Cobram “I don’t do Hills”

Bit of seat repair before the start.

Early Morning start from Cobram Willows Caravan Park

Close to start time

Simon and Richard

Simon

Phil, John and hay bales

Simon

Possibly a bit of photoshopping would help this! Its me.

Digging ditches for irrigation pipes

Simon and Silo in Nathalia

Youanmite Silo

Zoomed in, tractor advertising a farm near Youanmite, and

Zoomed out.

Silo in Tungamah.

Hi

A few weeks ago I was part of an online conversation about this Audax ride: a few of the Ozhpv committee were meeting in Cobram, making a weekend of it around Rodney Cruz’s Audax rides on the Saturday.  I was happily roped in and had the added incentive of being able to hand over OzHpv’s gazebo to Dome Deli at the same time.  Dome and a few other New South Wales crew will host a stall at The Sydney Classic Bike Show in Sydney in late March and he needed it for the event, I was happy to have it not occupying space at the top of our cupboard at home. Simon had booked a cabin in the caravan park, so it was all go.

Despite starting a few small projects to make the trike go faster including a front fairing, nothing new was ready, so the trike was the same as the one I took on Buckley’s Ride except for a bit of seat repair. Prep included downloading the Ride with GPS Map for the course into my Garmin 520 bike GPS unit and tweaking my spares and repairs kit, and making sure I had a rainjacket and waterbottle on board.

I arrived in Cobram at 6pm on the Friday, chatted and had dinner with Simon and Richard and went to bed.  Dome came in a bit later, he is a very keen cyclist and had driven 8 hours from Sydney to Cobram for the event. 

We were up early and left our cabin at 6:40 for the 7am start.  Rodney gave the usual ride introductions (“Apologies in advance for the headwind”), but really most of us were just happy to be riding on a cool (20 degree) summer day when most of the last month in Cobram had been 35 degrees plus.  So off we go!

Soon I fell in with Simon behind everybody else, and we slogged our way into a headwind to Nathalia where we saw a few other riders and stopped for coffee.  We had a tailwind (Whew) out of Nathalia, but about 12k into this stretch, Simon slowed down, he had felt his heartrate rising and his heartrate monitor confirmed his ticker had been going fast for a while.  He decided to bail it back to Cobram making his day 100k instead of 200, and that left me to plug on through the rest of the course by myself.  

And I managed this! The course was a little bit rugged with 2 rain squalls, 1 puncture and 40k of headwinds but this is par for the course for Audax rides really, and there were no navigation difficulties, it wasn’t too hot or too cold, I managed not to get too hungry or thirsty, most of the passing traffic was friendly, and it didn’t get dark while I was riding, which are all standard Audax occurrences.

Anyway, I got in about 6:30pm, which was about 2 hours after Dome and Richard and 5 hours after Simon who made it in safe. Rodney was organizing a dinner and as I came in to the caravan park everyone else was heading off to it.  I was a bit tired and passed.  Anyway, I was very happy with the ride.  Next morning there was a brief Ozhpv committee meeting and after that Dome did a 100k ride with a few other Audaxers, Richard rode home to Tungemah, and Simon & I drove home.

See you soon, Steve Nurse

Hardshell Seat Mount

First construction from my 3d printed hardshell bikeseat mounting parts. Woohoo, exciting!

Ice trike with hardshell seat

Performer bike with hardshell seat

My leaning trike with aluminium rhs frame and load carrying timber combined tailbox and seat.

Timber mounting for tailbox alongside 3d printed parts.

The design includes a compression plate (orange on black parts, black in orange parts) which sits below the frame and stops the parts bending.  The orange parts are my trial home 3d printed parts and the black parts are the real deal, carbon fibre reinforced onyx plastic from Emona.

Roughly the whole assembly.

Top frame mount.

Another view.

Hi

Today I have been working on a lightweight hardshell seat mount for my leaning recumbent trike.  I have perfectly good timber seats for the trike but these can be a bit heavy and unaerodynamic for long distance hilly rides. As well I have a hardshell seat in the shed I had only used briefly, so I will be making use of this.

Several months ago I attended a Solidworks, and Matt from Emona was one of the exhibitors.  His companies printer seemed capable of making some parts I'd been thinking about so I worked on some parts and eventually ordered and received them.

Photos above show the initial results, I had a diversion along the way and made a robot sculpture.  There is still a bit of work to do but I will post updates. Next post here

Regards

Steve Nurse

Mamachari of the Month

Hi

Today I volunteered at Wecycle and worked with Mick, Mike and James to fix some bikes, sell some others and give some away.  For the second week in a row I got to work on an old clunker, a Hallmark Gadabout.  I have owned a few Hallmark Jetset bikes and took one apart to make a leaning trike kit for cruzbike.

So what other daggy names for bikes did Hallmark come up with? Well I don't really know but here is a set of suggestions.

Hallmark Jetset
Hallmark Gadabout
Hallmark Parasol
Hallmark Trend-Machine
Hallmark Shopabout
Hallmark Bon-Vivante

That's enough for now.  Despite its unfortunate name, its still quite a nice bike.

Regards

Steve Nurse

PS, Found that the Little Bikes Blog has a liking of Vintage Hallmarks.   The Gadabout has 24 x 1 3/8 tyres and I think its a bit rarer than the Jetset.

New Byk

Hi

As discussed in previous posts starting here, last year I successfully converted parts of a Byk Bike into a recumbent and have since ridden a flat Audax 200k ride on the resulting trike, going once around Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay in one day.  With this working so well, I had been keeping my eyes peeled for more Byks at reasonable prices, and a few days ago I found one, bid for it on ebay, won the auction, and yesterday picked it up from North Melbourne.

