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Jennifer's wood-fired outdoor bathtub

2012-01-17T23:04:00.000-08:00

Last summer I got to visit my buddy, Jennifer, at her home in Homer, Alaska. Recently she has (mostly) completed a couple of additions to her spread: One is a sauna. The other is her outdoor bathtub. Both are awesome and merit sharing with the world.

Here is her sauna:

It's not technically finished yet insofar as it hasn't been christened formally as a sauna. Instead she has used it as a guest cabin for visitors and WOOFERS (willing workers on organic farmers).

Here is the bathtub:

The bathtub is pretty rudimentary but it does the job, providing a blissful hot soak outside in nature. As you can see, the tub sits on the ground somewhat recessed into an inclined slope. A fire box has been built out of mud under the tub. It is closed by an old door from a cast iron wood stove that was salvaged (along with the tub) from the Homer dump. You can see the chimney out the back.

It takes a few hours but it's fairly easy to warm up a bath in the summer time. Water temperature is regulated by a combination of fire stoking and adding cold from the hose.

When the bathing is complete the water is recycled into her garden by syphoning it with another hose.

Here you can see how water can be feed into the garden and green house.

Pokey spokes!!!

2011-07-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

If you go to the back of practically any bike shop you will see a tool that you can't buy. Yet for many bike mechanics it is reached for many times a day. So much so that many consider it to be an indispensable part of a bicycle repair tool collection. This is the pokey tool, also referred to as a pokey spoke. It is made by the mechanic from a spoke from a defunct bicycle wheel. One end of the spoke is ground down to a sharp point. It doesn't seem like much but somehow it gets used all the time. The most well-known use is to pick glass bits out of tires or bits of metal out of brake pads. It's important for opening cable housing ends and it's used to grab small items or clean hard-to-reach places.

These are three pokey tools in their simplest form.

Even though it's in every bike shop you rarely hear about it. This is almost certainly due to the fact that it's not a commercially-produced item. It's just a ground down old spoke made by hand in a bike shop. No one is trying to sell you a pokey tool. Still every mechanic uses one. It's a part of bike-mechanic lore that is passed down from one person to another.

The pokey tool is a virtually free tool, recycled from scrap parts. That's cool. I love this anti-capitalistic aspect so much I decided that it should be further celebrated. I made a big batch of pokey tools to be given away for free at my local non-profit bike shop, the Community Cycling Center. I volunteer here. It was the Cycling Center that taught me bike repair and opened the door to the mysterious inner workings of the business and, from this, the pokey tool. Providing free pokey tools for the shop to give away is my way of saying 'thank you' and my small contribution to further the revolutionary cause of bicycle empowerment.

I started out with a coffee can of pokey spokes. I sat down at the dining room table with the can of spokes and a big set of needle-nose pliers. The plan was to bend the non-pointed end of the spoke into random curly shapes. (This helps provide grip.) Becky observed that you could put plastic beads in the curls. She had a leftover bin of plastic pony beads. This was a great idea since the Community Cycling Center color codes the tools for each of their work stations. I also loved the juicy vibrant colors of the beads. (Oh no! Can it be that I've fallen for bead crafting? Kill me now!) The best part of this was the beads helped the tool be more visible. If it's just a simple spoke with a sharpened end, it's often hard to find mixed in with other tools. The beads eliminated this problem.

The first batch looked something like these.

After I delivered my first batch I was doing some unsanctioned gardening work in the apartment building behind the bike shop. Someone with kids had recently moved out and there were craft and pony beads spilled all over the place at the base of an exterior staircase. I picked these up. In the collection were letter beads. This gave me the idea of making personalized pokey tools for people.

Here are the ones that I made for some of the beautiful staff (and a few volunteers) at the Community Cycling Center.

Here's some other variations.

Do I have a new career on Etsy?

Keno's Sauna

2011-07-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

Alone in the woods stands a solitary sauna, decaying back into the earth. This is the story, as best I know it, of that sauna.

Way back in probably around 1973, my family took a hike up Bear Creek, in Hope, Alaska. Hope--on the Kenai Peninsula about two hours outside of Anchorage--had an Alaskan gold rush that preceded the great Klondike rush by two years in 1896. Before Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Seward existed, thousands rushed to the "cities" of Hope and Sunrise. During this era many of the small creek valleys leading into the Turnagain Arm were explored, prospected and had claims. Bear Creek is a valley that is more or less part of Hope's larger Resurrection Creek valley system. (Bear Creek is not a tributary. It feeds directly into the ocean not too far from the mouth of Resurrection Creek.)

Bear Creek intrigued my parents who had an interest in the history of the area and a taste for the adventure of exploring old mining claims and abandoned cabins. The Sleem map, a well-known map of the region from 1912 showed a number of claims, named mines, marked cabins and mining structures. However by the 1970s much of the area had been largely abandoned, left to become overgrown and forgotten. Wouldn't it be fun to see what was still up there?

The first night of the hike we spent in Keno's cabin. Herman Keno was a Finn. He was one of the old timers who moved to and stuck it out in Hope after the gold rush and eked out a living. During the Nome gold rush he worked primarily as a black smith. Maybe he had some money saved up from Nome, maybe he did odd jobs or maybe he worked a claim and made a modest living out of it? He did have a load mine up Bear Creek. (The Hope and Sunrise Historical Society has a photo of his hard-rock mine going into a hillside.) However he did it, he managed to survive, alone and mostly isolated, in a hand-built log cabin on the lower section of Bear Creek.

To this day, Keno has a dark reputation in the small Hope community. In spite of his independence and craftsman's artistry he was a drunk and sometimes a mean one. Billy Miller, a longtime local who was the source of much of the information in this story, told me of how he saved Keno's life once. He was driving slowly down the Hope Highway in the middle of winter. Sticking up out of snowbank he thought he saw a foot. He backed up to double check. Sure enough, it was a human leg. Billy got out and discovered Keno passed out behind a pile of plowed snow. Keno was purple. He dragged him into to his truck and then back to his house where Keno warmed up and got sober.

Every so often Keno had a habit of going into Anchorage and picking up lady drinking friends or maybe prostitutes to bring back to Hope. It should be remembered that back in the 1970s Anchorage had a rough and wide open side to it. This was particularly the case as the economy went crazy during the pipeline boom. Some of the woman he brought to his cabin were native Alaskan. He had a reputation of spending a few days with a woman and then dumping her out on the Hope road. Back then this was pretty tough business since the Hope road was a single-lane dirt road 14 miles off the main Seward Highway. In the winter it might be a while before it was plowed.

Keno died in the winter of probably 1973. Whatever year it was it was the winter just before the summer we slept in his cabin. After his body was found and people were cleaning up his place, a skull was found somewhere on the premise. I've heard that it was in his cabin and also that it was found on the grounds of his property. A search was conducted but no body was found. One version of the story was that it was a skull of a native woman. Was this a skull of some woman he brought from Anchorage? Maybe he simply found the skull of some old miner? Also around the turn of the century, the Dena'ina Athabaskans camped at the base of Bear Creek not too far down from his cabin. It's possible he found a Dena'ina grave. No one knows for sure, but due to his prior behavior with woman, suspicions remain.

He was old when he died. The winter must have gotten to be too much for him. When my family did our hike up Bear Creek the weather was so rainy the parents elected to sleep in the cabin instead of a tent. We slept in the exterior loft of his cabin. I don't remember much of this night other than it creeped the heck out of me. The cabin was old and filled with a fantastic collection of historic and new junk: tools, mining implements, and ancient opened cans of vegetables. Glass jars containing Keno's piss were stored all around the cabin. He had become either too old or lazy to go outside in the cold for a leak.

One of the other reasons my parents wanted to visit the cabin was that it was slated by the Chugach Forest Service to be removed. This was an era when the forest service had a misguided policy of removing old historic miners' cabins. They considered them to be a nuisance and fire hazard. Probably Forest Service bureaucrats wanted to erase any potential legal gray areas of land use and ownership. Old abandoned cabins could present problems if someone moved into the them, renewed a mining claim or somehow tried to "prove up" on the land. During this era a number of historically-significant cabins were destroyed under this policy.

We spent the night and somehow I survived Keno's ghost. We hiked up the valley. Somewhere not too far up the trail I distinctly remember finding a drinking ladle by a small creek tricking down the hillside, a gesture of hospitality and kindness from Hope's gold-mining past. There was also a nice old log structure, surprisingly almost right on the trail. It was fairly intact still but the roof had recently caved in. We didn't get too far on the hike. Either we ran out of steam, the weather turned bad, or we were hindered by alder growth in the trail. We didn't get far enough up the valley to explore the mining cabins my parents were looking for but it was a fun adventure.

In the early 1980s a small private mining operation reestablished mining claims up this creek drainage. The path was cleared out and mining operations began anew. Today this is an open day hike. There are probably remnants of what we saw and now, with improved access, more can be seen. You can certainly go farther than we did. It would make a great hike and I've seen photos of a lovely high-alpine lake near the top of the valley.

Not long after our stay, Keno's cabin was torn down. It was spared being burned down by the Forest Service. A local Hope resident was allowed to take it apart and remove it. The plan was to rebuild it elsewhere in Hope. Sadly it was taken apart but never put back together. The logs were left somewhere. By now they certainly have rotted into oblivion. This is particularly sad because Keno had a reputation for being a fine rustic craftsman. The cabin had a gambrel (barn-shaped) roof. Integral in the log construction was the second-story loft where we stayed. The loft was carefully framed to interlace with the log outer walls.

The cabin is gone but a few items of Keno's remain in the community. My family salvaged his old beat-up and leaking copper wash tub. The was his hand-made table which is now in the Hope and Sunrise Historical Society Museum, used as staging in the Oscar Grimes School House. Billy Miller, rescued his barrel stove. The stove had been left for trash outside after the cabin was torn down. It was a crude device but it serves as an example of some of this old Finn's great ingenuity and craftsmanship. Barrel stoves are typically made out of a used 55-gallon steel drums. Many of these use kits that come with ready-made cast-iron pieces: a door, legs and a stove pipe mounting flange. As a blacksmith, he had the knowledge and tools to reworked his own from scratch. The most interesting feature is an oven inside the barrel. Also the top had two burners for stove-top cooking. Each burner had a door which could be slipped aside so pots or pans could be heated directly by the fire. Once the cooking was done the door could be closed over the stove to keep smoke out of the cabin.

Here's is a closer detail of the oven. (You can see the hinge and the door latch but the door is missing.)

Here is his table, now at the Hope Museum.

At the site where Keno's cabin was located one structure still remains, but only just barely. This was his sauna. The sauna was built very much like his cabin. It was well-constructed and, mirroring his cabin, it had a gambrel roof. Benches were built high off the ground, about three feet up, to put someone up where the heat was in the room. Close examination shows how they were integrally built into the structure, Lincoln Log-style. This helps demonstrate that this little structure was put together for one purpose: to have a good sweat.

You can see the framing for a bench in this photo:

Opposite the wall, here is the bench on the inside of the sauna shot through an opening in the roof.

I was surprised to see that it had a poured-concrete floor, complete with older-style 8-inch composition vinyl tiles which might have helped shed water. Of course the hand-mixed concrete wasn't very think and the floor is now broken up by intrusion of tree roots. The benches were originally upholstered in red vinyl, giving it a bit of a 60s-era Anchorage massage parlor touch.

Today two towering cotton woods are slowly squeezing the structure together like a vice. The roof has collapsed and the back wall is mostly rotted back to forest humus.

I couldn't make out whether or not there was a stove pipe in this sauna. Judging by the soot on the walls of the interior and lack of any obvious stovepipe exit, my best guess is that Keno's sauna was an old-school smoke sauna or savusauna as it is called in Finnish. This is where a fire is built in an unvented stove or simply on rocks inside the structure. After the sauna reaches the appropriate temperature, and the fire dies down, the door is opened to air out the room and the sauna-ing begins.

For the cold plunge, Bear Creek is very near. The setting couldn't be more beautiful. Going from this sauna into the creek would have been wonderful. The creek, as you might imagine, is ice cold.

Here's a view from just outside the door of the sauna towards where he would take his cold dip:

It's sad that such a beautiful location is marred the disturbing tales of his behavior. Maybe the sauna provided some consolation and helped him cope with his loneliness?

My new bread-hauling bike

2011-05-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

This is my new bike parked outside the downtown Loaves and Fishes facility.

A short while ago I built up an old Trek 930 Singletrack mountain bike to be my all-purpose urban utility vehicle. This was my second effort at putting together a new bike from scratch from this particular model frame.

I like these bikes. I discovered this model when I found one abandoned as pretty much just a frame outside the trash room of my apartment building. The first one I found, I built up but I ended up selling it because it was too small for me. Still it helped me decide that the Trek 930 was a good frame on which to build a practical urban utility bike.

I found a larger version of this frame on Craigslist in Olympia, Washington. Some friends picked it up for me. It was such a junker, I think they were a little bewildered by my reasoning. I should have taken pictures of this bike in its as-found state. It was really beat to hell. Many of the original parts had been replaced with whatever was available. For example the hand grips were apparently salvaged from an old Magna. A powder coating from Brooker Enterprises and me doing some painting of the lugs spruced it up nicely.

The last few years this model was made Trek used the new standard larger head tube size, 1 1/8 inches. Surly makes a traditional-looking crowned touring fork in this size. This is the fork used for their Long Haul Trucker touring bike. You can buy this fork as a separate part. (I got mine from Universal Cycles.) This fork, mostly is made for 700 wheels but they also make it for 26" bikes. It has extra eyelets for fenders and, most importantly for me, mid-blade eyelets for a touring front rack. I removed the old threaded fork and replaced it with the threadless LHT fork. The plan was to add front pannier rack to carry City Bike bike buckets on both the rear and front of my bike. This way I could carry four bike buckets!

A bike that could carry four buckets would be a great way to haul material, groceries and other items but mostly it would be used as my daily bread hauler. Before I start my commute each morning I pick up the day-old bread from a wonderful bakery around the corner from my house, La Petite Provence. I bring this bread to the downtown Loaves and Fishes where it is redistributed to low-income elderly and disabled folks.

Some days there is no bread. Once in a rare while there are large quantities. Previously, when I had a large load I was forced to take my scooter or a car. Just recently I was able to put my four-bucket bike hauler to the test.

In this photo there's bread in all four buckets. (I'm not just faking it with that bucket in the back left.) The bike worked great though in the future I will put more bread in the rear so that the steering is less wobbly. It wasn't bad but it did change the riding dynamics of the bike.

These days we see a lot of options for bikes as hauling/cargo vehicles. There are: cargo/metrofiet bikes, bike with trailers, and cycle trucks. Personally I like the versatility of my four-bucket-capacity urban/hybrid bike. I can ride it without buckets and not be incumbered by a super-long wheel base or a trailer or the oddball heavier design of a cycle truck. It's just a regular bike. It's still easy to maneuver and lock up. If I need to carry a lot of stuff, I've got a lot of carrying capacity with four buckets. Also I have the versatility to choose how many buckets I need to carry. On most days I simply have two buckets in the back for carrying bread with me into work. Today I used only one bucket.

Niterider mini newt battery pack hack

2011-02-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

I wanted to get this up somewhere as an aid for people who are curious about the inside of the battery pack of Niterider's USB-chargeable bicycle light.

What prompted this was me purchasing the bike light for very cheap at an REI returns sale. I think I paid $20 for the light. The tag on the item said that it had a bad battery. This was correct. I ordered a replacement battery and the light works fine now.

Still I was curious if there was anyway to repair the original battery. Since I had a dead battery pack on my hands I was curious. So I cut open the sealed plastic battery case.

The photos show what I found:

The photo above shows the back side of the circuit board. "S1" designates the on/off switch. If the battery were flipped over on its back you can see where the switch would fit back in place with the clear rubber switch cover of the case.

A close up of the battery. This is a lithium ion battery. It's shaped like a standard AA battery but a little larger. The battery is welded to the circuit board at the positive and negative terminals.

Replacing the battery for this pack would be tricky. The dead battery would have to be unsoldered and some careful quick soldering would be required to attach the new batteries to the terminals. Once in place, the pack would have to be resealed with some sort of plastic glue that would re-weld the cases halves together.

Scooterists gone bad, two scooterists lost to the world of bicycles

2010-08-08T22:39:00.001-07:00

Portland, Oregon is considered by many to be the most bicycle-friendly city in the country. Over the past few years bike ridership blossomed beyond enthusiasts and hipsters to include more mainstream commuters and families. There are now bicycles everywhere.

