It's been a while, but a tilde club email list magically appeared, so i thought this page could use an update.

My main project blog moved to https://bill.fidean.net, run on Drupal 8 instead of the plaintext script i wrote for myself here. As a bonus, there are a lot more photos now.

My house was built in 1909, and has the vast majority of delightful and quirky details that were originally installed. Like the barely cemented-over cistern in the basement, and the lighted push-button switch in the kitchen that turns on the indicator light but doesn't seem to do anything else, and all of the original door knobs, rattling on their little square spindles.

It's not a huge thing, having rattly door knobs, but when you're trying to make your way to the bathroom quietly in the middle of the night it's nicer if they're quiet. Tightening them doesn't really help, because the spindles are just a bit too long, and the square holes on the knobs are worn just a bit, and that's what makes them feel loose, not loose screws.

I fixed them with 2 changes, taking up some slack in both areas. First, I bought some nylon washers with a 3/8" inner diameter and used those behind the knobs. They're about 1/8" thick, and fit within the escutcheon plate, so they're hidden when installed but take up slack from the slightly too-long spindle (or the slightly shrunken 100-year-old maple door). They're a snug fit on the spindle, but not stressed enough to worry about them breaking.

The second fix was for the knob itself. It fits fairly loosely on the square spindle, so i wrapped the end with a few layers of PTFE plumbing tape. It's not tight, but takes up enough space to make it feel better. Between the 2 changes and some fresh lube in the lock mechanism, the doors feel much smoother and tighter, for about 10 minutes work per door.

Our TR6 went into winter storage today. A bit of a shame, since we'll be back in the upper 60s for a couple more days, but prudent, because we also had our first snow flurries of the year last week.

At 130 miles, today's trip was actually the longest one the car has made this year. Since we just got it running again this spring, it's also the longest trip it's done in at least 15 years. It drove great, no problems other than a slightly dragging brake caliper, but we were already planning to pull those for rebuilding this winter. We've probably put about 350 miles on it this year total.

This is a fairly complete list of the work we did on it this year:

• new clutch hydraulics
• new rear brakes, new servo, rebuilt master cylinder
• replaced all coolant hoses
• cleaned, repaired, repainted fuel tank
• new fuel pump
• replaced engine thrust bearing
• rebuilt rocker assembly
• new bushings in throttle linkage
• partial front suspension rebuild, new front shocks
• cleaned carburetors (twice)
• relined window channels on both doors
• converted to modern spin-on oil filter
• full tuneup, new plugs and wires
• lots of miscellaneous cleaning, lubing, and adjusting different areas

List of work planned for this winter and next year:

• Finish front suspension rebuild
• new bushings in rear suspension
• convert rear shocks back to original-style levers
• new tires
• new exhaust

After next year, hopefully the major mechanical systems should be solid and we can move on to more cosmetic things, like refinishing the dashboard and guages, new body seals, maybe carpeting. Mostly more driving though, lots more driving time.

I'm really happy with the progress we've made and how well it's running, having started with a mostly unknown quantity last December. I'm going to miss driving it the next few months, and heading to the garage evenings for tinkering time. It's been a really fun year with that car.

My next project this summer has been an unexpected bathroom remodeling, done over the past week. My only bathroom in the house.

I've had a small but persistent leak into the basement from the 2nd floor bathroom for a few months, but kept pushing it off because it never seemed too bad, just a few drips. Then a couple of weeks ago i happened to be in the basement when someone was draining the bathtub and it wasn't quite a stream, but fast enough dripping that it was obviously a problem that needed fixing.

This is the bathroom before, mostly, after removing the toilet and a wall cabinet. I loved the original maple floors in there, but after 100 years there were a couple of areas of dry rot, and the toilet always rocked because the wood beneath it was shrunken from repeatedly being wet.

With the fixtures out i opened up the floor to find the problem. The sink connection was always a little hinkey, and i assumed the problem was the sink drain connection into the tub line, but that was fine.