Having conquered Port Phillip Bay, surely I could conquer a trip to North Melbourne to pick up a bike!   Yes car would have been a option but I would have to put up with that pesky traffic.

Anyway, a few pics from the pickup are shown above.  I had shuffled the bike around a bit by the time I headed back to Clifton Hill, but basically this was the load carrying setup.  Took bike tracks home as well, the load was a bit outrageous and precarious to be taking on the road.

Regards

Steve nurse

Buckley's Ride 2019

A small plastic box....

bolted on at the front for storage.

Front light mount off and.....

lights recharging.

Coreflute marked out for .....

new water bottle mount.

Start of Buckley's ride.

On the ferry, Peter Donnan centre.

Lunch on the ferry.

Checking in at Albert Park, a swan and some German tourists fairly oblivious.

Ahh! Home and with a cup of tea.

Buckley's Ride 2019

Hi

This ride is usually my first Audax ride for the year and I prepareded for it fairly carefully, mostly by fixing up bike accessories: I replaced a destroyed drink bottle mount, charged batteries on lights, pumped up tyres, finessed the wheel discs at the back and reattached a storage box at the front.  No real mechanical tuning was needed, everything was fine.  Actual training was limited to the OzHpv rally rides,5 or 6 40k round trip commutes to work, some 10k rides from Spout Creek to Airey's Inlet, and one 40ker, Aireys Inlet to Lorne and return.

So anyway, the night before the ride I was in bed early and had everything I was going to take or wear laid out on the couchor in the bike already.  A half hour trundle to Albert Park, and very soon we are off under instructions from ride director Sarah.

On the edge of the city, one bunch of 10 including me got through a traffic light, leaving 20 or so behind.  I stuck with the front bunch till Williamstown, when they got away from me, never to be seen again.

Fortunately it didn't take long for a strong rider from the behind bunch to come throughand overtake me, and I stayed with him till just after Weribbee when he turned off into a service station for supplies.  Not long after that, the "behind bunch" started coming through, and I pulled in with them or small groups of them all the way to Lara where I stopped for refuelling myself.  Through Geelong I was with Heather, Henry and another rider, but had run out of puff a bit by soon after Geelong, and they rode off into the distance.  Another group passed me, and then I started noticing the time and "distance to Queenscliffe" signs, and worked out that I could make it to Queenscliffe for the 12 O'clock Ferry, but only if I rode a bit harder!  Which I did, arriving about 12:04, just as the ferry was about to leave.  Whew!

The ferry ride passed quickly, eating lunch, using the bathroom, taking a few pics and chatting to a middle aged lady who was on the ferry to visit Sorrento for a lunch party.

By the time I'd been to the bathroom and topped up my water in Sorrento, most of the other 12-o'clock-ferry -Audaxers had pushed on, and I was able to pass one or 2 before Dromana where I rested for a while before the hilly Dromana to Frankston section.  It was a bit slow and steady through the hills but I got through it ok, and rested again in Frankston.  After that I did quite well on the flat and familiar bits, Frankston to St. Kilda and got in to Albert Park with some energy left at 6pm. 

I was home by 7pm and had earlier ordered a cup of tea from my wife Christine on one of my report-in phone calls. The cup I'd bought in Dromana was in 2 cardboard cups which were very good insulators and the tea stayed too hot for me in the time I had to drink it. I reported this to Christine and she said "God it must have been #%^house" as I am known for my very low standard of tea making and tea acceptance!

After that it was a shower, pyjamas and bed. 

 Overall, I think I did well for the amount of training I did.  I'll stalk the Audax calendar a bit to see what my next ride will be.

Regards

Steve Nurse

New Bike Seat Part 4

Side panel and some tools.

Ewan took this one.

...... and this one,

and I took this one.

Now it has a wooden lid, woohoo!

Friends Tony and Jen Hazeldine during part of a very quiet New Year's Eve.  Despite looking very relaxed, Tony isn't even drinking, partaking of a cup of tea instead.  

Hi

The last few days I have been at Airey's Inlet, catching up on my son Ewan and his friends, and a few other friends, doing a bit of swimming, sleeping and surfing, but also completing a bike seat and blogging, thinking about the year just passed and looking forward to the new one.

The bike seat is coming along well, but it needs a bit of work.  Its in its final form but the holes and slots which keep it together would let in water, so I have bogged them up with Plastibond.  Then comes sanding and a few coats of varnish.  Today my son Ewan was wandering around talking to his wife Phoebe's Grandma Paddy on the phone (about just about everything) for about an hour and a half, and I managed to coralle his services as a photographer.

New Bike Seat Part 3

Soaking 2 plywood pieces so....

I can bend them like this.....

and this.......

to make this.

Art Tram

Thumbs Up!

List of things to fix became long enough I needed to write them down.

Hi

I broke up from work a few days ago so have had some time to work on my NC routed seat kit, moving the pre-prepared 2d bits into 3 dimensions.  To do this, I needed to soak some of the timber, and this worked well.  From a previous occasion when I bent timber for the same purpose, I had made a timber bath from corflute, and I resurrected that (a bit dusty!) from the side of the house and it still worked.

So sofar everything is stuck together with cable ties, and I documented 6 different issues with the design. At a couple of points just behind the seat there are some plates glued together and the timber will end up 4 layers thick there, much more than is needed, and I plan to make a 3d printed feature insert for this spot. The slots in the back panel don't line up with other parts, and there are a few other minor things to fix.

But all in all, its good, I'm keen to get my list of revisions back into the cutting cad so new versions will come out better.

Oh, and I rode into the city on Saturday and managed to snap my bike with a Chinese gentleman and a Melbourne Art Tram by Valerie Tang in the background.

Have A Happy & Safe Christmas!

Steve Nurse