Ten Turing - Tales from the Coalshed: Coming of the Coalshed Racer

[toro1978]

Just get some vinyl sticky foil and cut the numbers yourself. You can take a picture of the original numbers, enlarge it if needed and trace some they are the same font.
The dollar store might also have some sticky numbers (and letters).

 

[GeePig]

Just get some vinyl sticky foil and cut the numbers yourself. You can take a picture of the original numbers, enlarge it if needed and trace some they are the same font.
The dollar store might also have some sticky numbers (and letters).

I went and had a look around the stores yesterday, but here in very rural eastern Poland some things can be hard to find and I am avoiding using the Internet. I love cutting letters and numbers from different materials, but since we have a printer I plan to make some kind of stencil - which is good as I am trying to limit myself to materials I have close to hand.

 

[toro1978]

Ah, I see. I live in a small town and I can't even get bolts and nuts around here. I have to go to the city, which is at least not far.

 

[GeePig]

Ah, I see. I live in a small town and I can't even get bolts and nuts around here. I have to go to the city, which is at least not far.

We have a small supermarket in a large village 10 minutes drive away, that once you enter you can find a small entrance on the left into a small unmarked hardware store that might or might not be open, and includes the kind of bolt you might need for a tractor implement or a combine harvester. If you want to pay by cash you do it there, but if by card you have to use the supermarket till...

 

[GeePig]

So I moved onto the rear, filling the gap between the seat and chain stays with mudguard. At this point I still had to drill it for the upper mount and massage the thing back into its intended shape - maybe first into, I cannot ever remember it not being distorted.

At the moment I am drawing up a shopping list of parts to purchase when we make a visit to the big bad city of Lublin at the end of the week, where I get some time to myself in my garage and go shopping. I think I bought a little packet of those angle brackets I have mounted on the chain stay in Lublin, and they have proved so very useful in mounting different things that I want some more.

Maybe I will even find the missing spoke there.

 

[kingfish254]

You've been busy! I had a lot of catching up to do.
The bike is looking good. I love the shape of the new rims. Cool profile.
Congrats on the coalshed transformation too!
By the way, the barn door is a killer photo backdrop for your bike!!

 

[GeePig]

You've been busy! I had a lot of catching up to do.
The bike is looking good. I love the shape of the new rims. Cool profile.
Congrats on the coalshed transformation too!
By the way, the barn door is a killer photo backdrop for your bike!!

Thanks, that is much appreciated

I have seven sets of barn doors to choose from, in grey, orangey yellow and this dark brown, and I have yet to test them all out. I am torn between the cool choice and the coalshed miserable grey theme I seem to have encapsulated in this project.

 

[GeePig]

The other day I dug through my collection of rear lights. Since I want to run a dynamo simply for the fun of using a piece of old bicycle technology I could immediately disregard the LED lamps. The trouble is that left only a selection of rear mudguard lamps as fitted mostly to Romets between the 1980s and 2000s.

I chose one of the oldest and modified a bracket that once did a similar mounting task on my Tigger project. You can see the scratch line where I later bent the bracket to hide the fixing screw. I quite liked the look of the lamp, but the curved line on the back just shouted where it was 'supposed' to be mounted.

Later I was doing some work on moving the rear bracket holding the gear change cable when I remembered the 1960s Romet tail light I had purchased for Tigger when I was running front and rear dynamos on that. Prior to fitting two dynamos I had considered running the front-to-rear lighting wire through brake cable housing so that I did not have to suffer a single wire wrapped around the frame tubes and stays. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

I found where I had hidden that tail light and did a mock up with a spare bit of old brake housing I had lying around.

A bit wobbly, and I need to rotate the lamp to put the cable hole at the bottom as well as buy some new housing, but I think I have resolved all the rear services (gear change and lighting) in one styled package. It looks a bit like a hydraulic system.

I still have to figure out how it will all work out at the front end, and how I will attach the cables.

#romet #turing #rower #jubilat

 

[GeePig]

Now I have the front and rear lights largely sorted out, now I can do something about my conceptual light: my lead light, born in the USSR!

My idea is to have a light that can sit on a bracket or be used like a handheld torch, not only to see things better but without the usual need to have the bike facing the object. OK, with a traditional dynamo its use is limited, but only because battery storage was never much considered for a bicycle in the past. I do not have the time to develop such a storage system here, I just want the possibility as part of the theme.

I had already stripped, cleaned and repainted the main parts, mostly while waiting to get power to the coalshed, so 'all' that was left to do was reassemble. It was very fiddly, and required much effort to insert everything from the reflector end, keep the hidden metal strips under the switch in place and somehow align two separate elements on the cable that the screws fitted into.

The bulb is 12v twin filament, as an appropriately sized 6v single element bulb was not available locally. Now I need to find something to mount the lamp, for which I was inspired last nigh in the shower when I noticed that the shower head mount sits on a handlebar-sized tube and is designed to hold the tapered shower head. I am sure I had a spare one around somewhere.