As a faithful scooterist, it's been a bit tough living here. On one hand it’s extremely exciting seeing the changes taking place. Bicycle shops are opening up all over the city. The city is putting in on-street bicycle parking on many business corridors. Anywhere, and at any given moment, there are bicycles on the streets all around you. On the other hand scooters and motorcycles seem to have been left behind in the city's transportation planning.

I have personal conflict too. I have to admit I’ve been riding my bike more than scooters. After a couple of scary doctor’s check-ups I started biking as a health necessity. Also it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the passion and excitement of being in the midst of a real revolution. I remain a committed scooterist but the excitement in Portland right now is with bicycles. So, as it goes, I suffer pangs of guilt many mornings when I pedal past my scooters on the way to work.

Exploring the world of bicycles, by odd coincidence, I came across a couple interesting stories of two Portland individuals who were pulled away from scooters into the vortex of the local bike fervor. They both took very different paths into the world of bicycle fanaticism. One, Sacha White, is a highly regarded custom bike builder. The other, Mark Veno, has immersed himself into the tall/freak-bike scene, building and hanging out with people who are into custom rat bicycles.

The stories of these two are interesting by themselves but they are also a great opportunity to reflect on the scooter/bike relationship. Maybe there are some insights on how we can keep the passion alive in scootering? Maybe we’ll find some dead ends, but also maybe there are commonalities. Are there bridges between the two interests and communities? Both are, after all, efficient two-wheeled transportation. Both are still vulnerable minorities on roads dominated by cars.

Meet Sacha White, owner of Vanilla Bicycles

Here Sacha White holds forth, sharing his bike building knowledge with a small group of cycling enthusiast who were on a tour of some of Portland's custom bike builders

I first met Sacha White in 1997. Mr. White had moved out to Portland from Colorado where he had been a member of an early club, Fun and Games SC. The club included members who went on to form the Colorado shop franchise, Sportique. Once in Portland Mr. White spent time hanging out with the Twist and Play SC, meeting Tuesday nights downtown at the Shanghai Tunnel. That same year, for Spring Scoot IV, he brought out a drop-dead beautiful green Lambretta GP with “gull wing” side panels. Many of us were dumbstruck by the beauty and crazy level of detail that went into this bike. It was a custom bike that seemed to take Bertone's redesign of the Series 3--one that cleaned and simplified the lines of the scooter--to a new level of purity. (The bike was later featured in issue #2 of Scoot! Quarterly magazine.) Sadly, not long after this we saw less and less of Sacha. We heard that he had become a bike messenger and that he had a new family member on the way.

(photo used courtesy of Jeff Allen)

Flash forward to the present day. I am hanging out on local bicycle web sites such as bikeportland.org. I learn about Portland’s thriving independent custom/hand-made bicycle craft builder community. One builder stands out. This is Vanilla Bicycles. Somewhere I saw a photo of the owner. It took me a while but I eventually made the association between Sacha White the scooterist and Sacha White, the world-renowned bicycle manufacturer. It made sense of course. It was immediately evident that the level of care, artistry and inspired creativity that went into his scooters would go into bicycles.

Today Mr. White is totally consumed with his job. His from-the-ground-up careful thinking that goes into each and every bike is in keeping with his earlier work with scooters. The shop is well known for innovative, often subtle, design ideas that are elegantly integrated into the each bike. As testament to Vanilla Bicycle's world reputation, one of his creations was featured on the cover of a recently-published large beautiful coffee table book, Custom Bicycles, A passionate pursuit.

One wonders in what sort of ways working on scooters helped Mr. White cut his teeth for a career in building bicycles. Did fine Italian design influence his approach to bicycles. Was he attracked to bicycles because they are so less damn frustrating to keep running? Mr. White has agreed to give an interview for us but between a five-year customer waiting list, trade shows and moving his shop, he simply has not had the time. We eagerly look forward to learning more of Mr. White's thoughts on the subject.

Meccanico di Veno, Inside the grimy machinations of an artist mechanic

Mark Veno arrived in Portland sometime around 2002. Mr. Veno like Sacha White began showing up Tuesday nights at the Shanghai Tunnel and also for the Portland scooter scene's regular Friday happy hour gatherings. Mr. Veno's lone ride was a wild redesign of a standard P-series Vespa where the body was totally altered. This scooter, to me, had San Diego written all over it. I could tell that it grew organically out of Mr. Veno being immeresd in the local scene down there. It reminded me of a few bikes and many custom hot rods I saw there during Amerivespa 1999.

After a few years Mr. Veno moved on to other interests. Many of us wondered if he was still in Portland. A few years ago there was an installation of handbuilt bicycles from Oregon on display in the Portland Airport. The display included a wide diversity of bicycles from Sacha White's and other custom bike builders' high end bespoke creations unique production bikes such as Bike Friday's folding bikes and Comotion's tandems. There was also a "tall bike," essentially a double-decker bike. This one had a car steering wheel for handle bars. This bike was dubbed "Reverse Cowgirl" and credited to the Drop Out Bike Club. Elsewhere later I saw that Mark Veno played a big part in the bikes creation.

Around the same time I began seeing posts on local Portland bicycle discussion boards by "SkidMark." The comments bore the distinct likeness to the Mr. Veno I knew: often opinionated, sometimes un-PC and sometimes insightful. I contacted SkidMark to see if he was indeed Mark Veno. It turned he was and, yes, he'd be willing to share some time with us to discuss his artistic life with scooters and now bicycles.

DAVE MCCABE: So let's start with the basics. When did you first start riding scooters. Where were you and where did it go from there?

MARK VENO: 1987. I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts and I bought a Vespa P125X on a whim for $200. I was into air-cooled VWs at the time and the fan-cooled engine and spare tire appealed to me. I didn't know anything about mods or scooterboys at the time. I sold it when I moved to Minneapolis the following year. Not long after that I picked up a fashion magazine called The Face and it had an article titled, Mutant Mods. It was basically about Scooterboys and their crazy Vespa and Lambretta cutdowns and choppers. Now I had seen plenty of Harley, Brit and Japanese choppers but never a scooter chopper. I knew I had to have one again, and I knew I had to cut it down.

I was also very into bicycles and especially BMX, and Southern California was the mecca for BMX, so I moved to San Diego. I had a friend, Rich Hansen, who lived in San Diego and worked for Haro Bikes. He got me in to talk to Bob Haro about doing some drafting for their next year line-up. At the time I was still working as a draftsman, and being a bicycle techno-geek I knew about frame geometry. I drew their new front-suspension MTBs and first 24" BMX cruiser and Linn Kastan prototyped them.

The thing I noticed immediately upon getting there was Vespas and Lambrettas all over the place. I bought a seized up P200e from Fabio Ballarin that was being used as a jig from making expansion chambers for $200. I brought it home and cut off the front fender and discarded the cowls. I poured some Marvel Mystery oil down the spark plug hole and knocked the piston loose with a block of wood and a hammer the next day. A new spark plug and it was running. A cutdown Vespa was born. From there I just kept going with it, getting frames and engines and parts, and making parts, and cutting, and fabricating, and making them go faster. I fell in with the Nightstalker Scooter Club and met Tim Stafford and Jay Tellier, who we all know as TJ Scoots. They taught me everything I know about reed induction conversions, mixing late model engines and suspensions with early frames, even basic bodywork. Any time I wanted welding done I had Tim do it, because he is one of the best TIG welders I've ever seen. I'd do the fabrication and have Tim zap it up. My first reed induction cases were from Tim and it didn't take long for me to build a top-end that was capable of destroying clutches and shifting cruciforms. Then one day it sent the primary cluster through the back of the case, so I did the cases I have today with the RD400 reed enclosure welded on. Both of these engines travelled through several frames. One was an Allstate 125 with 10" wheels, most of them were cutdown P200e's some racer style and some choppers, with a cool little peanut tank.

MCCABE: Your style of work, whether scooters, motorcycles or bikes tends to be rat rod custom. Where does this come from. Is it from San Diego?

VENO: I grew up with hot rods, I was always a big fan of Ed Roth, and Von Dutch. Later on I found out about Indian Larry, those guys are like the Holy Trinity of customizing. The whole SoCal hot rod/custom revival thing hadn't really started yet, because a lot of those guys were still building and riding Italian scooters! So it was a style I was into anyways, and it was going on around me, too. Basically American style hot-rodding crossed with the British/UK/EU Scooterboys style of building cutdowns and choppers. Later on I built a Suzuki T500 cafe racer, and a Yamaha RD400, because of what I had learned about building fast two-strokers. All these bikes were in spray paint or primer because that is what I could afford, after dumping most of my coin into the engines, tires and suspension. I also took about two years building a show-quality Vespa chopper, and within two weeks of it getting put on the road I was left-hooked by an old lady in an Olds 98. This was my first "I didn't see him!" and my last "nice" bike.

MCCABE: What are you currently working on?

VENO: I'm coming up with a prototype for a track frame that I plan on producing myself under the name Meccanico di Veno. Still in the planning stages. I'm doing a lot of bicycle wheelbuilding, and building a bicycle here and there, either for myself or to sell.

MCCABE: How did your stretch P, the one you brought with you from San Diego, come about?

VENO: I never liked how a Vespa sat at such an angle with an extended fork so I decided to do a frame with a vertical stretch. Jay had done one with a horizontal stretch, so I had to do something different. I also rode two-up quite a bit, so it was always a little cramped. The 4" up stretch is also 2" out, just about perfect. Thing was it didn't look like a chopper anymore so I replaced the 4" fork with a 7-1/2" over fork, with some aluminum spacers I turned out of hex bar stock on the lathe. To get the trailing link angle right and get a decent amount of trail, the spacers are shorter, about 6-1/2" long.

MCCABE: How did you end up in Portland. Was it Cirque du Soleil? Do you still work with them when they come to town? If so, can you get me tickets? Ha!

VENO: I came up to Portland with Cirque, and stayed when I met an exotic dancer and started seeing her. She broke up with me on Christmas Eve, she always did have a flair for the dramatic. About a year later I met Mirand, who I am married to now. I have a nice quiet life in the suburbs with her 2 daughters from a previous marriage. They are great kids and it's been amazing watching them grow up, and being a part of that. I probably would have moved back to San Diego if I hadn't met her.

I still work for Cirque when they come to town, I've worked for them in Seattle too. They used to give you 2 tickets and let you see the show, now they just give you one extra ticket, so that's obviously reserved for my wife. Join Cirque club online, and you'll be emailed when the tickets get discounted near the end of the tour.

MCCABE: Damnit. Thought I'd ask anyway. Still I get the sense that the circus works its way into your artistic sensibilities.

A few years ago we began seeing less of you. Last year I ran across the hand-built bike display at the Portland Airport. It was in this display that I saw the steering wheel bike entered by Drop Out Bike Club. This is how I discovered you had gotten into bikes. Did you have a hand in this bike?

VENO: Meeting Mirand and moving out here has a lot to do with it, but the main reason I stopped riding scooters is because people drive so slow and so badly compared to what I was used to in San Diego. There is just too much traffic and you can't lane split. It rendered my scooter pointless, and made riding it frustrating. It was on it's way out, needing to have the clutch primary gear re-riveted. The crank had also been way out of true, causing the stator plate to crack, because it was hitting the flywheel. I replaced the crank, and then the stator plate broke, and I said "fuck it". Around that same time I had started noticing fixed gear bikes all over town, and it reminded of the bike messengers I used to hang out in Harvard Square with, I decided to build a fixed gear bike. Using the same tactics I used to build Vespas, I started building bikes. I also met the folks that started Zoobomb at this time. From there I was introduced to the whole freakbike thing: tallbikes and choppers. I built the bike that was displayed at the airport back then and named it Reverse Cowgirl. The steering wheel came a little later. All the fabrication on that bike was done by me. Not long after that Drop Out Bike Club started up, and they asked me to join. When I showed the bike I wanted the whole club to get credit. Around that time we were also asked to have a booth at the Oregon Handmade Bike Show and a year later we showed at Oregon Manifest. I think the only other freak bike club that has showed at a professional framebuilder's show is Black Label, it's kind of a rare occurance, and some sort of testimony to the level of design and aesthetic we put into our freak bikes, I suppose.

MCCABE: Did you know that Sacha White of Vanilla Bicycles was into custom scooters before he became an custom bike builder? There were two scooterists in that airport display.

VENO: I think Sacha may have told me that a long time ago.

MCCABE: How did the Drop Out Bike Club come about? Are you still active in it? Did Zoobombing have anything to do with you getting into bikes here in Portland?

VENO: The big joke is that we are drop duts from Zoobomb, and we are. Most of us are actual dropouts, either from school or society. I am an art-school dropout. We still Zoobomb occasionally and are active within the bike community, and try to keep the focus on building and riding freakbikes. Lately I've been obsessed with building my own track frame, and building a 26" rigid singlespeed MTB frame, so my focus has kind of shifted towards "real" bikes. I still love working with existing bikes and creating something custom, but I really want to take it to the next level. I want to build frames, I want to start a bike company, maybe eventually do production bikes as well as handmade custom frames. I've also been trying to get back into BMX. To me it's all the same, it's all two wheels. I've been working on a Triumph chopper forever, the statement I made about driving/riding in Portland are why it is such a back-burner project. But I love it all, it's been about two wheels since I was 15 and built a "P.K. Ripper" from the frame up, even building the wheels. FTW to me means Forever Two Wheels.

MCCABE: So, don't hold any punches, what happened with you hanging out in the scooter scene? Did you become an environmental fanatic or something?

VENO: I just moved on, I went somewhere else with my life. It's just not about hanging in bars and gallivanting anymore. It's why I don't Zoobomb anymore either. I stopped drinking as well, I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. I miss drinking good microbrewed beer, but my stomach won't handle it, I had the worst acid-reflux. More importantly my family takes up a lot of my time and I like it that way.

MCCABE: I used to have really bad drinking-related heart burn. I quit the sweets, particularly soda pop and now I don't get it. So how about the environmental angle?

VENO: I could never be an environmental fanatic. I love big V-8s, noisy-ass hot rods burning rubber and releasing way too many hydrocarbons by sucking too much gas through too many carburetors. I love loud-ass choppers with big twin cylinder engines, whether V or parallel. I would love to get the Vepsa running, pre-mix it 32:1 and do some burn-outs. I see it as a vice, sort of a sin against the environment. The production of meat hurts the environment more than all automobiles do, and old hot rods, motorcycles, and scooters are such a tiny part of that. You could reduce your carbon-footprint more by being a vegetarian than by giving up your Vespa.

MCCABE: Interesting stuff Mark. I hope you keep on doing what your doing.

VENO: Thanks! If people want to see more of what I'm doing my blog is Meccanico di Veno at www.meccanicodiveno.blogspot.com

A study in kids' bikes 3, Kuwahara Mixte Princess!, the 24 inch mixte road bike

2010-06-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

Behold, the Kuwahara Mixte Princess! At least that's the way we refer to it. It's a mixte bike. Made by Kuwahara, model name: Princess. We just got it back from the bike shop fresh and built up and it's awesome! Because it was a small bike it's worth sharing with the world some of the complications involved with this bike build in case anyone else wants to try this.

In some previous posts I discussed our dilemma of locating a proper kids' bike. The stuff on the market just doesn't quite fit the bill. Either it's really high end (if you can find it) or it's heavy or simply low quality. Greta is now nine and she's at a tough age to find a bike that fits. Searching Craig's List we found a pretty neato bike, we dubbed the Swiss Miss. It is an older Swiss department store bike called a Euroteam Sunny. It's a 24 inch mountain bike with indexed shifting. It fits well, has built-in fenders and a rear rack and also includes a bottle generator for front and rear lights.

Here's the Swiss Miss:

It's a great utilitarian bike. We found this bike while doing regular searching of the Craig's list bike category using "girl 24." The Kuwahara came up first but we thought we had missed out on it when the seller left town. A week after buying the Swiss Miss the seller of the mixte called us back. For $70 it was too unique of a bike to pass up.

Once the mixte was in our possession I really fell in love with it. As a miniturized mixte road bike it was so cute. I thought about how it could be spruced up and lightened, losing the steel components for more up-to-date alloy stuff.

Replacing the old steel wheels was the biggest challenge. It was really confusing trying to figure out suitable 24 inch wheels that would work for this bike. I soon discovered that saying "24 inch wheel" doesn't mean much since there are so many different standards. There are the original 70s/80s steel wheel 24s, bmx 24s, mountain bike 24s and fancy road bike 24s. I settled on quality road 24s.

