down the shop to work on a toolbox with Grampy.  Good thing he received a new "construction set" complete with suspenders for Christmas.

Ready to work.

 Daniel drove about two dozen nails, never hitting

his fingers or Grampy's.  He also painted his toolbox.

The completed project!  A better tool box for

his new tools than the plastic bag

previously in use.

Christmas Wheel Truing

Here's a project in the works, a wheel truing stand for Chris.  I found and purchased Roger Musson's wheelbuilding ebook (http://www.wheelpro.co.uk/) a while back for the build it yourself wheel truing stand plans as well as wheel building info.  It's a worthwhile book and the plans for the stand are good, but I had to add my own tweaks to the stand.

The lateral truing gage is shown in this picture.

I added a solid wood edge band to the base plate, curly maple on this one, and used a single knob in a slot for width adjustment.  A pin on the underside of each upright engages the slot to keep the uprights in alignment as they are slid side to side.  I also routed a pocket for the "jaws" to better attach and locate them.

The radial truing gage is shown in this picture.

Hopefully Chris gets some use out of this stand.  I will building a couple more in the near future.

Organized Pegboard

A long overdue pegboard organization in the basement:

Just added the shelf in the middle.

First project of the year

Happy New Year!  I had hoped for a New Years Day ride but the weather was not cooperative.  Although warm it rained the entire day.  Instead I spent some time in the basement on a long over due project... bike storage.

I screwed bike hooks to a 2x4 and hung it from the

floor joists with some perforated angle iron pieces. 

 The bikes are hung by the furnace with care,

in hopes that a rider would soon be there.

The hooks are 16" on center.  I wouldn't go any closer

else the bikes may interfere with each other.  As it is,

they must be hung in alternating directions.

Homemade Bike Work Stand

Perhaps our first mountain bike ride at Findlay State Park was unusually sloppy.  Still, the follow-up experience of cleaning the bikes in the front yard made me realize bike washing is no longer a basement event.  In the past, with road bikes, I always carried the bikes to the basement for cleaning and storage.  A road bike washing consisted of clamping the bike into my homemade, of course, work stand and using a spray bottle of water and old cloth diaper to wipe down the bike.  This method is obviously not going to work with muddy, knobby tired bikes.

My second homemade work stand.

After a couple times washing the mountain bike in the front yard I decided an outdoor work stand would be helpful.  It's not practical to carry the one up from the basement, as it's base consists of a 40 pound piece of steel tread plate.  What would I use for the base on an outdoor stand?  And, what style stand should I build?  I think I came up with a practical solution.

The finished work stand in action.

For the base of the stand I decided to use something solid: the Earth, what a novel idea.  I figured I'll always wash the bikes in the same spot in the front yard, near the driveway and garden hose.  Instead of moving around a heavy base or trying to make some sort of tripod base, I buried a 30" pipe into the ground.  The work stand will drop into this pipe.

The base pipe is sunk into the ground.

The workstand I built about five years ago, for use in the basement, has a clamp that holds a bike by its seat post or seat tube.  It's solid and works well, but I decided to try a different style workstand for use in the front yard, one that holds the bike with a fork lock and bottom bracket cradle.  Yes, this requires the front wheel to be removed, but I figure it will be easier to clean the front wheel and the forks of a mucked up mountain bike with the front wheel removed.

Some dumpster diving provided pipe and a tee connector, quite a bit of elbow grease was needed to clean up these pieces.  (Otherwise, a couple pieces of black iron pipe and a threaded tee from Lowes would've worked just as well.)  Next I needed attachment blocks that would clamp on the pipe and also mate to the bike.  Ideally these would be made out of aluminum, and I still may do that someday, but for now I made blocks out of some hard maple and coated them in polyurethane.  I'm sure they will hold up well enough.

Rear block that cradles the bottom bracket shell.