The real culprit was the drum trap at the left side. The cleanout cap was corroded on a couldn't be removed, so i still don't know if it was leaking or just overflowing. Either way, it's getting replaced with a modern PVC and p-trap system. Happily, since it's an old and drafty house i didn't find any evidence of mold or mildew in the floor or wall, just the wet plank under the trap.

The (presumably original 1909) lead bend was interesting, and had a cool sticker underneath it. The less cool part was how the flange was built into the pipe, so it gave no support to the toilet once the wood floor gave up. It also meant a lot of monkeying around to find a combination of PVC pipe and flange that would work in that space and while aiming for the same finished floor height.

I'll spare the details of the rest of the interim steps, but suffice it to say that it can get complicated connecting new and old plumbing parts. Shout out to Gopher Plumbing, who helped figure out the correct connection between a clawfoot bathtub and modern PVC drain trap connection (those tubs uniquely have 1 3/8" pipe).

I knew i'd use tile, and have always loved the classic look of small hex. Budget precluded spending almost $700 on the marble version, but this 1" porcelain looks pretty great with black grout. Here's the finished floor, just waiting for the grout to set so i can start reinstalling fixtures.

It was 3 full days (one with my brother helping), and 3 evenings of work to get to this, with about a day and a half of work remaining to paint and replace all the trim and install everything. We had 6 mornings without a bathroom, and i've rarely been happier to live across the street from a coffee shop.

My major projects for the summer have been to build a new kitchen table for my mom, and continued work on the TR6 that began over the winter.

The table was a christmas gift, she's talked about replacing her old table since beginning her kitchen modeling project last year, and also a project i wanted to try building. We went back and forth early in the spring with design ideas and settled on a small 3'x3' top with a 2'x3' leaf at one end.

Her older table was always a bit large, so she wanted something small but that could also accommodate craft and sewing projects, so the one-ended drop leaf was a good solution. It has folding legs under the leaf so she can easily expand or collapse it herself, no need to store a leaf separately, and the table was meant to be against a wall anyway.

It's all solid maple, with most of the wood coming from my very good friend Mike, who happened to have several nice pieces left over from other projects, and donated it to the table. He also has a small planer, so we were able to get everything uniform thickness. I bought the leg stock separately, also in hard maple.

I've never glued up a panel like this before, and it went well, but i'm glad i started with the leaf, as i learned a lot about clamping and alignment before tackling the main top. I also learned that scraping tops is cool, and much, much easier when the glue joints are really really even from the start.

Here's the final table, finished with a medium gel stain and a tough oil urethane finish, full size with leaf up.

And here it is in more typical daily use, leaf down, enough room for the newspaper, breakfast and coffee.

As happens, i got wrapped up in writing a script to automate pages here, blog style, and it's a good idea, but i just didn't finish it, and time spent writing that took away from writing time, as too often happens. So bollocks to the script for now, and let's not leave this on a cancerous note. I'm fine, minus a little skin, and trying to wrap up some project loose ends.

The bike project got finished, but just as the cold was coming on, so it hasn't been on the road more than a couple of miles; an initial road test, and one grocery run in the cold that left me with a blinding headache. I don't think the headache was the bike's fault. So that pristine, lovely bike is going to sit until we thaw in the spring, but in my limited riding i'm still quite happy with it. I'll eventually post some pictures of the final setup. I'm particularly looking forward to building another LED headlight to go with the neat dyno hub i put on it.

The next project is already in the hopper though, and i'm so excited to get started:

This is a 1969 Triumph TR6 that has been in the family for at least 30 years or more, but has been sitting in a cousin's garage for the past 10 years. My brother had it shipped to us in MN, and we're going to get it back on the road. Not a full restoration (we're too time- and money-poor for that right now), but at least safe and roadworthy and stable until it can get more attention.

I recognize the irony of a middle-aged guy (which my brother and i both are, admittedly) getting a little red sports car. It's a ridiculous stereotype. If it's any help, this isn't driven by the need to regain youth or attract the young ladies, but really just as a fun project - the car is a blast to drive, and we both love working on classic cars. It's also a way to honor our dad, who had the car for 10 years or so, tinkering with it and driving it occassionally with our stepmom to see the sunset on the Oregon coast. He died a year ago this month, so fixing and driving a car that he also put some blood and sweat into is as connected as we can be with him now. I can't wait to get it back on the road.