The road bike 24s are a bit rare and hard to find. Also they are smaller than the other standards. Fortunately Tektro long reach brakes were able to accommodate the smaller rims. The new brakes are such an impressive improvement over the old originals too.

If you are curious about the 24 inch road bike standard stick to the ISO number. In this case it is ISO 520. I worked with a nearby bike shop Metropolis Cycle Repair, first to get these wheels and then to build the bike. Nathan at Metropolis is a Redline dealer. Redline makes a super slick cyclecross bike built for this type of 24 inch wheel. I think he was able to source the wheels through the Redline distributor. He was able to find a pre-built 24 inch rear wheel on clearance and I got to build the front wheel with an Alex (DR 13) rim and spokes that Metropolis custom cut and threaded. I laced the wheel and used a truing stand and tensiometer at the Bike Farm, a local non-profit that provides assistance with bike maintenance.

Metropolis re-spaced the frame to standard contemporary axle widths, 100 mm for the front and 130 for the rear. Apparently this was a bit of a challenge with the mixte because there is an extra tube at the rear and the shorter chain stay gave less leverage. The nice things about the bike though is that as Greta grows we may be able to re-size the bike by switching out to 26" road bike wheels.

Here's a photo of Greta picking up the bike at Metropolis. (The guy on the right is John who did the work on the bike and he did a fantasic job.):

One of the things that makes the bike so awesomely cute is that it is a miniaturized version of an adult mixte. Everything is proportionally correct but smaller: cranks (150mm), handlebar stem and handlebars. I had to compromise a bit with the handlebar. The originals were super cool because they were very narrow, but they were heavy steel and so narrow that they made the bike uncomfortable for Greta to ride.

Maybe this photos gives a better sense scale of the bike:

In considering the re-building of the bike one of the things Greta was insistent about was that she wanted to keep drop handlebars. City Bikes gave me a great deal on a set of used alloy ones, not as narrow as the original bars, but still about as narrow as you can get adult drop bars.

I was a little worried about Greta using the drop bar type brakes so we installed intermediate cross brakes also. The regular levers are short reach for small hands. They are still a little too large for her but she can work them.

We'll see how she takes to the stem shifters. So far we are keeping the original friction Suntour levers. If these don't work out, I'll try to squeeze in some mountain bike thumb shifters. I've also heard there are stem-mounted index shifters. That might be interesting to experiment with.

I kept the original legally-mandated front a rear reflectors. (What ever happened to these laws?) This may offend some but I like how they pay homage to the 70s/80s bike boom. They help give the bike a stock vintage feel. Plus with the seat so low, it might be a bit tricky to otherwise mount a rear blinky light. A few other minor details were that we added white cable housings and an inexpensive white juvenile saddle.

I'm hoping the bike works out for her. It is a very different riding experience. I'm certainly excited by it. The bike is sooo much lighter. (Greta can easily pick it up now.) Everything is tight, responsive and rolls smooth.

The little trailer that could

2010-03-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

In 2000 there was one particularly interesting item to surface when Mauricio Bianchini sold his business and all of the inventory of his scooter shop, Mario’s Italian Motors. This was his custom-made service trailer. It was a little trailer that he used for picking up and delivering customer’s scooters. Since the mid-1980s, with the departure of the Vespa of America Corporation from the United States, Mario’s Italian Motors survived on its own as a bare-boned one-man operation. Often all by himself, Mauricio needed a method for loading scooters either solo or with the balancing hand of a customer. This trailer was his creation and it demonstrates his resourcefulness and depth of Vespa knowledge.

The glorious aspect of this little trailer lies in his reuse of old 1960s-era Vespa steering columns . As I have discussed before (American Scooterist #46), the front fork/steering column may have been specifically designed to be a sacrificial weak link in the event of a front-on collision. The column absorbs most of the shock and bends before the monocoque body crumples thus potentially saving the scooter for repair and reuse. It's not uncommon for scooter shops to end up with bent steering columns in their salvaged parts supplies. (Note: on most scooters and motorcycles the proper term would be “forks.” Since a Vespa uses a unique hub-and-axle system to simplify tire repair, there are no “forks” holding on the wheel. “Steering column” therefore becomes a more accurate term for one of the signature features of a Vespa scooter.)

Mauricio certainly had his own stock of mostly-useless front columns. He took two eight-inch ones, cut them down and welded them to a cross brace which attached to very rudimentary single gutter-like track. The track is specially constructed to fit the wheel base of a Vespa. The front tire bumps into a stop--not too low to bend the front fender--and there is a drop in the back of the track which helps act as a wheel chock for the rear tire.

The trailer has no suspension, this had to be sacrificed in order to keep the trailer low to the ground for easy loading of scooters. With under-inflated tires and slower driving this is not typically a problem as long as the scooter hauling is limited to around town. A small cross section is welded to the front of the trailer for attaching tie-down straps.

How can you not love the elegance of a scooter-specific trailer that uses Vespa tires? These days maybe 10-inch tires might be a bit more practical due to them being more common. Still, if you ever needed a spare you could easily grab another from the shop or even borrow your customer's off their scooter! Or the other obvious option would be to take advantage of the vintage Vespa's key practicality feature: Unbolt the tire, split the rim and patch the tube. Off you go again.

For Spring Scooter 2009, Juaning Higgins borrowed the trailer from the current owner, Robert Pennington. Juaning hooked it to his dad’s Honda Goldwing. Many people appreciated that the breakdown support vehicle was also a two wheeler.

It's hard not to be smitten with all of the Vespa-specific thought that went into the trailer's creation. Maybe it's not so cute, but certainly tiny and eternally practical.

Sauna, cold dunk tank

2010-03-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

From Rubbermaid stock tank

Last summer I purchased a used 150 gallon Rubbermaid stock tank (aka water trough). Part of my intention was to possibly purchase a Cowboy Hot Tub wood stove tank heater so that I could create a low-cost, low-hassle backyard hot tub. I ended up changing my mind. The tank is too small for anything but a single person soak. There's nothing wrong with that, but I consider an important part of any soaking or sauna experience to be the social aspect. Whether it is saunaing or soaking, these are best done with company. It's a unique social environment, a space conducive to getting caught up with friends, telling in-depth stories and holding forth the occasional life-exploring conversation.

The other intended purpose of the tank was to use it as a cold water immersion/dunk for the sauna. To this end the dunk tank has been a smash hit success. I cannot stress enough how much the tank has added a fantastic new dimension to my sauna experience. I like it so much now that I almost consider it a prerequisite to having a quality sauna or hot tub.

Here at our house there is of course the solar shower just outside the door of the sauna and it continues to serve a similar purpose to the tank. Before I liberated myself of the oppressive Western psychological fear of cold water, the unheated shower could be very challenging, especially in the middle of the winter. Showering in 40 degree water takes some getting used to. But you do eventually get used to it and it is especially easy when you know that the intense, sometimes discomforting, sensation of the cold water will be rewarded by an equally intense sensation of pleasure once you are back in the sauna, when water is poured on the rocks and you are enveloped by a thick clouds of hot steam.

The dunk tank takes this experience to an entirely new level. Even though the water in the stock tank sometimes may not be as cold as the shower, it is much more challenging to immerse yourself in water. It just feels colder. In the shower, the cold water only covers a few parts of the body at a time. Inside the dunk tank you are 100 percent immersed in thermally-conductive bracing water. Hello! It's cold all over! But, just as it is much more challenging to embrace this intense physically sensation, the reward of pleasure, once back in the sauna, is reciprocally great.

Here is a photo of the dunk tank after a major freeze this winter. I had to take a sledge hammer to the ice to break it up enough to put a stock tank de-icer in it. (The ice was probably 6 to 8 inches thick on top!) The heater, along with warming temperatures, helped break the ice up enough so that it could be used as a slushy dunk tank in the evening. Greta and I both took advantage of it. I was proud of my daughter for taking her own dunk in the tank after a sweat! For us it was extra challenging because the larger ice chunks tended to scrape while soaking. At this temperature the water very quickly gave a 7-11 Slurpy-type brain freeze but all over the body!

From Rubbermaid stock tank

I made a plywood cover for the tank. This helps keep debris from the over hanging Douglas Fir and Hawthorne Berry trees from falling in. Also I'm a little concerned that some toddler from next door might wander over to play on the swing set, discover the tank and then discover that they don't know how to swim.

Sauna forehead rock removal

2010-02-18T22:11:00.000-08:00

I’d been picking at a small zit at the upper center of my forehead for about two weeks now. It was really frustrating because it wouldn't go away. Tonight, in the family sauna, the picking intensified as the rolling sweat came on. This gave way to a very disturbing sensation of my fingernail scraping against something. It was weird because, in the calm dark silence of the sauna, I was more aware of my senses. I could feel and hear my finger nail grinding against something.

I had paranoid fears. Do I have a sebaceous crystal growing out of my skull? Sensing a pregnant moment, I put two forefinger fingernails together and squeezed really hard. Out came a small thing that I could feel by rolling between my fingers. It was a large piece of grit, perhaps even almost rock-ish. I couldn’t see it because it was too dark in the sauna but I could feel it and it didn’t crunch between my teeth. It was too hard.

This is perhaps an occasional hazard of wearing a helmet everyday. Stuff gets ground into your head and you don’t notice it until it is expelled by your body. Here is example of another health benefit of saunas: forehead rock removal.

No, I don't need to post a photo of this.

Plant Bike Blaze, dynamo light hack

2010-02-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

From Trek Singletrack 930

As mentioned earlier I built a new mountain bike from a stripped-down frame I found abandoned at my work. It was an old made-in-the-US Trek with True Temper OX tubing. The few remaining components were so-so but the old-style lugged steel frame was great. My plan was to turn this bike into an urban utility vehicle with front and rear rakes for hauling. (It's still coming together.)

Here I discuss choosing and setting up a dynamo light for the bike.

In the winter the commute home is dark, wet and more than a little dangerous. Having a nice bright light is warranted. I'm happy with my existing battery-powered LED lights. They work well and, using NiMH rechargeables with a high quality smart charger, I don't fret about constantly throwing away batteries. Still I wanted to experiment and there is a nerdy satisfaction out of generating your own electricity with pedal power. The light from the dynamo is fantastically bright and something should be said about not having to worry about biking home in the rain with a dim light from unexpectedly almost-dead batteries. The jury is still out on whether the expense, extra weight and rolling resistance is worth it for me to be a fully committed dynamo light user.

For this bike I built a 26" wheel with a dynamo hub. (My first wheel build with the help of the Community Cycling Center's Advanced Bike Maintenance class.) Inside the hub (a Shimano Nexus Sport) there is a electrical dynamo/generator (6 volts/3 watts) which powers the light.

From Trek Singletrack 930

The light I settled on was Plant Bike's Blaze dynamo light. My decision was based largely on the fact that it uses Plant Bike's standard handlebar mounting bracket. It seems to be the most common/standard light bracket in use these days and it works relatively well. It's easy to take the light on and off when a bike is parked and locked up. Oddly enough though, and in spite of this great feature, the light does not have any easy way to be disconnected from the wiring. So, even though it can be easily removed from the bracket, it remains connected to the bike via the wiring, a connection that goes all the way to the hub.

My idea, and I discovered others have done this too, was to build a quick disconnect plug. This way the light is easily unplugged so it can be carried away after being locked up.

Here's how I did mine: I used old-school RCA stereo plugs and heat shrink tubing. The RCA plugs are the super standard for cords connecting stereo components. The fittings may not be the most secure, nor weather tight, but so far I have had no problems with them. It works great.

At first I considered using standard mini headphone jack plugs but I found the soldering connections too tiny for me to solder. I've gone through too many mini-stereo headphones to have much confidence in their robustness and longevity. The electrical connection always seems to fail at the plug.

I picked up the RCA plugs at a Radio Shack. I was little annoyed to be stuck paying so much for them but that's probably partly how Radio Shack stays in business. These plugs are designed for making your own connector wires or for repairing bad connections.

Here is a picture of the connectors. On the left are the mini stereo head phones that I purchased and then decided not to use. On the right are the two versions of RCA stereo connectors that I used for the bike, one has a friction plastic sleeve, the other screws together. I used the black ones to match the color of the head lamp wire. The reds pictured here (the other stereo channel!) are the left overs.

From Trek Singletrack 930

You can see that, even though tiny, there is a lot more room to work with the RCA plugs. I was worried that the mini stereo ones (left) were too small for me to robustly solder and wouldn't hold up to frequent connections/disconnections. The RCA plugs had crimp connections but I made sure to solder everything regardless.

Even so it was a little tricky soldering. The Plant Bike dyno light uses a very thin gauge wire. It's probably adequate for the current but I had to be careful to strip the insulation and not cut away some of the already thin wire. It took me a few tries to remember, but I finally managed to put on the heat shrink tubing on the wire before soldering the RCA jacks. The shrink tubing is a nice touch as it keeps rain out and adds some stability to the wire connection.

From Trek Singletrack 930

Some might say that an RCA plug is not a very water tight connection. It's not, I suppose, but I have had zero problems with it and, living in Portland, Oregon, I have commuted it some proper rain. The hot lead from the dyno is attached to the inner female connection of the RCA plug. The male connection is pointing down. I'm pretty confident that this configuration protects it all from shorting.

I'm really impressed with the light. In particular it seems great for daytime riding. When it is on in flash mode, I reach down and tilt it up slightly so the light projects up towards the rearview mirrors of cars. Hopefully this is valuable insurance against right/left hook incidents.

One small complaint is that the light appears to draw current and create some minor rolling resistance even when it is switched off. This is due to it having a built-in capacitor/battery that helps maintain light (for a short period) when the bike is not in motion (a nice feature actually). It's not too significant but bicyclist can't help obsessing over shaving every bit of weight and friction from a ride. A nice thing about the plug disconnect is that this resistance goes away immediately by unplugging the light. So I suppose this might be helpful for pulling a particularly long hill.

If money wasn't an object and I had done a little more research first, I might have purchased a great locally-made product, the Light On! DynoLight.

This is a primo product. One of my main reservations was that it didn't appear to have a quick release function. I met the owner at a recent bike craft gathering and discussed this issue. It turns out I was wrong and there are a couple of options. It either can be mounted to the quick release skewer and be removed along with the expensive dyno wheel (not a bad approach) or it can be mounted with a plug and quick release mount. Maybe I'll add one of these to a future project?

Alberta Street Glove Tree

2010-01-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

Throughout the winter I've noticed many orphan mittens and gloves along the bike lanes and streets of Portland. Maybe this is because I lost my own long-used and much-loved polyester "Miller Beer" fingerless gloves? (I don't remember where they came from. They were probably found on the street as well. Still, I'd had them forever and they'd served me well for spring and fall biking.) In a vain hope of finding mine, all the other dirty, soggy flattened ones caught my eye. Wouldn't it be nice if these gloves could be reunited with their owners?

The other day I noticed that some community-minded stranger(s) implemented an idea I've long considered. There is now a "Glove Tree" on a corner of Northeast Alberta Street and 20th.

The sign says it all:

This weekend while cleaning up the street in front on our house, I found a solitary red glove. Since the glove tree was nearby, why not make use of it? I grabbed a few extra clothes-line pins (to donate to the cause) and took a neighborhood stroll to hang up the glove. Oddly enough, on the way home I found the matching half about a block away! Sadly this other hand was pretty threadbare, having spent the last month or so in the gutter of Alberta Street getting ground up by car tires and muck. It's heartening to know some lonely owner may be reunited--and now with the complete pair. At the very least someone else can make use of a pair of gloves.

If you're biking in NE Portland and see a stray glove, you now know where the lost and found is.

Union Steam Baths, Astoria Oregon

2010-01-18T22:41:00.000-08:00

Just for the heck of it I'm posting these few photos of the Union Steam Baths in Astoria, Oregon. I am so bummed that I never had a chance to experience this place before it closed. A few inside photos can still be seen at this outdated website.

The Finns have a lot of history in the lower Columbia River. Becky even has some ancestors who were part of this group. It's too bad that the community is dissolving to the point of not being able to support the community steam bath of Astoria. The old Finnish bakery, the Home Bakery, is still kicking. I never seem to make it to Astoria when it's open though.

Here's a pic of the Suomi Hall:

To give a sense of the historical importance of the Union Steam Baths, the Suomi Hall, which is the old Finnish Social Club, is right across the street from the now-closed public steam bath.

I wonder if enough sauna enthusiasts could be brought together to persuade the current owner to fire up the boiler for a weekend?