#ussr

 

[GeePig]

Today we are back in the city, and I have a chance to sort through the bike stuff in my garage to decide what can be left for later projects and what I need now-ish on the farm. Since this means no work on the bike, I thought I would use up some other pictures I took this week.

This is my vice - which reminds me that somewhere I had a bending bar, the kind that goes in a vice and you hammer the metal over.

And this is my lathe. While this may resemble my vice, it is in fact a completely different tool. Really. Here I am turning down a long hex nut to make a retainer for fixing my Turing to the bike stand, as it turns out that the Turing has very narrow chain stays.

And here is my two-piece bike stand - and yes they are nails, because no set of farm-based equipment would be complete without at least one.

I could purchase more power tools other than the hand drill and jigsaw that I do have, but while I enjoy seeing others use them and indeed have spent many happy hours working in many engineering workshops, I love the seeking of scraps, the hitting of things with hammers, the filing of raw metal and the resulting not-quite-true product of these endeavours.

 

[GeePig]

Now I am back from the big bad city, with half a car full of stuff I harvested from my garage there. What with that and the fact that the neighbour wants me to renovate the bike he bought for his daughter five years ago, complete with bent crank, dinked aluminium wheel and no chain (why can I never find these buyers?), little was done on Ten Turing.

This is my anvil, and a bent crank off another project bike I brought to do some work on. Thank goodness for big hammers!

This morning I began to paint my mudguards and a bunch of fasteners and other small objects, and once they are installed I can move on to recovering the saddle, figuring out how to install the lead light and actually get around to the cardboard additions.

 

[Scrap Wolf]

There is always a plan B, bring in the MC. It's hammer time!

 

[GeePig]

Hah, I take a day off for my birthday, and come back to find I am already shunted on to page 2...

I did find time for a good ride, and began work on the cardboard fittings for the bike. I love working with cardboard, and sometimes I think we had to move out to the country to make room for my work

 

[Scrap Wolf]

Hah, I take a day off for my birthday, and come back to find I am already shunted on to page 2...

I did find time for a good ride, and began work on the cardboard fittings for the bike. I love working with cardboard, and sometimes I think we had to move out to the country to make room for my work

Happy birthday!

 

[GeePig]

Happy birthday!

Thanks, it was a great day, all due to wifie!

 

[GeePig]

I started by drawing up what I wanted to do in Paint, because I forgot to do it when we were in the city at the weekend, where I have Gimp on my computer. Paint is fine, unless you decide you want to change something later. Then it was simply a case of printing it out and checking that the size looked OK on the bike.

After cutting one out I used it as a template to cut the four ovals I will need for the bike. The idea is to make some metal brackets to mount on the frame, then encase them in a cardboard box structure with the ovals as the sides. Then I will crush the ovals flat, trim off any rough edges and then attempt to achieve a slightly convex shape.

I had a supply of cardboard in a plastic bag beside my computer for just such an occasion. It is important to keep it dry at all times, because once it gets damp the rippled paper core begins to disintegrate and catches on the knife as you try to cut it - a right pain, especially when trying to achieve curves or complex shapes. Therefore the first test is always to try cutting any cardboard you are considering to make sure the cut is clean enough. Cardboard is typically made from three grades of paper - the poorest quality for the core, medium for the outer layer that forms the inner side of the box as the content does not tend to move around much, and the best quality for the outer layer for the outer layer of the box as that has to take print clearly and survive delivery. For precision cutting it is best to do the marking out on this outer side as it will cut better, then make only a partial cut around the shape, and then do it a second time to cut right through.

Below you can see that the inner core has a slightly shaggy look because it did get slightly damp at some stage, but not enough to affect this project.

And why 96? Because that was the build year of the bike.

 

[kingfish254]

Happy Birthday! You have the coolest tool selection!!!

 

[toro1978]

Are you in shipping? I read about cardboard preparing for an exam and I was very impressed how much stronger the box gets when it is made of cardboard.
We had cardboard "walls" for the paletts in one firm, which were made of triple cardboard. This stuff was incredibly sturdy and it was hard to go through even with the box cutters.

 

[GeePig]

Happy Birthday! You have the coolest tool selection!!!

View attachment 167704

Thanks!

One of the first things I did when we bought this place was to search for all the tools I could find, and more keep turning up.

 

[GeePig]

Are you in shipping? I read about cardboard preparing for an exam and I was very impressed how much stronger the box gets when it is made of cardboard.
We had cardboard "walls" for the paletts in one firm, which were made of triple cardboard. This stuff was incredibly sturdy and it was hard to go through even with the box cutters.

I have never been in shipping, but these days I work as an editor for a translation agency, and while the translators are interested in learning words I get to enjoy reading the content - and when a client does something like making cardboard or doing strength tests they often really want to tell the world about their product/results. I also make two and three-dimensional mosiacs using the stuff, and have been known to cruise the supermarket aisles for suitably coloured boxes while wifie does the shopping, and then we carry everything home in my new boxes.