Holy molly......it's got wheels on it!

Last night, after a couple of hours of scraping & sanding, we hung components......bottom bracket, cranks, pedals, headset(s), fork & front wheel. It's really starting to look like a vehicle which is scary. Up till now the concept of riding this thing has been an abstraction, a distant idea clouded by our focus on the details of structure. Now, however, the reality of riding a wooden bicycle that we built from a sheet of plywood comes to the fore. Throughout the evening Jeff & I kept pausing just to look at the thing and although I had never considered this a beautiful form, just a stepping stone to something else, it has started to grow on me. I like it's rugged simplicity & seductive curves, the clean edges and expanses of smooth blond wood. Jeff & I had a divergence of opinion about edges. Being a died in the wool modernist I like crisp, clean edges. Jeff, being someone who deals with the reality of boats bobbing around in the water and crashing into things, likes nicely rounded corners.

We have a couple of issues, albeit minor, in that the bottom bracket is about 1/2" too low and the rear head tube (the one we attach the handlebars to) is a little low. We will have to be mindful not to pedal through sharp turns and a pair of BMX handlebars will be required to get that nice upright Dutch feel. I also think the cargo bed is too high. Everything else came together pretty easily. Currently the bikes weighs in at about 41lbs with probably another 6 to 10lbs more to add in components. This is well within our target range and gives us plenty of leeway in terms of adding material for strength & rigidity. My gut feeling is that the bike, while being ride-able, will fall short in terms of rigidity and load capacity. But I'm not worried....we have identified several areas where we can design in more strength going forward. The fact that we are even in the ball park bodes well for future iterations. And as we rush to complete the assembly and ride this bad boy our thoughts and discussions have already moved beyond to the next version.......

Maxi Preist featuring Shabba Ranks/ That Girl

Time for that happy dance.........

Update from the shop..........it's stiff, very stiff

No images for this one but a couple of hours ago Jeff, unable to contain his excitement, snuck out to the shop to see if the additional panels we added last night made any difference to the overall rigidity. The judgment has been handed down: way, way waaaaay stiffer. We nailed it (actually glued and nailed it). No need for glass fiber.....scrape, sand and hang the components. We could be riding this bad boy by the weekend.......scary thought.

Dina Washington/ Mad About the Boy

The frame is done!

Another stellar session at the shop (and another late night!). The frame is done bar the cleaning of dried goop and the sanding and filling of holes. All that remains is to construct the extended steerer tube and hang the components! It's hard to believe that in just over two months we have gone from an 8'x4' sheet of birch ply to a complex structural form that has, by & large, come together much as we envisioned. It speaks to the huge potential of computer aided design and CNC technology (I'll take credit for that) but more importantly to Jeff's awe-inspiring craftsmanship (he is, after all, the skilled one in this collaboration). This really hit home to me when Jeff perfectly trimmed the side panels to the head tube block entirely by eye using one of those cool Japanese saws. He then went on to essentially free form the head tube cap in space armed only with a bevel gauge, a pencil and the band saw. I will gloss over the fact the we totally muffed the first attempt by forgetting to drill the hole for the head tube first (duh!) .

The evening started with Jeff demonstrating the strength of the frame by standing on it. I would say it deflected by less than a quarter inch over the entire length. Jeff then nearly gave me a heart attack by jumping up and down on the frame! The frame flexed but didn't crack and I drew another breath. We found ourselves in the odd position of having a cargo bike frame that was very light, extremely strong but flexible as a noodle. And oddly the flex was all in the cargo bed. When we had originally conceived the design our concern, as far as rigidity, was all about the rear end, this being the area where all the energy transfer from the rider to the rear wheel was concentrated and not the cargo bed which we figured would be bombproof. The reality has been the exact opposite; stiff rear end, noodly cargo bed. So the decision was made to add panels to the underside of the cargo bed to fully enclose the struts and lock down the form. This has radically changed the visual of the bike. The cargo bed is now transformed into a stealthy slab which I rather like. "This things going to be amphibious!", chortled Jeff and it's true, it is developing a decidedly aquatic look. We are really hoping this will eliminate the warping of the frame but we do have one more option should we still fall short; fiber glassing the deck but we shall wait and see what transpires when the glue drys......