When i last checked in, i had a freshly rebuilt 50-year-old hub and other wheel parts en route. Now to build the wheels.

I really like building wheels, but it's one of bike tasks that you don't get to do very often unless you work in a bike shop, and even then, it really depends on the shop. I worked for a season at the (now) late, great Hiawatha Cyclery, where they specialized in custom commuting and touring builds, including a lot of custom wheels. The owner Jim built most of them, and learned a lot from him, but i initially learned from this wheelbuilding page from the late, great Sheldon Brown.

Unless you have some fancy disk or carbon wheel, all bike wheels have the same parts: a rim, a hub, spokes, and spoke nipples. I really like generator lights on a bike, and i found a great deal on this hub from Rivendell.

After lacing the wheel per Sheldon's instructions, it goes into the truing stand to tighten up gradually. As long as you work around the wheel gradually and keep an eye on both runout and trueness as you go, it's usually a very predictable and satisfying job.

A final tension check to make sure the spokes are pulling evenly and final true, and it's done. Repeat for the rear wheel, and now the bike can roll.

A small diversion in the project blog...

Two years ago i went to my regular doctor to have a mole removed from my thigh. I went because my keys would bump it, and i bugged me, and i'd had a couple of other nuisance moles removed when i was younger and it was no big deal. This one became a big deal when he decided to do a biopsy instead of just taking it off, and it turned out to be melanoma.

It had been a flat reddish spot for years, then raised up over a few months, but i honestly would have ignored it if i wasn't constantly feeling it through my pants pocket. I've always had little skin tags or bumps that didn't mean anything, so this one didn't seem important either. Within the next couple of weeks after getting those lab results, i had a CAT scan (where i found out i'd broken my ankle in a summer volleyball bad landing), and a PET scan, and surgery to remove a 6" long football-shaped chunk of skin, plus a couple of lymph nodes. 2cm margins are a bitch.

That went well though, and once i healed up the prognosis was good, with no sign of spreading or other cancers. I went to my skin checks for the next year, then was laid off, and well, didn't go for about another year. Finally i went last month, and things looked good until the doc found a small spot on my calf (same leg) that didn't look right. Another biopsy, another melanoma, and another football-shaped piece of skin removed, thought a much smaller one this time. I won't be missing any more skin checks, that's for sure.

My grandfather had skin cancer, and my dad died of lung cancer, so i have enough reason to fly the "fuck cancer" flag, but now i have to be on high alert for myself as well. I'm lucky, really, having something that's highly treatable when i have had friends with breast cancer or brain tumors, so i have no complaints. Still, i say fuck cancer, and in particular fuck this cancer, which has been taken off my leg and placed into a little plastic jar, the better for the lab to test and for me to contemplate.

A few years ago i had a period when i went through a series of bikes i set up in different ways trying to make the best (for me) commuting set up. They were largely 70-80s road bikes; some Raleighs, a Peugeot, a Lotus, a couple of Schwinns, and others with no markings at all, truly UJBs.

I liked the style of the 70s bikes best, when bikes had real headbadges, Raleighs were built in Nottingham, French bikes had real style, and the Japanese were proving they could build any of those cheaper AND better (before everything just got cheaper after the bike boom was dead in the mid-80s). As i went through different bikes, i narrowed down my requirements to something that is reasonably quick and stable, fenderable, and has room for at least 32mm tires. That seems simple, but that removes a lot of bikes, especially many modern bikes without such room.

Eventually i gave up the idea of having a separate 'beater' commuter bike and just rode my Surly Crosscheck as my primary bike. It's a real chameleon and has done equally well in cyclocross racing and daily commuting, and seasonally changing it over for racing or winter riding satisfied the itch to keep building more bikes. It was a singlespeed for a long time, and then i added an 8-speed cassette in the back, and it'll likely stay as a 1x8 for a while now.