I think there may have been a similar place in downtown Portland. I'll have to do more research on this one.

Solar food dryer failure!

2010-01-04T22:45:00.001-08:00

I've had a couple of spectacular failures with the products of the solar food drier recently. Since this is how I learn, and one of the reasons I chose to keep this blog, here I humbly share my failings.

The cloudy color in this jar of prunes is grain moth silk:

Grain moths, curse you! We have them in our kitchen and it seems like they've always been here. I partly blame the rye crisp crackers we kept in the lower kitchen cabinet for the last two years. It's odd how rye crisp tends to keep even in the paper wrapper. It's not amusing, however, to discover what a wonderful food source these Swedish crackers are for grain moths. I suspect they crackers were the launching pad for a very healthy population in our kitchen.

The grain moths tend to get into everything eventually but I thought that my hard-earned horde of dried fruit was secure for a couple of reasons. First it was dried fruit and as such protect by being desicated and containing a concentration of fruit sugar. Larvae would prefer starchy flour and similar items, not dry and sugary fruit. Quite the opposite, they thrived in it. Ugh!

I first noticed a problem when I found little dark spots in the morning hot cereal. No, that's not random fruit fiber. It's grain moth larvae poop. I only figured this out after finding a moth floating in the bowl.

At the bottom of this jar are little brown granules of insect droppings.

The second problem was that the moths got into a number of jars I had falsely assumed were well sealed. Here is the lesson: Do not trust new one-gallon pickle jars! I had been collecting them from the backs of restaurants. I liked them because they seal (or so I thought!) They are clear, so you can see what's inside. And they are large which makes them practical for storing food in bulk.

Here's a photo of a jar with the modern commercial quarter-turn lid:

The problem with this type of lid is that you simply can't tighten these down enough by hand to keep them air-tight. A good test to check if a jar will seal properly is to fill it with water and turn it upside down. If it leaks then it's suspect. Of course I only figured this out after my disaster.

All told, I lost about one and a half gallons of prune and about a quarter of a gallon of dried Asian pear and apple. Normally a few moths here and there don't bug me, but this fruit got infested really thoroughly really quickly.

My lesson here is to stick to classic half-gallon canning jars. The classic Mason jar requires over 360 derees of rotation to seal. This may provide better leverage to get a tight seal with the lid. At one point in time, gallon jars were made with this type of lid. It was a nice jar standard and the country is that much poorer that we don't have these readily available to use anymore. I now have to buy expensive half-gallon Mason jars. I don't like this but at least they seal properly.

The other fruit preservation failing was with a small batch of figs I dried. I discovered a neglected but fantastic fig tree near my work downtown. (The quality of fig trees really seem to vary from tree to tree.) The fruit was falling on the ground so I decided to "liberate" the tree from waste and do some help-myself gleaning. Here I think I didn't dry the fruit enough and they molded in the jar. Next year they'll get a better drying even if they get kind of tough and leathery.

I had to wait for a free weekend to take photos of the moldy figs since I'm at work when it's light out. During this time, the jar mysteriously ended up in the driveway. It appears to have become a science experiment of our daughter, Greta. Not sure what the appeal of mold was but that's what happened with it.

I guess it is pretty impressively fuzzy. Thank goodness she didn't open it inside.

Trek Singletrack, my utility bike in progress

2010-01-03T22:04:00.000-08:00

From Trek Singletrack 930

There isn't much to share here. Mostly I'm putting up a personal document of my own accomplishment.

I've mostly finished building a bike, a pink(ish) Trek Singlestrack. I found it as a frame, stripped save the fork and crank, abandoned outside the trash room of the building I manage. The frame appealed to me because it was light. You don't see too many lugged mountain bike frames. It was made in the U.S. (probably one of the last by Trek) and it was built out of double-butted True Temper Ox Comp 2 tubing. It's surprisingly light for being a steel mountain bike frame.

From Trek Singletrack 930

My regular commuter bike is a Gunnar Crosshairs (a cyclocross bike). I can't ask for a better commuter bike but it has some limitations. Mostly, it's expensive. I get nervous locking it up so I wanted a more practical utility bike I could use for getting groceries and such. Also the Gunnar's frame is probably too small for me and I have to be really careful about hitting my foot on the front tire taking slow-speed corners. Because the bike has fenders this can cause real problems. It's not too much of a big deal but it gets in the way of carefree casual riding.

The Singletrack was made up of new parts and ones that I scrounged. I found another abandoned frame downtown. It was an old Novara (REI) mountain bike. It too had been largely stripped, but I did get complete brakes and pedals off of this one.

I bought a bunch of used parts from the Community Cycling Center including a seat stem, shifters and a rear XT derailleur. On Craigslist I found an old set of fancy XTR-hubbed wheels. The rear went on with a new cassette and chain. As part of a maintenance class I took, I replaced the bottom bracket bearings with a new cartridge and repacked the front fork bearings.

For me, as a novice bike mechanic, my biggest accomplishment was building the front wheel. This was my first wheel build. I did this using a dynohub. I'm still undecided if dynohubs are all that useful but they have a lot of nerd appeal to me. It's fun to generate my own electricity as I ride. Building the wheel was fairly straight forward. I appreciate how the process requires a practiced physical knack. It's an art in that you need to think but also use your senses and a certain finesse.

From Trek Singletrack 930

The bike rides well. It feels secure and seems to have reasonably good geometry, upright but not too steady. All I need to do with it is add some fenders and racks and it will be a great urban utility bike.

Doug and Erin's wood-fired hot tub

2009-11-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

For a while my friend Doug and I had discussed how best to create a simple wood-fired hot tub. Stressful jobs require drastic measures to help maintain one's health and happiness. Doug took action and created a truly wonderful soaking tub.

Conventional acrylic hot tubs work fine but, frankly, I find them a little stupid. They are expensive to purchase and maintain. It's a little offensive how much energy is consumed maintaining hot tubs at regular operating temperature 24 hours a day. Such a waste! Then there are the chemicals. You always see half-working hot tubs on Craigslist. After paying high utility bills for a couple years, those who don't really appreciate their tubs seem desperate to get rid of them. (Note: Huge thanks to all of my friends who have let me soak in their tubs. Don't let my opinions dissuade you from inviting me over. Ha! I appreciate your sacrifice for me and others!)

Wood fired soaking is not perfect but there are fewer on-going expenses and maintenance hassles. I find the aesthetic appeal of a good hot fire an important part of the relaxation and rejuvenation ritual. Fire provides a raw primordial satisfaction. It's comfort food for the soul.

There are a number of options out there.

There are fancy cedar tubs with specially made submersible wood stoves made by Snorkel Hot Tub in Seattle. Sea Otter Wood Works in Haines, Alaska also makes beautiful cedar tubs that are heated various different ways:

There is the trendy hip Dutch Tub:

There is the extremely rudimentary Cowboy Hot Tub.

Doug settled on another option that falls more on the simple/affordable/DIY side of the spectrum and I think he's hit on something that works great!

Here is the tub:

Under the pergola is a 300 gallon Rubbermaid stock tank (aka a cattle watering trough). Not very visible to the right is a Japanese Chofu wood-fired hot tub stove. On the left is a 150 Rubbermaid stock tank for cold water dunking. (The dunk tank has recently been replaced with a vintage cast iron claw foot bathtub.)

Here's a closer look. Looks inviting, no?

The stove for the tub was purchased from Island Hot Tubs, a distribution company for Chofu. (Doug reports having a positive transaction.) Their website is built around promoting this "stock tank" method of hot tubbing. The Island Hot Tub web site doesn't have much in the way of example hot tubs so I figured this post would help illustrate a working model in action.

Here are some details of the stove and the water connection to the stock tank.

The water is heated via convection current. Cold water enters through the lower pipe and exits into the tub from the upper pipe. Putting a hand over the outlet gives a good sense of the impressive heat and rate of flow. The fire box is designed to burn hot and fast and is surrounded by a jacket of water for heating.

Here Doug stokes the fire. It's a fairly small fire box but it puts out a lot of hot water. I've only arrived to enjoy the hot tub. I haven't been around to light the fire and heat the water up all the way from standing outside (cold) temperature. Obviously this takes more planning, effort and commitment than a conventional hot tub. Doug says it takes about three to four hours depending on the outside temperature.

For water sanitizing they follow Island Hot Tub's recommendations of using concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This method is inexpensive and chemically benign since the chemical quickly breaks down to oxygen and water.

The 300 hundred gallon tank seats 4 people comfortably. Five or six is probably possible but it would displace a lot of water and it might be a bit cozy.

Future plans are to add a passive solar booster to shorten the warm-up time.

Winter squash harvest

2009-10-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Normally each year I plant green beans along the neighbor's fence line. The fence works well for vining green beans. This year I prepped the soil by digging in compost but then I didn't get around to planting the beans. Instead I noticed that volunteer squash/pumpkin/gourds were growing from the compost. I decided to let it go and see what became of it. Maybe I'd be giving the soil a "rest" by growing something else?

At various times in the summer the squash vines were absolutely beautiful. I loved the way they trailed up the fence. It looked very Art Nouveau.

Last night we ate a couple of the squash. Neither were as sweet as the delicata we normally buy but they were good enough. The photo is almost the total of our harvest. A few of the squash grew over to the neighbor's back yard and are still there. There were so many squash blossoms I'm kind of surprised we didn't get more of a harvest. Maybe we should have learned how to cook squash blossoms?

The pumpkin is a Cinderella pumpkin. Greta carved a "G" in it when it was smaller and now it's quite distinct.

A study in kids' bikes, part 2

2009-09-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I discussed Greta's earlier bikes and how we figured out how to safely commute downtown with Greta using a tandem. Here I discuss the bikes we settled on for her own independent riding. She had outgrown her 20" bike. We looked for something that fit better and was better suited for basic daily city riding in Portland.

The transition from a 20" inch bike to something bigger is often a big step for a kid and Greta was no exception. The larger bikes are often still a bit too big. They are a lot heavier and, with the longer wheel base, maneuver differently.

We looked around at the various new bike options in the local Portland bike shops. There are some nice bikes but we didn't see anything that excited us to the point that we were willing to spend a lot of money for something new. My biggest complaint was that all of the bikes seemed to presuppose that all kids want to do is dirt ride. All we saw were bikes with heavy suspension shocks on the front forks. If I remember correctly all of the bikes came with knobby (or at least hybrid) tires. I suppose if money wasn't an issue we might have settled on a Redline Conquest 24. These bikes seem to fit the bill but they are also very expensive, kind of ridiculous for a kid who still has trouble properly locking up her bike.

Jonathan Maus at bikeportland.org shared some of my concerns in a post he called "Practical Kids' bikes." His take was to ask why we couldn't find properly appointed practical kids' bikes here in the U.S. while they are everywhere in Europe. Over there almost every new kids' bike comes with fenders, a rear rack and front and rear lights powered by a dyno/generator.

I decided to search for a used bike and, if necessary, fix it up so it was a little more performance oriented. On Craigslist we came across the Euroteam Sunny. According to the seller it was purchased originally in a Swiss department store for one of their kids. We're not sure where the bike was made, but it includes some European components such as Italian Grimeca wheel hubs and German-made pedals. We liked this bike because it was a European kids' bike and, as mentioned above, came ready made with the accessories for practical urban riding: fenders, rack and lights.

The bike is very utilitarian but it also has some nice feature. It has alloy wheels and front and rear Shimano indexed gear shifters.

Here's a closer look

This is not Greta looking like the salt monster from Star Trek. She's trying to look tough on her new bike.

You can see that even with the seat all the way down it is a bit of a stretch to fit.

During our search we came across a vintage girls' Fuji 10 speed step-through and a very cool Kuwahara mixte, the kind with the two small top tubes that extend down rear dropout. We missed out on the Fuji and thought we missed out on the Kuwahara so we bought the Euroteam. As it turned out the seller of the Kuwahara had just left town and he called us when he returned from his trip. We decided that the bike was so amazing that we should buy it anyway. Buying two used bikes we were still getting off pretty easy. A typical kids' 24" non-Walmart bike store bike is around $340 to $400.

Our plan is to use the Euroteam for now. It fits and works great. It is a good transition size between her earier Jamis and the Kuwahara. The Kuwahara is still a little bit too big so in the mean time I will fix up the Kuwahara.

India report, part 2

2009-09-17T21:41:00.000-07:00

Bajaj Auto Limited used to be the world's largest scooter manufacturer. Everything changed when, within the course of just a few years, the scooter market in India completely collapsed. Now the country is all about motorcycles. In a wrenching change the company adjusted to the new market, focusing almost exclusively on motorcycles. Today Bajaj is back on track to become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of motorcycles.

Still one Bajaj product continues to beat with a scooter heart. This is the venerable three-wheeler. A few issues ago I started the story of a trip Becky and I took to India where we were able to squeeze in tours at Bajaj's three main factories. We began with the company headquarters in Akurdi and the location of their new scooter plant. Here I pick it up again with the other two factories, Chakan and Waluj. Waluj is where the bulk of Bajaj’s three-wheelers and autorickshaws are still made.

Chakan

About an hour’s drive north of the Bajaj headquarters is the company’s showcase factory, Chakan. Before leaving for the three-wheeler factory in the Waluj neighborhood of Aurangabad we paid a visit to Chakan. It is a relatively new facility, in part constructed to test and demonstrate new production methods.

Everywhere the buildings were painted bright white. This campus, above all of the others was particularly beautifully landscaped and lush, much of the greenery made possible from the use of a waste water recovery system. One area contained a huge bed of flowers that spelled out “Hamara Bajaj,” an older company slogan that means “Our Bajaj.”

Upon arrival we were offered lunch at the company cafeteria. As part of the work culture all employees eat together, from the top managers and engineers to production workers. We were treated to a local India favorite, Indian-style Chinese buffet. Indian-style Chinese is really a cuisine unto itself. Based on this very casual encounter, I concluded that Chinese Indian food tastes similar to Indian but tends to substitute noodles more for rice. We had a great lunch and a pleasant chat with employees.

After lunch we were given the tour. The walk from the cafeteria to the busy assembly lines was surprisingly quiet and serene. Along the way we were greeted with banners hanging from covered walkways proclaiming company slogans and TPM production philosophy.

TPM you ask? TPM stands for (at least originally) Total Production Maintenance. It started in Japan in the 1950s as an approach towards maintaining factory assembly equipment but evolved into a broader manufacturing philosophy related to all areas of quality control and production efficiency. The Japanese Institute of Plant Engineers awards TPM designations to factories all around the world. A number of years ago Bajaj Auto got the TPM religion and adopted it wholeheartedly, so much so that there were many times touring the Chakan plant that I thought I could very easily be in Japan. It was so unexpected to see Japanese culture and ideas adapted so rigorously into an Indian work environment.

At all of the Bajaj factories, but most particularly Chakan, it was obvious that Bajaj was dead serious about quality and production efficiency. The unrelenting churning out of high-quality motorcycles was almost scary. Will Bajaj take over the world? Standing on the factory floor watching the vehicles roll off the production line, it certainly felt like it.

The tour proceeded with a walk-through of the engineering area and a video presentation on Bajaj’s embrace of TPM. A narrator with a baritone Japanese accent (I pictured George Takai) droned on about manufacturing numbers and production goals met. We saw examples of production improvements, many charts and graphs and viewed scenes of employees doing morning exercise drills.

In the engine assembly area most all of the production lines included an air filtration system. The air was blown through massive ducting, keeping a positive air pressure of clean air in the work areas. Throughout the entire factory tour we walked along a raised gangplank looking down on the assembly lines. One section had robots boring out motorcycle engines. It was fast, precision work.

Before leaving for India I read in a Bajaj annual report about how production was way up and man-hours worked was down. I pictured the evil manager at the end of the assembly line turning up the speed on the conveyor belts, making all of the hamsters on the wheels run faster. This wasn’t so. Part of the new manufacturing philosophy highlighted at Chakan is that much of the “non-value added” (their term) production has been outsourced. Bajaj now obsesses with production and assembly, making every step simpler and easier. For example, why make an assembly line worker walk around a cart to pick up a part when a cart can be built with revolving shelves. If more parts are needed, a freshly loaded shelf can be quickly rotated into place so items can be grabbed at arm’s length. If anything, the work place seemed quieter and the overall mood of the workers seemed friendlier and more relaxed from when I visited the Akurdi plant previously 11 years ago.