Next session.....lots of scraping, sanding and then adding parts. Exhausted but stoked we are.

Daft Punk/ Something About Us

Sent from Jeff's (new) i-Phone

So sometimes the curse of living car-free comes to haunt me at an unexpected hour. Jeff is at the shop, right now, and he puts a wheel on the frame, puts the other end on a can of battleship gray Kiwi Coat and stands on the deck! It did not collapse. Then he emails me a photograph just to taunt me. Of course a photo of him standing on the deck might have been more impressive but Essie is an Anatolian Sheepdog and doesn't know how to operate the camera function on an i-Phone.

Steve Harvey & the Cockney Rebel/ Mr. Soft

Existing in that nether world of the seventies between prog rock & punk rock........

At the shop & getting closer.......

Another awesome session at the shop. Every time we come in we seems to get stuff done. Almost as soon as we came through the door we started to pull clamps of the rear end.......the verdict: way stiffer than we had imagined. Not as stiff as a quality steel frame but easily as good as a cheap steel cruiser. In other words within acceptable limits for a functioning rear end. The frame was basically 90% done and weighs in at twenty pounds. That seems suspiciously light even allowing for the extra parts to add but I'm not complaining. The forward head tube is off the center plane by a degree or two but there is little we can do at this stage. The cargo deck is still the 'noodly' spot on the whole structure. Tonight, we installed the dropouts (glued and riveted). Why does the extra bit of wire always get stuck in the rivet gun? The cargo bed side panels (pinned, epoxied and filleted). Outstanding is the rear head tube and the forward head tube cap. I think one more session and we will be ready to start installing parts.....like wheels and shit.

Time for bed..........

Mary Poppins /Chim Chim Cheree

Mary Poppins........straight trippin'

We're getting Kickstarted!

Great news.....our project has been accepted by Kickstarter.com. For those unfamiliar it is a web sight where individuals and organizations can post projects in search of funding. Originally conceived as a way for artists and musicians to raise money for specific projects, hosting a gallery show or recording a demo tape for instance, it has grown to include advocacy, technology and design ventures. The way it works is when a project is posted interested parties can pledge anything from $1 to, well, as much as they want. The beauty of the system is that if a project fails to meets its funding goal no money changes hands. We have set a target of $2,000 within 30 days. I have no idea if this is feasible but we shall see. Projects are encouraged to offer rewards for different funding levels so I thought I might try and laser cut small models of the cargo bike for donors (above $50) to assemble & own along with a small booklet with more detailed information about the project. While we have managed so far to run this whole undertaking on a shoestring it is evident to us that some serious moolah will have to be laid down by the time this is all completed. Obviously we can't submit a bike to Oregon Manifest with janky components we dug up out of our garages so there is a long shopping list of shiny stuff we will have to purchase. Powder coating will have to be outsourced to somebody and while we have connections it won't be free. We would also like to produce a limited edition book of the whole project which will again require more 'wedge'. Hence our Kickstarter submission. It won't be up on the sight until next week at the earliest as we have to jump through a couple of hoops and produce a video but we are excited to see how much interest it will generate.

Leftfield/ Chant of a Poor Man

Update........and the Hand Eye Curiosity Club

So Jeff goes by his shop all the time (it is his shop after all) so he gets to fiddle with the project out of hours. Yesterday he removed some of the spring clamps from the rear end.........and it didn't explode! Jeff's initial report is 'good stiffness'. Of course he didn't wrench on it excessively but so far so good. Thursday we are back at it.....drop outs, rear head tube, cargo bed side panels.

But yesterday was not a work day so instead we went to the Hand Eye Supply Curiosity Club (a fortnightly lecture series) in Chinatown to hear Michael Felix discuss human/computer interaction. Very interesting, very geeky. Michael is the creator of the Velosynth, an interactive sound device for bicycles that responds to motion and the proximity of other Velosynths. After that it was dinner at Gideon's (red cabbage salad with cranberries and aniseed dressing.....mmm) then on to see The Scott Pemberton Trio at the Goodfoot. An edifying evening all round.

