Recce trip prequel

 

Old lightweight tailbox

Corflute about 4 years old and showing much......

dirt and signs of wear.

Stripped down plywood seat frame

Some new stickers!

Plywood frame before refurb.

Initial coreflute construction was....

moved inside when it got dark and rainy. This is creasing the coreflute so that it bends only at fold lines.

Off we go!

 

Hi

For a while I have been trying to improve the general image of my bikes, and that has included overhauling several tailboxes. Over the same time, I have been finalising a home made, front wheel drive, moving bottom bracket bike. The bike has been going well with a heavy, load carrying tailbox, and I wanted to swap to the faster lighter version which is on Thingiverse.   I was initially slow in overhauling the lightweight tailbox.

But once I had overcome a fear of the very big Bunnings near us and bought replacement coreflute, I fairly quickly made the bottom part of the tailbox back, and cleaned up and revarnished the timber. Then for a few weeks it sat there, until I booked up a trip to Coleraine for ongoing organisation of this years OzHPV challenge (woohoo it has its own webpage! ) With a few days to go, I decided to do the trip by train and bike but wanted to have fitted aero wheels and the faster, refurbed tailbox before the ride. The changes would add a few kph to the speed and subtract a few kg from the weight. 

I only had a day and an evening (the Tuesday after Easter) to fit the new tailbox corflute lower, and make and fit a new corflute upper and back, as well as pack for a 3 day bike trip. I hadn't bike toured for a while, so had to hunt around for the spare tubes and things I needed. To finish off the tailbox, I installed a water bottle mount (ok, its part of a 2l milk bottle which holds another 2l milk bottle, made a catch for the lid, and installed timber reinforcement at the top of the seat frame.  Eventually I got to bed at 1 am, and was up at 6am the next day to catch an 8:15am train to Ararat, one of the nearest stations to Coleraine but still about 140k from Coleraine.

In the morning I made 4 rounds of sandwiches which stood me in good stead, ate my usual muesli breakfast and rode in to Southern Cross Station. There was plenty of time to catch the train and I was off to Ararat and Coleraine. 

Tailbox interior with water bottle holder, spare tubes, pump, light and....

new reinforcing timber at top of seat frame

Boot lid catch - quite proud of this!

Bike on the road

Last of my Wooden Recumbent Frames

In its 2017 Heyday

Unique steerer assembly

After the.....

Initial rescue from outside

This sticker came from my time as an engineer at an electric motor manufacturer

Graham with the lock.

Aged timber frame

 

Sorting frame kit pieces.

About 10 years ago I completed an industrial design master's degree at Monash University. As part of this, I made several plywood wooden leaning trikes. And after my master's I wasn't satisfied with the seat design and made one more version for a timber design competition and Fringe Furniture 31.  I kept that trike intact but it was stored outside. About a year ago I tried to rescue it but I found the glue in the frame had let go and the frame was extremely wobbly. I cleaned it up, took it inside and there it stayed until a few months ago I got motivated to move it on. 

My friend Graham (he is a carpenter who works on wooden boats) agreed to take it, and before delivering it to him, I packaged up the bike and a complete NC routed kit for making a timber frame for this style of bike. 

A few days ago, M and I delivered the bike and Graham was very pleased. It turns out we just did a swap, Graham makes timber locks from scrap timber and he gave me that in exchange for the bike. 

I'll stay in touch with Graham and will hopefully see a version of this wooden bike on the road again. The learning from these frames helped me design better timber tailboxes which I still design and use. I doubt that I'll ever make another one of these, but you can, as the entire design is on Thingiverse here.

Regards Steve Nurse 

The Peugeot Project

Mornington Orange has a larger frame and 

a working front derailleur whose basic design goes back to 1962 (book pic is from "The Dancing Chain")

Geelong pink and messy spare bedroom

Additional "checkered" brake cable outer protects the chain side chainstay and matches some of the stickers. As detailed in this exhaustive blog entry, chainstay protection is a thing, it is sometimes done with stickers but why not Do It With Already Made Stuff  and do a better job in the process.

Textacolur on the brakes makes the lettering stand out on Geelong Pink.

Geelong Blue .....

is still a bit ragged around the edges. 

There seems to be endless discussions of Peugeot bikes here and in other places, including mention of SF10's and Australian made frames. Having not read anything to the contrary, I think SF10 stands for "Stands For 10 Gears".

 

Hi

Although most of my bike riding is on recumbents, I occasionally develop a soft spot for road bikes and folders, and am now in the middle (muddle?) of one such craze, this time for Peugeot Mixte bikes. I am actively involved in recumbent design, building and promotion but consider myself a tourist or "interested outsider" in mainstream bike design. That's not such a horrible thing - a lot of other people could be so involved in bicycles that they don't see the forest for the trees.

 I've documented fixing mixtes and their load carrying before and have thought for a while that the older Peugeot mixtes looked good, but only really dove in when I responded to a Geelong Marketplace ad for 4 Peugeots (some in bits) . And a week or so later (today) I bought Mornington Orange.  

I'm happy with the purchases, 3 of the 5 bikes I've built are rideable and my next small project will be to add load carrying to Geelong Pink. One frame (Geelong Red) was in a really bad state and I sent it to Mottainai Cycles for a respray. That will take a few months, meanwhile there's quite a bit of other stuff to get on with. The last frame has all the associated bits renewed but completely separated from the frame. It is a Peugeot folder.

Meanwhile, just to check I'm on track for the load carrying on Geelong pink, I took some photos of bicycle load carrying and the general scene at a local festival. They are shown below. There is a "sitting on Milkcrates" photo there, refer to my last post . 

I plan to go on blogging about the Peugeots! 

Update March 27: I dug out my 1973 book which has the Peugeot Mixte frame sizes in it, and have compared them to the 2 mixte frame sizes I have. Also, after watching a youtube video have bought a makeshift cotter pin removal tool. Maybe I should just have bought the right thing .Will report more later anyway. Some pics below.