There’s even more emphasis on quality too. The production lines included numerous new quality control measures and checks. A line stop due to a quality or production snag would be announced by electronic music. (Imagine Mozart’s Magic Flute sounding like it was piped through the speakers of an ice cream truck.) Hearing the chiming music, workers would briefly stop what they were doing and note the production error that was instantly posted on a big electronic scoreboard above the line.

It would be very interesting to compare Bajaj’s production methods and quality with Kymco or a Japanese manufacturer.

I’m waiting for someone to import Bajaj motorcycles to the U.S. The Pulsar, in particular, might be a big hit. It is a high quality, small capacity motorcycle that achieves super high fuel efficiency. Even though this is considered Bajaj’s sport bike, at the time of our visit the largest engine was 180cc. By now it has broken the 200cc barrier (believe it or not this is a very significant milestone for the India market) and is fuel injected.

Waluj

After the Chakan plant we took the bus from Pune to Aurangabad. A very rough geographic analogy for our trip might be to make a comparison with the Bay Area. Consider Mumbai as San Francisco except with an upside down peninsula. We started out there and went south to Pune, Bajaj’s headquarters. If you pretend Pune is San Jose, Chakan is Oakland. From there we took a bus to Aurangabad, which— following the comparison— would be Sacramento. The distances are off but they’re close enough to give you a mental comparison. The real difference is that in getting to Aurangabad, given the crowed roads and frequent stops, our bus trip took about six hours. It was a long and somewhat stressful ride but also fantastic for the scenery and as an opportunity to see everyday India outside of the tourist mainstream.

Aurangabad is a very old city located on a trade route. It had largely been passed over by industrial growth until the 1980s. At this time Bajaj Auto decided to expand production and built a huge plant here. By doing this the company played a key role in turning a relatively small city into a substantial new industrial hub. On the drive to the plant I recall seeing a lot of factories with important sounding names. Aurangabad is full of many satellite parts and accessory companies related to the automotive industry.

Simply put, the Waluj plant is huge. The campus is a ways off the main highway. After passing through the trademark giant white Bajaj entrance gate, the road took us about a kilometer through undeveloped wooded and grassy land. Arriving at the factory, it felt a bit like something out of a Star Wars set. It felt easy to get lost in a monotonous grid of tree-lined paved streets and big three-story concrete windowless concrete box buildings.

Now Waluj has a bit of a ghost town feel. Waluj used to be Bajaj’s primary scooter production facility. With the death of the unibody scooter and, following the new production model of the Chakan plant with a higher reliance on outside parts manufacturing, a significant portion of the facility lies mothballed.

There is still one legacy of the Vespa scooter that remains at Waluj and this is the three-wheeler. In India (despite the new competition from Piaggio) Bajaj Auto Limited remains king of the three-wheeler market. Many of Bajaj’s three-wheelers still owe some derivation from the original Ape, manufactured under license in the 1960s. In India three-wheelers are everywhere. They were imported into the U.S. briefly both by Bajaj of America in the 1980s and more recently by Bajaj USA (now Argo USA). Used versions from both eras still turn up from time to time. In India they generally come in two forms: autorickshaws—the ubiquitous affordable taxi of urban India and many other parts of Asia and the Middle East—and goods carriers or GCs. In India GC is synonymous for (and actually replaces) the terms “small truck” or “small lorry.”

If you love Vespas and factory production lines, the three-wheeler factory in Waluj is out of this world. In one area, I stood transfixed watching body after body get dropped down from overhead conveyor belts onto waiting chassis. Parts of a vehicle that any scooter enthusiast would recognize are put together into thousands of autorickshaws and GCs. Even though there are now diesel and propane four-cycle engines, cleaner two-strokes are still being produced and appear to remain the preferred power plant. The engine still looks very much like a standard traditional Vespa engine/transmission unit though obviously modernized and beefed up. The tires are still the same 8” split rim. Cables and front fenders all harken to the vehicle’s origins.

Here again we saw TPM in action. There were numerous billboards of production improvements developed by small groups of production supervisors and assembly line people. This continual refinement of the assembly process is commonly referred to as kaizen, another Japanese term that was completely integrated into the work culture here.

GCs and autorickshaws for the New Delhi market were all painted bright primary green. The green designated that these vehicles ran on propane. This was certainly based on some mandate set up to help authorities assure that only newer cleaner-burning engines were allowed in the crowded inner city. Similarly, we noticed that in central Mumbai, three-wheelers were completely banned. We remember seeing lines of three-wheelers stopped just outside a certain boundary near the airport waiting to pick up new “fares” as passengers got out of more expensive car taxis and into the cheaper autorickshaws. This allowed travelers to save a bit of money as they moved to outer city areas. Inside the city beat-up black and yellow taxis—old Fiat clones—were also run on propane. The Mumbai three-wheeler ban was probably as much an anti-working class move as anything else since three-wheelers are the primary taxi of the poor and working class. Even though they actually take up less space and are more maneuverable in tight urban areas, they were probably banned due to their reputation for being smelly two-strokes. With propane-burning Bajaj three-wheelers available maybe the Mumbai ban will eventually be lifted?

Many of the other GCs were also bright primary colors. Between the colors and my own enthusiasm, I felt like I was in a candy shop. The visit to the three-wheeler assembly lines will remain one of the highlights of my life as a scooter enthusiast.

We left the factory on something of a sad poetic note. At one of the many near-empty factory intersections there was a large sculpture in an island in the middle of the street. At first we didn’t pay much attention to it. As we drove by, pieces sticking out of the structure caught our eye. Stop the car! Attached to a black rectangular column were parts and sections of a Bajaj scooter. The sculpture was put in place back when the scooter was the economic powerhouse of Bajaj Auto Ltd and certainly a symbol of pride for the Waluj plant. It once acted as a study in the form of the scooter, the towering pillar a reminder of the scooter’s economic authority. How things have changed! I got out of the car to capture some photos. The lawn around the sculpture wasn’t very well maintained and parts of the old scooter were starting to rust through. Just as the Vespa-derived metal-bodied manual-geared scooter production has reached an end for Bajaj Auto, the sculpture was well on its way towards rusting into oblivion.

Prunes!

2009-09-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Here are the first dried plums/prunes of the season.

From Prunes!

This batch came from Chad Stockdale's back yard. Thanks Chad.

From Prunes!

The two racks on the solar dryer produced a half gallon of prunes.

A study in kids' bikes, part 1

2009-08-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

Our daughter Greta is eight going on nine. She has been an active bicyclist since she was around four. We recently wrestled with getting her a new appropriately-sized bike. She is at an awkward age where she is too little for the next-size-up 24" bikes on the market and too big for her current 20" bike. Since this is a common problem, I figured it would be helpful to share some of our experiences with Greta's bikes and various family bike transportation options we have used in the past. Later I'll discuss the new bikes we settled on for Greta.

When Greta was attending pre-K, I would commute with her. We bought a used Adams Trail-A-Bike to do this and it worked great. I'd drop her off at school and continue on to work, a few blocks away, with the empty trail-a-bike bouncing behind me. Becky would pick her up in the afternoon, either with the car or her own bike. (We bought a bike hitch for Becky's bike so, with the two hitches, we had a lot of cool biking/commuting versatility.)

The great thing about the Trail-A-Bike is that the kid helps with the effort. I think these bikes are a huge help moving a child past training wheels toward independent riding. The bikes help the kid develop the muscle memory of constant pedaling and staying upright. It's great real-world practice for when they're ready to pick up two-wheeling on their own. People were pretty surprised when Greta was biking to school on her own in kindergarten.

Greta learned to ride on a tiny crappy department store bike that I found abandoned in the neighborhood. It was pink (of course!), single speed with a coaster brake and 16" tires. When I found it, it needed new tires and tubes. The chain was rusty but the bike did the job once we had it lubed and all fixed up. As with many of these mass-market bikes, the quality was just above functional but that was all that was needed. It was so small that the ratio of Greta's size to the bike's weight overcame inherent junkiness. A young child is never heavy enough to cause much damage (unless it's ridden by an over-sized sibling!) Gearing also helps. It is so low that it overcomes weight and friction issues related to quality. There isn't much need for performance quality in a tiny bike. Kids don't go all that far or fast. The bikes can be abused and still hold up. (If they don't, they're so cheap they're practically disposable.) This bike ended it's association with Greta after it was quietly donated to the Community Cycling Center.

Sometime in first grade she graduated to a 20" bike, a used Jamis Capri 2.0. (Here's a link to Jamis's current Capri. It appears to have been improved a bit.) Greta recently told me "that practically everybody has a Jamis." (Like it's way too pedestrian for her now. Jeez!) It wasn't always like this. Jamis was a early bike company to incorporate better-quality and/or currently-in-use better components into regular kids' bikes. The Jamis Capri had a Sram grip shift selector connected to an indexed Shimano derailleur. There was no front derailleur and instead the chain sat in a channeled sprocket that acted as a chain guard. Another nice feature was that the rear derailleur had a metal cage to protect it from damage, a common problem when shifting bikes are dumped over on the right side. The bike had linear-pull brakes. (These brakes might actually be a little too good for such a small bike since I was told that the previous kid rider locked up the front tire and endo-ed over handlebars during a panicked stop when the bike was brand new. Greta never had an issue with this fortunately.)

One big advantage to the bike was that it was built with a lot of size variability. The seat stem came with a lot of length and could be positioned so it could be placed really low or high. Also it used a more-modern threadless headset so, as Greta grew, we were able to purchase headset spacers and higher-reaching threadless stems to keep the bike fitting. Braze-ons for a water bottle cage tucked into the bottom of the frame were a nice touch too.

The Jamis was a good bike but, as is my complaint with most kids' bikes, it was a little heavy. I wish we'd see more kids' bike frames built the same standards as adult bikes. I ended up replacing the original knobby tires with more-practical, comfortable and smoother road tires. I also found a lighter seat stem. Both of these improvements shaved some weight. I see that the new ones are aluminum so that probably helps a little with the weight issue.

It took a while for Greta to embrace the Jamis Capri. At first she didn't like it because she felt it was too large for her. A lot of this was that she was used to her older bike. There was also the inevitable adjustment from coaster brakes to hand lever brakes, always tough for kids.

Earlier this summer we started shopping for a replacement bike. At the same time we tried to come up with a solution for bike commuting to downtown Portland. Portland has fantastic bike lanes and routes. Our ride from our neighborhood five miles to downtown was practically entirely a bike route. Still we decided that Greta was still just a bit too young to bike all the way downtown independently. There were a couple of summer day camps we had in mind for her and the plan was to reintroduce Trail-A-Bike commuting, where I'd drop her and the trailer off, I'd continue on to work, and then pick her and the trailer up in the evening on the way home.

We bought a second used Trail-A-Bike for this purpose. This time it was a Gary Fisher Freeloader. These bikes are more-or-less a shameless ripoff of the Adam's Trail-A-Bike concept. The Gary Fisher has a gear selector which helps with the kid's energy production. We tried it out for a while but determined that, alas, Greta was now too big for the rig. It worked but the ride felt unstable.

Supposedly the Burley version of this bike is more stable feeling due to the way the trailer is hitched to the main bike. There were, at one point, 20" tire versions (made by Adams I think.) I suspect that these too would provide a little more stability when ridden. The Freeloader just felt like Greta's weight might throw me or cause me to lose hold of the handle bars if she slipped or jerked to one side all of a sudden.

We looked on Craigslist for tandems and lucked out finding one that was relatively cheap and worked well for a kid.

$120. Score! Even though we got a great deal on this bike it was a bit of a wreak and took some work. Both brakes were either broken or out of adjustment. I had to spend a fair amount of time truing the front tire and adjusting the derailleurs. The bike spent the past few years outdoors so I'm still cleaning up rust.

The bike, a Motiv Duo, was purchased originally at a Costco sometime around 1999. It's an interesting bike because it was weirdly built around 1990s mountain bike components: heavy tubing, 26" knobbies (promptly removed), thumb shifters, linear-pull brakes, etc. I suspect that the Taiwanese factory was seeing the first signs of the mountain bike craze softening and attempted to come up with a unique niche product using the existing tooling and readily-available parts. Somewhere I saw a photo of a similar-but-later model with a suspension front fork. I just can't see dirt trail tandem riding. It's too goofy.

The big plus for us was that the Motiv Duo has a wide range of adjustablity, particularly for the rear "stoker" seat.

Here's another detail photo:

We were able to adjust the seat way down and the handle bars down and way out so Greta could comfortably reach things. I suppose one problem is the comparatively long 170mm reach of the cranks. At times this makes Greta's pedaling a little jerky. With a fair amount of effort this could be fixed with either new cranks or clamp-on crank adjusters but it hasn't been enough of problem to be worth it. A few weeks ago we biked to the SE Sunday Parkways ride and Greta and I pedaled up to the top of Mount Tabor. It was a killer but we made it!

The main thing was that it made biking for the two of us downtown a breeze. Greta attended PNCA camp. We had a blast biking to and from camp/work. Tandem biking takes a little getting used to, especially maintaining momentum when starting out from a stop. Greta would help out bit adjusting the pedal for a good initial power stroke from a stop. With all of the funky bike options in Portland, Trail-A-Bikes, triple tandems, I was surprised by all of the attention we would still attract from passers-by. Greta also enjoyed pouring it on and going fast. The downside was that unlike with a Trail-A-Bike, the pedaling effort of both riders is directly connected. If Greta got tired, I would end up lifting her legs, which is doing more than simply pedaling for her.

It makes sense to break this up, so in a future post I'll cover the two bikes we purchased as Greta's replacement for her 20 inch Capri.

Here's a link to our Flickr photo set on kids' bike

Here's the link to part 2 of this story

Putting up cherries, Solar food dryer tackles cherries

2009-07-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

The fam damnily participated in a fruit picking this weekend organized by the Portland Fruit Tree Project.This one was a little unusual because it was at a farm outside of Portland, not the typical urban harvesting party.

The farm we picked fruit at was an organic cherry and peach orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The farmer was stuck with a huge harvest of amazing cherries that he couldn't sell. His particular variety (Lapin) arrive late in the season. Unfortunately for him, this year was a bumper crop for cherries and, aside from his own retail sales at the Hollywood Farmers' Market, he could find no buyers. Even the huge Hood River juicers were at capacity. In an effort to salvage some of his product, he contacted the Oregon Food Bank. In turn the Food Bank contact the PFTP. We received an email on Thurday inviting us to volunteer. It was last minute but we jumped in.

We enjoyed a fantastic sunny day picking. It was super cool to get to see some private property in Hood River. Before I had only driven through downtown and through a few neighborhood streets. I think it's safe to say all of us in the picking group couldn't believe the cherry crop. The trees were unbelievably loaded with cherries and they couldn't be any riper.
Here's Greta looking like a model in a Bruegel painting. We had just taken a break, eating our vegan plowman's lunch. Instead of eating her cucs, Greta decided to cool her eye lids off with them. What do you do if your parent's drag you to a volunteer work party? Lounge under a shady tree picking cherries directly into your mouth. Maybe later take a break, eat lunch and lie back with cooling cosmetic eye shades. Life's tough all over! Actually though Greta was a great helper and more than did her share in collecting fruit.

The volunteer group ended the picking with over 780 pounds of cherries. A significant percentage went to the Oregon Food Bank. The pickers kept the rest. We took home about 40 pounds for the family.

Most of the cherries went directly into our solar food dryer. As I've stated before I'm a big fan of drying food as a preservation method. You don't need to worry about power outages if the food is frozen and, unlike canned fruits, the dried fruit tends to actually get eaten. Canning in the summer is hot and messy with hours of boiling water on a kitchen stove. I love home canned food but I'm not so sure that it is always worth the time and effort.

The cherries seem to be turning out really well in the dryer. I'm a little concerned that they'll be sticky and stick together when stored but otherwise they taste fantastic. Time will tell how well they keep. If our plums are any comparison they should be fine to eat throughout the next year. Will they unseat prunes as the ultimate oatmeal companion?

At the picking there was some discussion about pitting cherries. The farmer mentioned that he thought the best method was a simple cherry pitting utensil. He said these could be purchased at William-Sonoma. He said that the batch pitters tend to not work well because a lot of time is spent un-jamming them.

Someone else mentioned an old folk method of using a pencil and bottle. Here the eraser from a standard pencil is removed. A cherry is placed over a bottle and the metal eraser end of the pencil cuts through the cherry to punch out the pit. Becky tried this but found that often smaller cherries got stuck in the bottle and it was a hassle to repeatedly put each cherry on top of the bottle.