Oh, and Laurelwood Porter?............it's good.

Everything But The Girl/ Flipside

Reminds me of home............

Shop Class as Soulcraft/ A review

As is often the case this book stumbled into my consciousness at the optimal time. Somebody thrust a copy in my hand at Mary & E.J's (famous) Christmas party. Having only recently decided to embark on the cargo bike project (okay....we had decided two months before) and experiencing some doubts about how viable it all was this book was the perfect catalyst to action. This is required reading for all of us who go to work every day and then have trouble explaining what it is we actually do (i.e. produce) to friends & families when we get home. Matt Crawford makes a compelling case for a return to a basic level of manual competence in opposition to 'work' that increasingly produces nothing of substance and requires little skill other than the mindless inputting of data. He argues that our mechanized, consumer industrial society has created a spurious division between thinking & doing where technocrats do the heavy conceptual lifting and the proles are left to do, well, the heavy lifting. He points to the fact that very few high schools now still have tool shops where previous generations learned the rudiments of manipulating wood & metal. Our products, or at least the ones we obsess over, are increasingly opaque as to the underlying operations that create function (think iPod). Some of the chapters are hilarious like when he describes his short stint writing abstracts for science papers for an online database. But beyond the evident utility of being able to, say, fix a leaky toilet he suggests that the act of manual labor necessitates ethical virtues, a deep intellectual capacity to problem solve and fosters individual responsibility. It also, I would argue, encourages humility and by inference, community. A very readable & accessible book and a manifesto for all the cubicle rats (and I count myself among them) who pause everyday at their computer terminal to wonder: Is this it? Highly recommended.

The Incredible Jimmy Smith/ The Cat

So pooped last night on the ride home I could barely put a sentence together but in my head I felt like this............

Glueing up the rear end......intense

Our wooden cargo bike is about 90% glued up. Last night we tackled the rear triangle which is an order of magnitude more complex than the cargo bed/head tube mast we did last week. Not only did we have to ensure proper clamping and alignment of the rear stays but also integrate the seat post and bottom bracket blocks, the bottom bracket/seat tube steel component, rear head tube and attendant panels and all of these disparate parts liberally coated with epoxy resin making the whole enchilada a slippy, gooey mess. Good job Jeff owns a small mountain of clamps and an awesome epoxy resin dispenser, that combined with liberal use of zip ties (what did we do before they existed?) and the nail gun that shoots tiny, tiny headless pins we slowly brought the form together. Still, three hours in a jolly plastic coverall and respirator applying 'spooge' into every nook & cranny is about the limit of human endurance. We left of the dropouts, the rear head tube and the outer frame of the cargo bed for another session. Those cold beers Jeff had in his micro 'frigilator' never tasted so good.

Jeff has some misgivings about the intense curve needed to form the rear stays. It's possible the whole thing might explode when we remove the clamps (cool!). Our thinking going forward is to form the rear stays with stacked plywood laminate but that will have to wait for version #2. Right now our intention is to add material as necessary to increase rigidity. The major area of concern is the cargo deck that lacks torsional rigidity. The rear triangle? We shall have to wait and see when the glue drys.

Tim Wheatley/ The Cyclotrope

The Cyclotrope from tim Wheatley on Vimeo.

Hours of fun..........

Parliament/ P-Funk (Wants to get funked up)

Pulling fillets

Somewhat unexpectedly we ended up gluing & filleting the cargo bed and head tube mast last night. I was sure we would need another week to get everything ready but after cutting out the front & back head tube panels, the ones we completely overlooked when we cnc'd the parts, and trimming the forward head tube it was only 9.00pm. "Let's get gluing" announced Jeff and in short order we were mixing epoxy and laying sheets of plastic for the parts. Working with epoxy is icky, slimy work and it gets everywhere. Being asthmatic I have a particular paranoia about VOC's and gnarly particulates so I was fully encased in a jolly yellow hazmat coverall, respirator, goggles and gloves. Jeff nonchalantly opted for a dust mask & apron. For some reason we (or maybe it was just me) decided to go with orange tinted goop for the fillets. It felt a bit like caulking with salmon mousse. Pulling fillets is exhausting work especially when you have a corners to fill and this structure has a lot of corners. After three solid hours of this the front end was done. We are really not sure how straight this is going to be and going forward ensuring correct alignment will be critical. Right now we just want to get something built and so many of these questions will have to remain unanswered until after the rubber hits the road.