After a quick test to determine the final length for the horizontal pipe, I cut this pipe to length and installed the blocks.  A skewer is needed for the front block and a small piece of mouse pad material is added to the back block for gripping and padding the bike's bottom bracket.  Both blocks have a 1/4" bolt for clamping and thumb knobs for pinching the blocks securely onto the pipe.  To prevent the whole stand from rotating in the buried pipe, a small bolt is threaded into the upright pipe and a corresponding notch made in the buried pipe to capture the bolt head.

Front block with fork lock.

The stand works well.  It's nice to clean a bike standing up instead of bent over, and it's certainly easier to lubricate the chain or fiddle with derailleurs with the bike up on the stand.  After use, the stand is pulled from the pipe in the ground and hung on the garage wall for storage.  I found a plastic cap to put over the buried pipe, to keep it from filling with water or junk.  I'll call it a successful project!

Daniel tested and approved.

Truck Construction

In a little more than a week Ryan and I will be loading the truck up with bikes and camping gear to drive down to Boone, NC for five days of cycling and camping.  Last week I began work on a shelf and storage system for the back of the truck to accomodate all our stuff.  This is where the purchase of the truck cap last fall comes to fruition (LINK).

The goal is to have the bikes travel safely and securely inside the truck bed, with the protection of the truck cap.  It would be easier to simply use my hitch mounted bike rack, but I like the idea of having the bikes inside the vehicle.  The challenge becomes fitting two bikes and all our camping gear in the back end of the truck.  For several months I've been planning a shelf and storage system for this trip.  Today it gets installed.

First, I attached a cleat to the driver's side bed rail with three bolts, and I attached a cleat across the front, floor of the bed with some threaded rod I bent into j-bolts.  These cleats will allow a shelf unit to be secured to the truck.  The shelf unit consists of two shelves between inner and outer sides.  The outer side is notched to fit over the wheel well and snug to the side of the bed.  I skeletonized the sides to save a little bit of weight and provide access to items stored forward on the shelves.

The lowest "shelf" is the bed fo the truck.  The heavy popup canopy, tent, and water jugs will be stored down here.  The first shelf will hold three plastic storage tubs end to end.  These container are for food, cooking equipment, and general camp stuff.  The top shelf will hold sleeping pads, sleeping bags, and perahaps another storage tub.

To the right of the shelf unit two cots will stand up with a 5' plastic table.  These are secured to the shelf unit with a ratchet strap.

The remaining 25", on the passenger side of the bed, will contain the bikes.  At this point it became a puzzle to figure out how to store two bikes in such a narrow space.  I built stands to hold the front wheels independantly of the bikes and I already had some front fork locks built for a previous trip.  In the basement I laid these out on a piece of plywood and attempted to come up with a configuration where both bikes and wheels would fit in the alotted space.  It took a couple tries but I ended up with a workable setup.

The plywood piece was cut to size and I added a bracket to lock the plywood in place once it's slid into the truck.  It turns out there's enough room between the tailgate and end of the plywood for a cooler.

There are more tweaks to be added before the trip but most of the work is done.  We will store our clothes and cycling gear in the extended cab of the truck.  I might try to whip up a shelf for the extended cab, this would be better than just piling stuff back there.

I'm sure there will be more pictures to come later of the system in action.

Now I need to do a brake job to get rid of my warped rotors and an oil change before our trip.  I've been living with a pulsing brake pedal on the short trips around home but I'm sure this would get old on the longer trip.

New Year, New Shelves

Happy New Year!  The first project of the new year was to install a set of shelves in the basement.  Yesterday I built four 16" x 8' long shelves in garage and the job of the morning was to install them.  As the Christmas tree was coming down, the shelves were going up.

Daniel lending a hand.

I also have made two sets of 4' long shelves to install elsewhere in the basement.  The whole goal here is to organize the out of control mess in preparation for a dedicated cycling gear and work area.  A new work bench, wall hung cabinets, lighting... I have big plans, bigger plans than I have time.  But, gotta keep getting a little done at the time.  More to come on this project in the future.