I experimented with cutting the cherry in half and then prying out the pit. This was messy, time consuming and tended to mangle the cherry. The advantage though was that a halved cherry shortened the drying time by exposing the inner fruit flesh to the air.

I modified the pencil method and had great results. I found a piece of plywood and drilled a 9/16th inch hole. I placed the cherry, stem-side up, in the hole and punched the pencil through. This size hole was consistently small enough to keep the cherry from getting stuck but still big enough for the pit to get pushed down through the hole. I set up the board to hang over our picnic table and put a bowl on the ground to catch the pits. Pretty soon we had an efficient cherry pitting operation. There was much economy of motion by grabbing a cherry on the left and dump the pitted cherry in a pile in the right. It worked so well that I drilled a hole on the opposite side of the board so that Becky and I could pit cherries at the same time.

The cherry's possible big weakness as a preservation fruit is all of the prep time it takes to pit them. This pencil-and-board method may do a lot towards making it easier to produce a fair amount of fruit quickly and easily. I'm saving this board for next year!

Big thanks to the Portland Fruit Tree Project for organizing the picking (that was a lot of work!) and to Feeley's Fruit for sharing their wealth and not letting this fruit go to waste. There will be some very delighted people receiving Oregon Food Bank boxes. I will be sure to buy peaches from them when they come in season at the Hollywood Farmer's Market. (This is probably the best link for finding Feeley's Fruit.)

Father's Day sauna tale, the urban muk'eevik

2009-06-21T13:28:00.001-07:00

In a blog where I write about the good life of solar showers, soaking and saunas, it is important to explore the origins of my interest in this subject. For Father’s Day, here, I share the story of my father’s steam bath, its origins and the important influence it had on my own enthusiasm for a good sweat. (Thank you, Dad!) This particular sauna is where I learned my love for the activity. It remains to this day my all time favorite and not just because of the memories. It has more to do with its character, its proper proportions, patina and location as an urban Alaskan sauna.

The specific details of the steam bath’s origin are a little obscure but I can offer an outline. For starters, I should note that this was constructed to be a proper Alaskan “steam,” not a fussy and sometimes overly austere and minimalist Finnish sauna. I use the two terms interchangeably but favor “steam” over “sauna” for a variety of reasons. An Alaskan steam is different than a sauna. Really it is more like a Russian banya, with more water. It is its own unique creature that has historical antecedents in mining/fishing/logging camps, the Russian colonial period and native traditions.

Dad was inspired to undertake his backyard steam after spending time in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta area of Alaska. In the late 1970s Mr. McCabe worked as a contractor to the villages of Naknek, King Salmon and Dillingham. He was the hired gun to either clean up or establish property tax rolls for these villages. In this part of Alaska there is a deep tradition of steams. Many folks have them outside their houses in the native villages. In Yupik they are called muk'ee. “Muk'ee” means bath and “vik” house.

The McCabe steam was converted from an old shed. The shed came from an equally old small house in the working class neighborhood of Fairview in Anchorage. The shed was probably built in the 1920s and is constructed out of whatever the builder could get his hands on, spare boards and even doors. One side looks like it was made of recycled tongue and groove doors. There is even an old keyhole cover and escutcheon plate for an old rim lock door strike mechanism still attached to one of the old door-now-siding pieces. The above photo would have worked better if I had taken it horizontally which would show better how this is a door laid on its side. (If you look closely the slots on the screws of the two plates are still aligned, all vertically, at least in relation to the door.)

The doors and other siding appear as if they might have had some use in the railroad. The Alaska Railroad was headquartered, and has its repair yards, not too far away.

To start the project, the shed was moved to the backyard of our house off of K Street. I remember a bunch of my dad’s friends helped lift the shed over the cinder block wall in the alley and set it in place on top of a wood platform in the back yard. There was lots of grunting, and yelling at me to stay out of the way and to watch my fingers.

Then came the very long process of finishing the interior. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of work to be done but it took a number of years. I helped out a bit here and there. I remember evenings in the backyard with dad puttering away on the project. The garage door would be open. He had a Craftsman radial arm saw, peanut butter jars full of nails and a constantly-full coffee mug of low-grade red wine. We listened to the relatively-new-at-the-time local public radio station, KSKA. I remember listening to salsa, blue grass (incredibly popular in the state at the time) and even a locally-produced gay and lesbian talk show. For the time--I’m guessing around 1977--it must have been politically loaded especially for a small state like Alaska, but then again, Alaska was far less conservative then than it is now.

Up went the insulation, the plastic sheeting and rough-sawn boards for the ceiling. The walls and benches were redwood. Even then they were expensive. A perennial cheap skate, Dad took great care not to mess up his cuts. When he did I heard about it.

The effort to do this finish work slowed to a crawl. Some work would get done and then it would sit for months. From start to finish the project may have taken two years to complete. Once it was done there were a few parties where friends, particularly those who helped move the shed, were invited to steam. Then, maybe kind of like the family boat, it didn’t get used so much.

We were in Hawaii on vacation, I’m guessing in 1978 when my parents took a phone call from the hotel. The tenants who were living in the family’s basement apartment called to say that there had been a fire in the steam. Someone had lit it, presumably to use it. The sauna got too hot and it caught on fire. The tenants discovered it burning and called the fire department. The interior was pretty uniformly charred. It was a sad sight with much hard work lost.

The fire also drew some attention from the authorities. The shed did not meet lot line set back requirements and the wood stove was certainly much too close to the interior walls. We may have received a letter from the city about this, but after a while the violations were forgotten. The steam sat in it’s burned state for a year or so and then Dad set about rebuilding it. Charred wood, particularly from a house fire, can have a very unsettling smell to some folks. In spite of this, my father’s approach to restoring things was to simply flip the charred redwood boards. Those boards cost a lot of money, you know. At the time I was a little appalled. For three or four years the sauna retained the strong burned wood smell but eventually it went away or at least blended into all of the other aromas of a good steam. I look back on this now and appreciate the burned wood actually. The fire in the steam might be considered as if it went through a conditioning stage. Like primitive Finnish saunas and Native American sweat lodges, the room is first filled with smoke from an open fire. Then it's opened up to clear the smoke before people enter to sweat. The smoke aroma is part of the experience.

When I was in high school, the steam bath was used more frequently with friends. It wasn’t until my brother’s generation arrived that the steam really got a regular workout and I more profoundly learned to appreciate the virtues of the steam/sauna.

My brother Michael, largely in cooperation with one particular friend, Paul Adasiak, had sauna parties with his high school friends. All long-time Alaskans, they may not have experienced many other Alaskan saunas or steams, but they intuitively understood the vital role a good steam plays in lifting spirits in a dark cold winter or how it was an excellent way to appreciate the glory of the endless Alaskan summer sunset.

During college I spent a year living in Anchorage. At this time my brother’s crowd began having more frequent sauna gatherings. I would tag along. I have to admit, sometimes I found them a little unsettling. Here were late-teenage boys in the throes of teenage-ness. There was alcohol, shit talking, hair-brained philosophizing, high energy and passion, but mostly we had a lot of laughter and fun.

Michael and Paul, were unabashed hedonists and they took their hedonism to new levels. Certain rituals evolved from their own peculiar form of steaming. They would cook for a while then the water came out. First on the rocks and then it would be slowly and sensually poured down neighbor’s backs. Folks would scrub each other’s backs with loofa pods. Almond-scented Doctor Bronner’s castile soap was popular for some reason. The steam sessions were mostly young men but they were almost always coed. The evening often would end in a large group shower inside the house where people would soap each other down and rinse off. I used to joke it was like a softcore porn party. As far as I know, no one ever got overly aroused (or, ahem, turgid) but it was little too far out for me. Predisposed to being reserved and uptight, I would sit the orgy showers out.

Still, one of the reasons I appreciate the steam bath so much is that it is like an express train to sensuality. I live in my head a lot and the steam is a very sensual physical experience. It helps ground me back in the world of physical sensation. I bet this is a reason why it is so popular in Finland. The Finns are notorious for being uptight and reserved. Perhaps the sauna is a pleasurable way to forcibly compensate for a national tendency towards being uptight? At any rate the degree to which my younger brother‘s crowd took their pursuit of relaxation and pleausre taught me a lot. And it was the frequency of these guys using the sauna that conditioned me to acquire a taste for the steaming habit.

After college the steam bath sessions turned into a more mature crowd. I'd fire up the sauna and about once a week we had a regular crowd of friends. It was a fantastic way for people to get caught up with each other lives. Sometimes the conversations were mundane. Sometimes we'd voyage into uncharted philosophical territory. During this period the steam was more of a salon of good conversation.

As mentioned earlier, Dad's steam was an urban Alaskan steam bath. It was built very much influenced by native village muk'eevik and cabin saunas but it is located not far from downtown Anchorage in a relatively dense residential neighborhood. The steam opens up out onto the back alley. It was always convenient for a friend to drive or bike up in the evening. We’d often all pour out and run up and down the alley to get the circulation moving. It was fun to dive into a snow bank or roll down the grassy hill in the yard opposite the garage and steam. We could stand outside, drinking beers, steam rolling off our bodies, and watch the traffic go down the busy L Street artery. Occasionally this would surprise a hotel guest, looking down at us from the nearby Inlet Towers, or an unsuspecting driver going down the alley.

Like my backyard sauna in Portland, Oregon it’s great to take a primordial experience with smoke and fire and sensuality and drop it into an urban setting. There is something liberating and revolutionary about being this free in the middle of the city. It’s not the shock value but being in a completely different and somewhat heightened (or at least altered) physical and mental state in the context of cars, pavement and houses.

In the early days Michael and I steamed with Dad and his friends. Later there were times when Dad would come down to visit while we steamed. He steamed with us once in a while but I think the conversation got a little too rambunctious. It was great to have him sit around for a bit, maybe drinking a beer with us while we cooled off outside. I’m sure he enjoyed seeing the sauna well used and appreciated. We thank you, Dad, for the vision to build an Alaskan steam in your backyard.

Too bad neither Michael nor I live in Alaska to continue its regular use. For now we need to focus our attention on making repairs so it doesn’t deteriorate. The rolled roof is completely missing in some places and water is coming in around the chimney.

King Farmers' Market responds to bike parking demand with new bike racks

2009-06-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

As we reported a few weeks ago, the overwhelming bike character of the new King Farmers' Market is a big factor in its success. The chemistry of the neighborhood--demographics and geography--worked together to create a well-attended market where bikes are the primary means for getting there and back. However, unanticipated demand for bike parking has been a challenge. There simply were not enough spaces. Without adequate parking it didn't take much to overwhelm all other options such as sign poles and fences. Biker frustration had the potential of staling the successful launch of the new market.

The Portland Farmers' Market and the Northeast Coallition of Neighborhoods (NECN), the two sponsor organizations, initially rented racks from BikeRacker. The rentals worked well, helping support the bike traffic during the critical incubation period of the market. But the weekly rental was not in the budget and not sustainable. NECN improvised for one week with a creative solution. They brought in an extension ladder and locked it between two sign posts, adding some locking spaces without costing anything.

Along with the ladder as a bike rack, the NECN table kept a donation coffee can for people to give cash directly toward the effort of acquiring new racks and paying for the previous weeks' rack rentals. In the mean time, an effort was made to work collectively with different organizations to find a more permanent solution to the parking problem. The word went out to various city organizations for assistance in attaining new racks.

Last week new racks arrived and they were ample in number! As of now there are 20 installed on the 7th Avenue sidewalk and within the King School grounds. According to the NECN, 30 are planned. Judging by the nicks and scratches and the occasional sticker on the racks, these were some that were saved from other locations within Portland. Quite possibly they are some of the downtown bus mall bike staples that were removed and replaced with gleaming stainless steel versions along the new MAX line.

Here are additional staple racks waiting to be installed!

Incredibly King School had practically no bike racks prior to this effort. I counted two original preexisting staples at the school and nothing else. Is this a problem elsewhere at other Portland Public Schools? The appalling lack of racks at King Elementary may be part of the reason for the swift response. But what about other schools? While there are a few bike racks at my daughter's nearby school, Sabin Elementary, there frequently is not enough space to provide convenient locking for all bikes.

Strawberries dried, first drying of the season

2009-06-15T18:52:00.001-07:00

Last weekend was a busy one. Saturday the family drove out to Sauvies Island for some U-pick strawberries. We came back with about 45 pounds! With strawberries you don't have a lot of time after they are picked before they go bad and we didn't have a lot of room in our refrigerator. They either need to be eaten (always a viable option!) or preserved pretty quickly. Becky, super woman, dove into action and started canning. With a little help from me and Greta, she cranked out a huge quantity of canned strawberry jam!

I used our berry bounty to take the solar food dryer out on it's maiden voyage. Today, Monday, I harvested the strawberries out of the dryer. Overall it was a success. I did have some observations that are worth sharing about the dryer. (One of my intents with this blog.) As mentioned earlier, I built two solar dryers based on plans from Eban Fodor's book The Solar Food Dryer.

Some notes on the trial run of the dryer
Saturday was an overcast, cooler day and it was late afternoon by the time I had all of the strawberries cleaned, cut up and loaded on the screens. I was able to grab some late sun to get the dryer up to around 110 degrees but that didn't last too long. I was paranoid about fruit flies. We are in the midst of a gigantic fruit fly bloom in our compost, about eight feet from the dryer, so I needed to maintain a higher temperature in the dryer to discourage the flies. I was forced to plug in the dryer over night. It was a little discouraging doing so for the first use of the dryer but the circumstances made it necessary.

The dryer worked. The scent of the drying strawberries was wonderful but it quickly developed significant condensation problems. The night was cool and lots of water built up on the inside of the glass. The strawberries probably retained a lot of water from being washed and they are inherently pretty water-laden anyway. Moist air hitting the cold glass surface caused big water drops to accumulate. Some of the water ran down the inside of the glass and dripped on the screen at the back of the dryer. Maybe a possible solution here is to put a blanket over the glass at night. This would help keep the glass warmer and probably improve the efficiency of the dryer.

One problem I discovered with this dryer is that I forgot to install any screen in the top ventilation door. Oops! This needs to get fixed since keeping bugs out of the dryer, especially when drying sweet stuff, is important. For this batch, I tried to keep the vent door closed as much as possible to keep the flies out by limiting access and maintaining a higher temperature. This meant that I wasn't able to evacuate the moist air as quickly as desirable. I noticed that mold even built up by the side vents. Welcome to Oregon. This is not acceptable. That vent door needs to get fixed!

Comments on drying strawberries
It's weird how there is so much variation in the taste from one strawberry to another. This makes me a little undecided how much I like them as a drying fruit. Some of the first berries I tasted had an odd sort of chemical taste (acetone-ish?) to them which I think is related to the speed and temperature of the drying. (I'm sure there is some food science explanation for this but it's beyond me.) I don't seem to notice this taste as much now. Other berries were absolutely dreamy. The drying concentrates the flavor, making the berries tangier, sweeter and more "strawberry-y" tasting.

We tried some in our Cream of Wheat this morning. For hot cereal, I think I still prefer plums but maybe the berries need to cure in the half gallon mason jar for a while. One problem with the solar dryer is non-uniform drying. A few weeks in the mason jar will help the berries cure to a uniform consistency. Right now some are chewy and some are crunchy. The crunchy ones take a bit too long to soften in the hot breakfast cereal for optimal eating, though as-is I prefer the over-dried crunchy ones for snacking. I have a tendency to over dry fruit. I'm still not very confidant how well partially-dried fruit will stay preserved. This will take some trial and error.

I read some of our old 1970s drying books for information on drying strawberries. These books heartily endorse strawberries as a good drying fruit. One important tip is to place the berries skin-side down otherwise they have a tendency to really get glued to the screen. I was a bit haphazard with my berry placement and some did turn out to get pretty stuck. By pressing up from the underside of the screen, I was able to get the berries free. Still it took a bit of extra effort. The more the berries were dried the easier it was to release them from the screen as they tended to snap off. Some of the less dry strawberries smeared as I was taking them off. Maybe extra dry is the only viable way to dry strawberries?

One book suggested to cut berries into half inch pieces. This is a little vague. Next time I'll stick to simply halving them and quarter the particularly large ones. Quartering rather than slicing prevents a flat fleshy inside surface from getting stuck to the screen. A quartered piece still has some outer skin to put face down.

The two trays, fully loaded with berries, yielded about two pints of dried fruit. Strawberries shrink considerably when dried! We produced these just in time to replace our exhausted supply of plums, though really we should be eating the real thing, fresh strawberries!