However we did start brainstorming ways to replace the goop with something that was easier and cleaner to apply. We created a plywood test piece with an assortment of rope, fabric, paper and carbon fiber strands epoxied into the intersections. We will let that set and come back for some destruction testing later. Ideally we need a material we can easily pre-cut to set lengths, dunk in epoxy and lay down with minimum mess & waste. I'm thinking laces from hiking boots.....cheap and available in all sorts of cool colors & patterns. We shall see.........

Buck Owens & his Buckeroos/ Truck Drivin' Man

Yihaaaa!

Glue.................at last!

Steely Dan/ Jack of Speed

One word.............sublime

@ shop.......

Desmond Decker

This is the latest artist to enjoy an extended residency on Jeff's CD player*.........
*The one in the 'Toaster' (Scion xB)

meanwhile back at the shop..........

Hyper/ We control

If I hadn't been so dog tired and if Jeff's retro Ford F350 had a cd player this is the track I would have blasted out on our drive back from the 'Couve.

Toolpathing: the ninth circle of hell........

Never again will I utter the phrase "something that we can cut quickly & easily on D's awesome CNC machine....". Not because it isn't totally awesome (which it is) but because of the Tron era software required to program the toolpaths. In excess of eight hours were required at the computer to enable four hours of cutting. My hunch is that the designers of this software went on to write the federal tax code or perhaps the terms & conditions of your medical coverage. A more utterly opaque and unintuitive interface would be hard to imagine, however, hours of slow torment paid of big time. Once everything was set D's Multi-Cam fairly tore around our sheet of 6mm Russian birch ply (check the video below). We cut out our proof of concept! High fives all round! Admittedly we had a few do-overs (depth settings seemed to challenge us) and a couple of parts that failed to stick to the particle board and were thus munched by the cutting tool. At one point there was a voltage fluctuation that shut the machine down. We had to unscrew the collet, manually push the gantry back so that Jeff could crawl under the machine with a flashlight & a voltage tester, check and then reset the machine.
But it was all worth it........at just after midnight we beheld a pile of plywood parts representing the sum of our efforts so far. I have to say that my first impression was; 'is that it, did we forget some parts?' and then 'are we seriously going to make a bicycle out of this pile of scraps?' It just seemed so physically insignificant but as we started slotting the parts together the form took shape. The accuracy of the machine is impressive and all the truss frames slid with reassuring firmness into the slots. Obviously our work here has just begun. Next we meet at Jeff's shop for the long process of sanding, assembly, jigging and gluing. Some of the parts, particularly the blocks that house the bottom bracket shell and the head tube, are still to made and we haven't decided yet if we will CNC the dropouts or just cut them by hand. And don't even get me started on the steering. One of the interesting things to discover in the weeks to come will be how light & how stiff? Ideally we have a target weight of 80lbs for the fully assembled bike and currently the dry weight of the frame parts (minus glue and epoxy) is around 14lbs. If it turns out to be excessively 'noodly' then we will have to add material and re-assess how we mitigate lateral flex.

Right now we are the are the happiest wooden cargo bicycle builders this side of the Willamette......

CSS_Let's reggae all night

My favourite trash-pop-punk band from Sao Paulo, Brazil

All change..........

A month long hiatus of intense development and deep exploration of process and purpose. The last time we went to the shop we decided to put the fork-less steering system on the back burner as it was clearly proving to be a distraction. The more we delved into it the more we realized that we were heading down a rabbit hole of cause & effect that would end up draining our will and focus. Fork-less steering was a concept, we agreed, that could be more profitably explored further down the road when other more fundamental issues had been resolved. Instead we shifted gears and strategy and brainstormed the fastest way to create an all wood proof of concept. Basically a down & dirty sheet material form that slots together and could be cut quickly & easily on D's awesome Multi-Cam. A long couple of weeks followed at the computer bringing the form to fruition in Solidworks with many stop, starts and revisions in response to Jeff's woody worldlyness.