And that's probably more than you'll ever want to know about drying strawberries.

King Neighborhood Farmers' Market, Where are the cars?!

2009-05-31T15:24:00.000-07:00

While Saturday was Bike Day for the PSU Portland Farmers' Market, a biking phenomenon of its own quietly unfolded the next day at the new King Neighborhood Farmers' Market. The King Farmers' Market is the fifth and latest farmer's market organized by the longtime non-profit, Portland Farmers' Market (founded in 1992). This particular market is put on in collaboration with the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods (whose office is conveniently right next to the market). It is one block south of NE Alberta Street on 7th and Wygant in the King Elementary School parking lot. There must have been some serious pent up demand because, even though it started without too much fanfare on May 3rd, in the past few weeks it has quickly blossomed into a crowded and thriving event.

For bicycle enthusiasts one of the most exciting aspects of this particular farmer's market is the huge number of bicycles that arrive for good food and fresh local produce. There is obviously something conducive with this neighborhood, shopping locally and bicycle riding. It seemed as if very few people actually arrived on cars.

When my family arrived in the morning around 11:00 (the market is open Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) we had serious trouble finding a place to lock up our bikes. Eventually we settled on a special rented bike rack that was brought in specifically to meet the bike parking demand from BikeRacker. Every other possible nearby fence and pole was spoken for.

We weren't the only ones who noticed the surprising concentration of bicycles. Last week a local bike enthusiast and shade tree mechanic saw the same thing. After locking up our bikes I noticed that nearby (comfortably situated under a nice shady tree of course!) there was a person with a folding Park bike stand and small set of tools. I went up to say hello and see what was up. I met the friendly mechanic, Mark. He said that, after visiting the market last week and seeing the shear number of bicycles, there was an opportunity. Like an entrepreneurial lemonade-selling kid capitalizing on a hot day, he'd take advantage of the unusual bike concentration. Mark offered free inspections, including chain lubes and tire pressure checks just for the chance to look over bikes and give out his contact info for possible future maintenance work to his neighbors. While we were shopping, a number of people got their bikes hoisted into his stand for a quick looking over. It was a cool service and a nice addition to a surprisingly bike-friendly shopping trip.

Outdoor solar shower

2009-04-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Our outdoor shower is simply great. From around April (if we're lucky and it's sunny) through October (again with sun), I am able to use our solar-heated outdoor shower. Nothing beats arriving home from work, after a sweaty bike commute home, and taking a relaxing hot (and free!) outdoor shower. Sometimes the sun shines on me. I can listen to the birds sing and smell the fresh air. In the winter the outdoor shower has become a necessary part of our sauna.

When we put the shower together eight years ago it was definitely out of necessity. I threw it together one afternoon just as we began the remodel of the one and only bathroom in our house. We needed someway to get ourselves clean during a significant remodel project.

This particular bathroom redo was a bigger project than usual because we had to undo layers of previous muddled remodeling. Becky and I moved and re-framed the walls and the 100-year-old plumbing had to be completely redone and relocated. Once the old acrylic bath tub was removed, we had to do something with the original window opening that had been covered over with vinyl siding (on the outside) and the icky mold-growing acrylic bath tub cum shower surround (on the inside). Since we were doing all of the work ourselves on the weekends and in the evening, the project would take a long time. With the bathroom tied up for a while, how were we going to stay clean and stink-free for our day jobs?

The solution was the outdoor solar shower. It worked so well, especially when used with our sauna, that we've maintained it and continue to use it.

The shower, as built and in principle, is incredibly simply. It is essentially a single purpose solar batch hot water heater.

The solar heater
I had saved an old (10 gallon?) RV electric hot water heater for the project. With a Sawzall I removed the outside metal jacket and then the fiberglass insulation. I spray painted the tank matte black with standard high-temp barbecue rattle-can spray paint. The tank then went up on the roof of the garage, resting on some plywood with a couple of 2X4 feet so the roof rain water could drain under it.

Around the outside of the tank I built a "green house." A local used building supply Portland institution, the Rebuilding Center, supplied the sheet glass that were taken from old windows. I cut this up and glued the sheets together into a box using silicone caulk. (Silicone caulk is amazing stuff, up there with duct tape and Gorilla Glue.) The back side of the glass box was chip-board plywood painted white to seal out rain and reflect light back onto the tank. The plywood is aligned toward the north side of the box. Practically no solar gain comes from this side and the plywood is an easy medium to pass the plumbing through.

The shower
A semi-permanently dedicated garden hose provides the water for the shower. The hose transitions in to PVC and then CPVC pipe. Before the shower, the water "T"s, half going up to the solar heater and the other half serving as the cold water supply.

Here you can see the water entering from the right. At the first "T" water goes up to the hot water heater tank and continues to the left to the shower faucet. At the faucet the cold water is mixed with the hot water that comes from the roof. It goes up the galvanized steel riser and comes out the shower head.

The shower hardware is simply a junked old cast iron pipe shower riser and attached Delta shower faucet. Over the years I've used a few. One I saved from an old house remodel from my maintenance days. Another was was the shower from our house. The Rebuilding Center supplied the latest.

For a period of time I used the acrylic shower surround taken out of our bathroom to help "finish" the shower. The acrylic covered the plumbing and kept the water off the siding. A few years ago I figured out that it was accomplishing very little and was simply butt ugly. So I threw it out. The old wood siding was holding up fine to the occasional water exposure. (Hey, it rains all the time here in Portland and has done fine for the past 100 years.)

Notes on the day-to-day practical use and abuse

Cowboy Club Med, a Visit to Summer Lake Hot Springs

2009-04-21T21:01:00.001-07:00

It took us a long time, but the family finally made a visit to Summer Lake Hot Springs. The experience really exceeded our expectations so it's worth sharing.

About ten years ago I found a short mention and photo of the historic and isolated hot springs bath house on the internet. Summer Lake is located in high-desert south central Oregon about two-hour's drive south of Bend, not the sort of place you can make a quick weekend get away too. I tucked this info away in a note on my computer and kept the dream alive of someday visiting.

Getting There

I was able to finally make it happen last weekend. The family went down to participate in the Burgundy Topz Scooter Club's 23rd annual camping rally, Scootouring. The rally starts in Sacramento. Becky's dad, Mike, and his wife, Pat, just moved into a new house in Cool, California which is located in the "gold hills." As luck would have it, their new house is actually very close to the traditional Scootouring camping location. We trucked a scooter down, had a brief visit and one-night's stay in Mike and Pat's new house and the next day meet up with the ride. As usual, it was a fantastic camping experience.

Early Sunday morning, we packed up for the return trip to Portland. To get to the hot springs, instead of taking I5, we went over to Reno, Nevada and took 395 north.

It was a long drive and pretty tough on our eight-year-old daughter, Greta. We arrived in Paisley, Oregon around 7:30 p.m. and decided we needed to get something to eat before checking in at Summer Lake Hot Springs which was a few miles away. We pulled into the first (and really probably the only) place we saw, the Homestead Restaurant. The waitress looked a bit frazzled. She was hurriedly loading beers into the cooler behind the register. We were told it might be a 20 minute wait before we were served because there was a big party in the back room. Having no other options, we sat down.

There was indeed a big party and it was all cowboys wearing true-to-life cowboy regalia (including their hats on indoors). They were having some sort of association meeting but they were also having fun drinking beer. While we were waiting, a couple groups of other local families sat down in the main area where we were. Picking up on some of the conversation, the families were ranchers too and most of them were duded-up in cowboy hats, boots and even spurs. Very likely there was some rodeo-type event in the area that day. Even so, it was evident that in this part of Oregon they take cattle ranching and cowboy culture seriously. Maybe I was a little giddy from the day-long drive, but I thought practically everyone in the restaurant had charisma. The people seemed full of character: strong, healthy and reasonably happy. Maybe there's something to be said for living in cattle country?

On to the springs

By the time we finished our food it was dark outside. We were a little worried we would be checking in too late and imposing on the proprietors. We showed up sometime after nine. It was late but we were graciously received. We were pointed in the direction of our cabin. The bath house was noted off in the distance with simple instructions to "help yourself." It was totally dark out but there were some lights on in the bath house. That was good enough for us.

I think one of the reasons I love soaking and sauna-ing so much is that, as I get older, I tend to get pretty sore muscles, especially in my hips after sitting all day. (Stupid desk job!) After driving for most of the day I was eager for some righteous "hydrotherapy." We quickly unloaded our stuff, grabbed towels and headed for a soak. We stumbled our way through the dark, partly dazzled by the incredible star show.

I was entranced by the bath house. It was empty, quiet and completely unsupervised. It was an old structure (built in 1928) and a bit like being inside a barn, peeling paint, dust, rust and a few spider webs. All was peaceful and quiet, with the only noise the calm steady pour of the spring water into the pool. After 9 p.m. bathing suits were optional and, amazingly, the bath house was open 24 hours. This was true cowboy freedom!

We found changing stalls and the showers. (Do you need changing rooms when no one is around?) We got into our birthday suits, and headed for the showers. Even though there is abundant geothermal hot water, there was no hot water for the showers. The website made it clear that they wanted people to "wash your bums" to help keep the pool safe and chlorine-free. We dutifully washed our bums in the bracing water. This really wasn't so bad knowing that blissful warm water awaits.

We soaked in the pool for a while, taking in the amazing rustic atmosphere of the space. We heard some voices outside the bath house. Greta did some exploring and came back to report that there was an outdoor soaking pool made of rocks and concrete at the back of the bath house. There were a couple of people finishing up their soak back there. Once the other folks vacated, we relocated to the outdoor pool. It was much hotter, making for a more vigorous soak. I loved the bath house but being outside in the hotter water under the stars was just what I needed.

The experience of soaking in the outdoor pool and looking up at the amazingly clear high-desert night sky was one I won't forget. There's really something to be said for looking out over the universe from the comfort of warm, womb-like water. The universe is gigantic and cold. It can seem lonely and unforgiving, but from my position it didn't feel that bad.

After the soak we slept like babies. In the morning I brought my camera out and explored.

The Cabin

There were two small cabins built next to each other. They were built on concrete slabs that were geothermically heated. When we arrived the night before, our cabin was actually too hot and opened the windows to cool it off a bit. We were impressed.

This one is the "Paisley," named after the nearby town

This one is the "Manzanita," where we stayed

I thought our cabin was nice and well-proportioned. It was put together carefully and thoughtfully. We appreciated the interesting choice of materials in the construction. Notice the re-used corrugated metal roofing. This probably helps to keep the space cooler in the summer.

Much of the interior wood was salvaged old-growth clear vertical grain fir, replaned and sanded. If you looked closely you could see old nail holes.

Here is a good photo showing the reuse of an old ball-tipped door hinge.

I liked how the door and window casing was consistent with what would have been done in the 1920s in the area. There was the screen bead piece just under the top horizontal board but no crown lintel. Nothing fancy but it was the way it was done, particularly in working-class structures or out here.

The kitchen counter surface was made of red linoleum. It reminded me of my family cabin's 1950s kitchen counters in Hope, Alaska. It reminded me that this red linoleum is still obtainable in case we ever need to redo the Hope cabin's counter tops!

You can kind of see the counter here in this photo, along with some other cool features.

The old refrigerator was a nice aesthetic touch but it was loud. We ended up unplugging it for the evening. I liked the old sink with the built-in drain board. Practical. Also, how about that re-used five panel door? The builder got it right, right down to the cast-iron escutcheon plate for the door knob.

Here's a pic of the bathroom:

My only complaint with the cabin was that the drapery arrangement didn't seem like it had been fully sorted out yet. We couldn't close the drapes (and there were no blinds) sufficiently to keep out the light. This caused us to wake up a little early.

The Bath House

A stay at Summer Lake Hot Springs includes all-you-can-eat soaking, so we started out the day with another soak and I brought my camera.

Here's a picture of the bath house.

Here's a photo from closer in

Here's the inside

The water pouring out of the old cast iron pipe/spigot for the pool was hot but not too hot. It was relaxing but it wasn't exactly what I consider to be a hot tub soak temperatures.

Standing under the spigot and having the water pour over my head and back was wonderful.

I wished there were a few benches or something similar in the pool so we could sit down and relax. I wondered if that idea was ever tried?

The ambiance of the old bath house structure was simply fantastic. It was great to let my eyes wander around the boards and rafters and daydream. Many people from all walks of life had been here before us. I could imagine tired dirty ranchers using the pool, sharing it with some of the first and truly adventuresome tourists who traveled on Route 395 or whatever dirt road or trail may have proceeded it.

It was pretty disappointing to see graffiti carved into the wood with people's pointless initials and dates. The wonderful fact that people can use the bath house unsupervised and in relative privacy is a double edged sword in that there will always be disrespectful people who can't handle this sort of freedom. I looked around for signs of any really old graffiti. Maybe some of this started in the 1930s and I shouldn't be so judgmental? This would help me view the carvings as part of a historical continuum. All I saw were dates from 1990s and later. So they were just stupid disrespectful people and they don't get any excuses.

After a while we moved outside to appreciate the hotter, smaller soaking pool. It was a crystal clear morning, something we haven't seen too much of over the winter in rainy Portland.

Here's a shot of the outside soaking pool.

We had a conversation with a worker who said that there were plans to expand this area to include two more pools. That sounded good to us as long as there was enough water for it all.

The only thing that would be any better (for me at least) would be to discretely add a wood-fired sauna somewhere nearby and to include a proper cold dunking tank. I kind of suspect that that is what the large steel stock tank (in the foreground of the above photo) will be used for.

Here's a link to the flickr set that has more detailed photos of things.

Crusty mid-century modern, a visit to the Sou'Wester Lodge

2009-04-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

Can you see those trailers in the background!?

For enthusiasts of mid-century-modern design, the vintage travel trailer possesses serious mojo. There's something about the travel trailer that encapsulates a concentrated dose of Americana. Sleeping inside one of these often-musty trailers is like entering an intimate time capsule. You get an in-your-face exposure to past space-age design ideas and "modern" construction materials. How can you avoid thinking about the history of where these trailers came from when you're brushing your teeth in a trailer's bathroom?

Many people are aware of Shady Dell, a motel in Arizona where you can stay the night in a restored, period-correct travel trailer. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have possibly a better collection of vintage trailers at the largely-undiscovered Sou'Wester Lodge. (Warning: web 1.0!) Like the Shady Dell, you can experience them first hand by staying in them!

A few weeks ago, the family took a short trip to the beach. The pretext for the three hour drive from Portland was to look at a used china cabinet for sale on craigslist in Longbeach, Washington. We figured we shouldn't kill ourselves with the long trip. So we planned one night's stay at our favorite hotel, the Sou'Wester Lodge, located in Seaview Washington on Long Beach Penninsula.

Here is a link to my Flickr set of the trip.

The main part of the hotel is an 1892 summer home built for a former Oregon Senator, Henry Winslow Corbett. At some point, the main house (impressive in its own right) was converted to a hotel. In the 1940s or 1950s, drive-in cabins were added along with an amazing collection of now-vintage mobile home/travel trailers. (There are also RV parking spaces.)

Staying at the Sou'Wester is definitely a diamond-in-the-rough experience. I absolutely love everything about this place but it's not for everyone. The current owners are ex-patriot South Africans, Len and Miriam. They purchased the business sometime in the 1980s and have imbued and transformed the former tourist motel into something much more with their love of art, peace and humanity. Frequently the Sou'Wester hosts lectures and classical music concerts. This earthy intellectual culture might not jive too well if you are a tatooed rockabilly-ist. This is no Atomic Age Disney Land.

The owners appear to have viewed the trailers with some ironic distance. They are certainly protective custodians but they also call them "Tch, Tch," a British-ism for tacky. Over the years some of the trailer exterior walls were used as surfaces for murals and practically all of the trailers have guest art, guest journals and found beach objects. This may have been their attempt to breathe some "taste" into the stay. The decorating attempts to bring something softer and perhaps a more-grounded aesthetic to the sharp modern American design ideas.

Nevertheless there are the trailers in all their shaby glory.

While the owners of the Shady Dell probably spend a lot of money and time locating period-correct furnishings and fabrics for their trailers, Len and Miriam are perfectly content with, say for example, a homey late-80s floral bedspread:

And why not? This isn't a museum. Let the Sou'Wester be what it is. A vintage trailer enthusiast doesn't need a perfect restoration to appreciate the trailer underneath. Mostly the trailers are still remarkably intact. The wood in the bedroom of the Zelmar provides an enveloping warmth.

Look past the guest art and you can still make out the original Formica and appreciate an original cabinet hinge or light fixture.

When I first experienced the interior of a Royal Spartan, I was surprised by how well integrated the use of natural wood paneling was with the more modern design items such as the appliances and hardware.

It is certainly a surprising diametric contrast from the aluminum-clad exterior. Some of these trailers are indeed very earthy while still being modern. Is this a synthesis of Monty Python's "horrible" Tinny verses "good" Woody? A new world view?

Sou'Wester's Pacemaker trailer is a departure from the warm wood paneling of the Spartans and the Zelmar.

The interior is angular and I would say is more populux instead of moderne.

Can you get more atomic age than a light fixture shaped like an atom?

There are numerous other trailers at the Sou'Wester. I counted at least five Spartans and there are other interesting models on the site. Surprisingly there's only one Airstream and it's a small one. If you are interested in a stay, it might be worthwhile to show up early and see what is available. In the winter there are frequently a lot of options.

The Sou'Wester is right at Seaview, Washington's beach access. While I don't encourage it, this beach is actually a legal state highway and it can be driven on at least up to Long Beach. If you are in the area, we suggest a visit to the Depot Restaurant, about a two block walk from the Sou'Wester, a bit fancy but, hey, you're on vacation. There are also oysters in Oysterville (up the peninsula) and Jake the Alligator Boy at Marsh's Free Museum just up the road (or beach) in Long Beach. Now we're talking tacky!

Miner's lettuce

2009-03-23T22:43:00.001-07:00

Last year, a little too late in the season, I discovered that we have miner's lettuce growing in our front yard. Becky knew about miner's lettuce from Girl Scout camp in California. She taught Greta and me about it when we saw it at a farmer's market. Miner's lettuce is so named because it was the first edible plant to pop up in the spring. It has important vitamins and helped miners stave off scurvy, or so the myth goes.

It took me a while to put it all together and realize we have a nice patch of our own and it's actually pretty tasty, nothing like eating other common weeds like eating bitter dandelion.

My theory is that it arrived here long ago transplanted along with a Douglas Fir tree that my friend Tom McRoberts brought with him when he visited us. About 12 years ago Tom did a brief stint working in a tree nursery for the Washington State Forest service. I asked Tom if he could score us some Doug Fir seedlings. He brought us three. One was planted in our front yard and is quickly growing to be way too large for the space. (What was I thinking planting it here?!)

I suspect that this patch hitched a ride as a seed in the small bit of soil that came with the tree. Alternatively, the shade and soil conditions created by this tree helped a latent patch take root.

I need to poke around the neighborhood and see if I can find it elsewhere. I haven't seen any elsewhere though. It made for a great addition to last night's dinner salad.

Guerilla fruit trees

2009-03-21T23:57:00.000-07:00

Yaaaarr! Pirate fruit trees.

Over the past year, I’ve been planting fruit trees in the back lot of a neighboring apartment complex across the street from our house. The ownership of this group of apartments and commercial buildings has changed hands a few times over the years, moving from one non-profit to another. Custodianship of the property has been virtually non-existent and the landscaping is currently maintained be a property management company whose sole orientation is “mow and go.” Therefore I’ve taken it upon myself to liberate the land and plant some fruit-bearing trees for the family and the neighbors.

About three years ago a long-time neighborhood resident and friend helped me plant the first tree in a barren island between the parking lot and sidewalk in the rear parking lot. It wasn't a fruit tree but this effort did lead to my current project. I had expressed to my friend how naked and uncared-for this area was. I told her that I wanted to plant some trees in this area to create a visual break between the residents and the commercial buildings and to provide some shade and greenery for the neighborhood. My friend took the lead here and said she had a tree we could plant. It was a Zelkova Serrata, a tree that is often used as a replacement to the American Elm. The Asian Zelkova is related and, though smaller, shares the elm's characteristic of having a gracious and large canopy.

The first tree took a lot of work because the soil was mostly rocky gravel. We spent an afternoon clipping up tree branches by hand that had been left over from a neighborhood clean-up. The clippings worked as a soil cover/mulch. We dug in further compost material and later planted a tree. It took some effort to protect the tree from the landscapers since they had a proven track record of bumping lawn mowers into the trunks on the trees, effectively scalping the bark off the base of the trunk and killing the trees.

After some reckless haphazard watering on my part, the tree seems to have established itself and we are beginning to see inklings of a gracious shapely tree.

The property was redeveloped about ten years ago. With the exception of a great old barber shop and a wholesale record distributor, pretty much everything else in the entire block was boarded up. In the redevelopment, ginkgo trees and other small shrubs were planted along the property’s parameter. Within a year pretty much everything was dead. Those trees that didn’t die from lack of water (I did make an effort to help here but was too late) eventually died from having the bark scalped at the base of the trunk by careless lawn mowers scraping them. It looked awful. Over the years. I did my share of pulling out the dead trees to remove the eye sores.

My friend was my tree planting teacher with this project. She led me through putting up a wire fence around the base of the tree to help protect it from urban deprivations: lawn mowers, cats, kids and bicycles.

Here's a photo of the fence we built to protect the tree:

I want local accessible fruit for eating and preserving. We’ve done a fair bit of canning over the years. I’ve pressed apples and pears for juice, cider and peary (aka pear-based hard cider). Recently I’ve experimented with food drying. The apartment complex across the street has a long length of planting strip that runs along the entire block-long section of the south lot. It's about three feet wide. The ginkgo trees planted here ten years ago have long since died so this is where I’ve been working on sneaking in fruit trees.

So far I’ve planted four fruit trees. Last year I planted a French plum. (Some sort of free-stone plum that I don’t know much about.) This winter I added an Italian plum, a russet-type apple and a Rainier cherry. The last three trees all came from Earth’s Rising Nursery. I ordered them on faith from a catalog that I found at our local coop grocery. The catalog had no email or website listed. I sent a check in on faith and the trees arrived without incident. The trees were bare root, packed in saw dust. This is not something I’m used to. I’m only familiar with planting trees with a soil root ball. Apparently this is not too uncommon and the trees, so far, seem healthy enough. They are even budding a little.

Digging and planting for the last two trees, Greta and I noticed some interesting things. We dug up old (broken) soaker hoses that had been grown over by grass and weeds. The hoses were intended for watering the failed trees and other landscaping that went into the area when the property was redeveloped. Also we were able to take advantage of some of the pre-amended soil from when the ginkgoes were planted. The last two trees that we planted ended up being in more or less the same areas as the ginkgoes so we had some good top soil instead of gravelly soil to work with.

Since it is the first day of spring, there really isn’t too much to show for the planted trees. The photos didn’t turn out that well because there isn’t much to look at. In a few years, with luck, I’ll have some better photos!

Going down the row, starting from the tree in the foreground on the right, there is a russet apple, Italian plum, French plum and a Rainer cherry.

Here's a photo of my own kid/lawn mower defense:

I used rotting log ends that didn't make it into the sauna in time. The posts are steel pipe that I picked up in another neighborhood that were left on the street for scrap. (I was good and left the good copper and aluminum for someone who probably needed the scrap metal money more that I did.)

Farewell, my lovely

2009-03-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

My beloved teardrop trailer has found a new home. In 2005 I discovered this trailer on eBay. The listing was only about two hours old. It took about five minutes of decision to grab it at the "Buy It Now" price of $850. Luckily, the trailer was just outside Portland, Oregon.

I bought the trailer from an older guy living in Estacada who was selling his house along with most of his possessions. The story of the trailer was that it sat for years abandoned in a field in the area at the base of Mt. Hood, having previously been used as a hunting trailer.

The seller was an older baby-boomer hot rod enthusiast. He had spent most of his adult life working as a machinist at Precision Cast Parts. He had some of this hot rods up on eBay at the same time, including a 30s Ford Coupe convertible and a 40s Ford truck. Both each sold for over $30,000!

The trailer was partly customized and partly restored to be towed as a matching accessory to his Ford Coupe convertible. I appreciated his restoration. He kept it true to the character of the original trailer. Probably because it was built during the war, it didn't have aluminum siding. Instead the plywood was painted and it had wax-cloth heavy canvas for a roof. I'm sure that out of respect for the trailer's original state, it was redone, keeping the original painted plywood. Instead of wax-cloth the roof was redone in a very fancy black fabric, historically correct to 1930s Fords.

There were many added details that only a true hot rod enthusiast would care about. The rims were old 1950s rims that had been cut in half and rewelded so that the fill valve was hidden facing the inside of the trailer. The intent here was to widen the tire profile and to give the tires a clean uncluttered look. The door handle was polished and the art deco lines had been carefully filled in with black paint.

The interior didn't leak a drop and all of the basic mechanical issues were addressed. The cool low-profile torsion bar suspension had been rebuilt with repacked axle bearings. The trailer frame had been completely repainted. All of the hardware was replaced with stainless steal. In short, I lucked out. I kept thinking to myself, "I'm not worthy."

It came to pass that I certainly wasn't. I didn't have a place to properly store it. In a couple short years the plywood began to rot and the beautiful paint job began flaking and fading. Another issue was that our family had outgrown the trailer. Originally we could sleep two and stuff Greta on a shelf in the back of the cabin part of the trailer. As she grew older the three of us ended up sleeping together. With only one door to get in and out, it just got claustrophobic.

In another life, if I lived by myself, I would be a nomad out of this trailer. It wasn't perfect but I loved it for its imperfections and character. There was nothing like waking up in a camp ground or in a rest stop, daydreaming with my eyes following the wood grain of the vintage and patina-ed plywood. I loved looking at the simple but very well-put-together structure. A few well-crafted carefully-cut boards were all that were needed to give the trailer a robust structure. Sometimes, if I was desperate for a nap away from the family, I'd sneak out to the trailer. I would go hide here whenever a new issue of the Veteran Vespa Club of Great Britain newsletter arrived from some blissful undisturbed reading time.

The trailer was great for spur-of-the-moment camping trips since we could just attach it to the tongue of the truck and go. The vintage romance was certainly a huge part of the appeal but these trailers are also damn practical and economical. They remind us how far carried away Americans have gotten with over-built gas-guzzling RVs.

This trailer pre-dated the stereotypical teardrop format where a kitchen galley was built into the rear door. Instead we had a rear storage compartment. We loaded a table, and other stuff that comprised our camping kit into this area. It was really just as simple to unload this stuff and set up the cooking area at the rear of the trailer. Admittedly there is also something appealing and gadgety to having a rear kitchen galley where, all you need to do to cook, is to lift up a door.

Someday I may dabble in teardropping again. Maybe Greta would go for a pup tent and Becky and I could sleep in peace? Maybe it would work if the trailer was five feet wide instead of four?

Here's a link to the Becky's Flickr page with a collection of the photos from rallies and the Northwest Spring Fling teardrop trailer gathering.

Second solar food dryer finished!

2009-03-13T23:54:00.000-07:00

About a year ago a subscription issue of Homepower Magazine arrived at our home. One of the stories was about a solar food dryer. (Issue #199, page 58) I pine for an opportunity to do proper solar in our home but for various reasons--mostly siting and financial--it hasn't been practical. The solar food dryer was a solar project I could afford and accomplish and it fit well with my interests. I share it here because I haven't seen many web photos or discussion of this particular dryer and maybe I can offer some of my own experiences with its use later during the harvest season.

Our inner Northeast Portland (Oregon) neighborhood is filled with old turn-of-the-century fruit trees. We have none in our yard but we (my daughter, Greta, and I) forage off of neglected trees in vacant and commercial lots and overhanging branches. Over the years I've put up a fair amount of fruit but canning gets to be a hassle after a while. It's time consuming and labor intensive. Canning fruit, from start to finish, can take up a weekend and sometimes it only happens if a free weekend falls when the fruit is ripe. With plums in particular you need to put them up shortly after picking them. You can't put them in a box and forget about them like you can with apples.

For the past few years we've been drying a lot of plums in a garage-sale-found electric food dehydrator. The electric dryer works well but it is noisy and it does add noticeably to our monthly electric bill, maybe $10 extra for a month.

Dried plums, aka PRUNES, are the bomb. Say "prune" and all sorts of unpleasant associations are conjured up. As a youngster, I drank the better part of a full jar of prune juice in one sitting. I can attest to the unbelievably effectiveness of prune juice as a bowel mover. It gave me hours of gut wrenching pain on the toilet.

Prunes or dried plums however are pretty much like any other dried fruit and don't deserve the same rep as prune juice. They're sweet and flavorful. They keep well and make a fantastic snack or additive to things like oatmeal and baked apple crisps. Portlanders used to understand the incredible urban agricultural value of of the free-stone Italian plum. They are all over the place here and mostly the fruit goes to waste.

When life gives you plums make pluminade!

The solar food dryer seemed like a big enough project that I would get a better return on my investment in time if I made two instead of one. The idea made sense since I only had to dig my table saw out from the garage a few times for the extra effort and I would have less waste if I bought material for two dryers instead on one. After purchasing the full book (the HP article doesn't have the complete plans), The Solar Food Dryer by Eben Fodor, I finished one dryer last year mid-summer, as a gift for a friend. I figured she needed it sooner than I did. (She has a huge garden.)

I've finally gotten around to getting number two done.

Here it is looking down on the dryer, like the camera is the sun:

Below is the rear of the dryer with the doors open and the screen drying trays partially pulled out.
A bit of construction detail
I deviated from the plans a bit by adding extra bubble foil insulation on the very bottom piece of plywood (under the spray-painted black sheet metal "collector plate." I also added standard kitchen aluminum foil on bottom front and back plywood pieces. With the aluminum foil, I glued it onto the plywood with spray adhesive, a trick I learned in a kid's workshop for making cardboard solar cookers. (We'll see how it holds up.)

You can also see that I stapled the bubble foil insulation onto the lower sides of the dryer. Below is the kitchen aluminum foil (on the left of the photo) glued to the front plywood section of the dryer. Just to the right of this is visible a thin section of the bubble insulation that is glued and stapled to the bottom.
Mr. Fodor recommends the foil insulation on the larger back door of the dryer as a performance upgrade to get more drying time later into the season. He suggested using foil tape. I've taken this idea a lot further. The question is will the dryer be too hot now in the summer? I'm starting to get a little nervous about this.

I built the dryer with his suggested electrical back-up of two standard 200 watt incandescent light bulbs. These are to help get drying done on cloudy days or later in the fall when there is less sun. The bulbs I found were 130 volt commercial-service bulbs. The box states that at 120V (more like regular house current) the energy used is 176 watts. Nevertheless when the dryer is plugged in and the vent doors are closed, the internal temperature pretty quickly reached 160 degrees! I suppose with the extra insulation I could use a lower wattage bulb. Is there such a thing as a 150 watt bulb?

A few general comments about the design:

One thing that made me nervous in the plans was the placement of the light bulbs in the bottom of the dryer. The 200 watt bulbs seemed too close to a piece of wood that supports the dryer's bottom section of plywood. Mr. Fodor's suggestion to limit the fire risk was to apply aluminum tape to the wood below the bulbs. My method was to wrap the support wood a few times in foil. (I didn't have any foil tape.) I stapled the foil onto the wood. I like having a few extra layers of foil to provide some air insulation between the foil and the wood.

To help move the the bulbous part of the bulbs away from this wood, I mounted the porcelain sockets on an additional section of plywood. This help give a bulbs another 1/4 inch of clearance from the wood. I mounted the sockets as close as possible to the metal collector plate so that the bulbs are almost touching. This might help dissapate some heat. Now that I see how well the extra insulation works, maybe I can get away with lower wattage bulbs? This would save electricity and add a margin of safety to the design.

The book suggests that the exterior of the dryer can either be painted or coated with linseed oil to provide some protection from getting wet in the rain. I coated the plywood ends and the exterior in shellac. I'm a fan of shellac because it is natural and easy to work with. The solvent/liquid medium for shellac is denatured alcohol, pretty benign stuff compared to other chemicals and solvents. I'm not sure how well the shellac will hold up outside in direct sunlight. I've read that one method of sealing shellac from UV degradation is to coat it with old-school (floor?) wax. I may wait to see how well the shellac holds up for a season before trying this. Alternatively, shellac is so easy to work with, maybe if is begins to fail I will just slop on another coat?

Now all I need is something to dry! Another challenge will be figuring out where to store the dryer. It's a bit big and our yard space is limited. If I can talk Becky into sewing a rain cover, it might work well on our flat garage roof. If that doesn't happen I'll hoist it into the attic.