But a funny thing happened on the way to creating what we always thought of as a stop gap, a stepping stone to Renovo-esque fluidity. As we started to look beyond our proof of concept to model #2 there seemed to be an enormous disconnect between the formal volumes we were envisioning and the functional realities of what we were trying to achieve. I had always imagined that the CNC'd monocoque, fluid, sculptural & organic was were we were headed but the further we dug into it the more the proof of concept started to display an elegance and simplicity that we found compelling. Conversely my sketches that tried to marry the various hard points via the monocoque process became cramped and unconvincing. Clearly I had hit a conceptual wall. As the Dude famously said;"My thinking has been all uptight about this....". Something had to give.

On the night of the Oregon Manifest Launch Party as Jeff and I slowly weaved our way home from the Lizard Lounge via the Springwater Corridor (that HUB organic lager is quite strong!) we discussed the different approaches. Considering what we were building, was the Renovo way the correct one? Was our flat-stock, slot-together idea more suitable? How realistic was it to try and combine both construction techniques?

A couple of days later I sat down at the computer and started model #2 but within an hour I was stuck. Nothing about it produced that 'aha' moment. I deleted the model and started again pretending that I had never set eyes on a Renovo and knew only of 6mm birch ply. It is at moments like these that I want to kick myself because the model came together with such ease and inherent consistency that clearly this was the direction we should have pursued all along. I was gratified when Jeff had the same reaction when I showed him the model that evening. Suddenly it was like the log jam cleared and a torrent of ideas followed. Forkless steering was firmly back on the agenda as was cable steering, an idea I had floated previously but had abandoned through timidity. A bunch of problems we had envisioned evaporated with the new direction and ideas came tumbling out faster than we could sketch them. It was exhilarating!

Of course all of this euphoria will have to surmount the obstacle course of reality but right now we are stoked! So this is what we think it might look like...........

Phillip Glass/ Vessels

What was & what's next........the story so far

So first comes the forkless steering proof of concept prototype. The image on the left shows the basic idea: take a steel frame (in this case an old Raleigh MTB) and weld on an extension to mount the forkless steering. Originally I had scrounged up some 1.75" tubing from a child's swing set. However Curtis pointed out that mitering the tubing accurately, especially with our $40 Harbor Freight tube notcher, would be extremely difficult so we sprung for some 16ga, 1"x2" steel tubing. The rectangular section will be a lot easier to cut, weld & fixture. It's probably overkill for our needs but it's better to overbuild than have the thing fold on the first test ride. One challenge will be welding the stout rectangular tube to the relatively light gauge down tube.

In preparation for all this we created 'frankenjig' to secure the frame. With a lot of tweaking and applying of spirit levels we can achieve pretty good alignment (or at least good enough for our purposes). The process of building the jig was a lot of fun and we now realize that we could have created something much simpler. The collision of concept and reality is always illuminating. Before this project Jeff & I had never worked on anything together so it was gratifying to see the level of synergy and cohesion in our collective efforts. As I start to learn the layout of the shop and discover where everything is kept this will only get better.

The next stage is to cut, prepare and fixture the rectangular tube and the components needed for the steering mechanism. The steering will require some head scratching. I understand the principle of how this works but I imagine reality will intrude and require some changes. One of the features I have incorporated is the ability to change the 'head angle'. My feeling is that the steering geometry should work just like a conventional bicycle steering where the interplay of head angle, fork offset and the resulting trail should be broadly equivalent but that is just a notion uninformed by experience. The ability to alter one of these parameters will allow for some experimenting without having to grind and weld. The other concern I have is the do with the fact that steering to the right will not feel the same as turning to the left as the plane of the wheel is offset to the right of the head tube. I have no idea if this will be a factor or not. All is yet to be discovered........