Then i got this 2-speed automatic hub earlier this spring, and that got me thinking about something sort of like the Raleigh 3-speed that's always ready to ride, but with the agility of a decent road bike. It should have a dyno hub and lights (like i have on my Surly), and a saddlebag, or maybe a front rack. I remember really liking how nicely that Peugeot UO-8 had ridden. The French had a nice take on geometry even if they were stubborn about keeping their own part sizes well into the 70s.

This plan simmered for a few months while i was busy on the house, then when i was at my friends' shop last week i asked if they had any large French road bikes around. They had this one:

It's not a high-end bike, but it might be ideal for this project. It's a Motobecane, with a beautiful fork and even more beautiful use of standard European-sized parts. It was dirty, but the important bits (bottom bracket, headset) were fine, and i replaced most everything else anyway. That picture is the after shot, with wheels borrowed from another bike, and brakes, cranks and pedals and saddle from my parts pile. Those aren't the wheels i'm keeping on the bike, but that's the topic for the next project blog. The stem and bars polished up beautifully, which is a little sad because i'll need at least a longer stem for it to fit me well.

http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-27.html http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-27.html Mon, 21 Mar 2016 01:57:56 +0000

As with many people, i've been trying to figure out what to do with my tilde club space. I have no interest in making a retro website, what excites me more is the chance to bootstrap something new in a limited space.

Constraints drive creativity (at least for me), so i want to apply some modern website thinking to a simpler environment. This is why i chose to build a site with CSS and images yet doing so directly through a terminal, and now backing it up to github. I'm working on a super simple blog posting script, which has diverted some time from writing, tbh.

That's fine philosophically, but what to put here? Building on my earlier tile floor post, I decided to go with a general project blog; website or otherwise. Some will be a rehash of things from my old blog, but i'll add new stuff as i document it.

I built this LED bike light in 2008.

This is an older project, but that same light is on my regular commute bike now, 6 years later, and it still works great. More details are on the original blog post, but the construction is quite simple. Power comes from a standard generator hub (i have a Shimano); the only electrical 2 parts required for the light are the LED itself and a full-wave rectifier, which converts the hub AC to DC required by the light.

The hub puts out 6 volts and 3W, which matches the LED needs nicely. I get a steady light as low as 4 mph and it's been on as fast as 45 mph without burning out or even overheating, despite a lack of any real heatsink. The case is just a copper plumbing part, and it barely even gets warm while the light is in use. I call the 2-clamp mount 'temporary' in the original post, but i never found anything simpler or better, so it's still mounted the same way.

http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-22.html http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-22.html Mon, 21 Mar 2016 01:57:56 +0000

Twin Cities tilde clubbers had a meetup yesterday: 5 members, maybe the biggest one yet? The peak MN Tilde Club moment was realizing that we were having a discussion of usenet history on a rooftop garden in October, with the sun setting and the fall chill setting in, yet all were reluctant to end the meetup just yet. But all good things, etc., so we got together for a picture and called it a night soon after.

Left→right: ~joeld, ~kjell, ~tristan, ~kronick, ~wjc

A couple of local vinyl guys have 4-5 sales a year, but in the fall have a big clearance where everything is $1. So i did a little record shopping this weekend and found this cool Nirvana album among other gems:

Some Twin Cities swintons/tildenizens are scheming a meetup this week. If you're in the area and want in, email me for info.

Tried updating this page through ssh on my phone last night and realized how hard it is to type on a phone on a train while simultaneously keeping an eye on my bike 10 feet away in the bike rack. Anyway.

I know ~ford and some others might be working on a super simple blogging system, but that hasn't kept me from thinking about trying it myself too. I started building something like this years ago but never finished, but partly because i was doing it all through web forms and went down a design rabbit hold from which the project never recovered. Starting as a simple ssh app might be a small enough piece to get it finished.

It's interesting how tilde.club has been evolving (or not) over the past week. I've given up on randomly clicking through the user list both because there are too many to keep track of, and because there are so many inactive accounts. Same for the recent changes list, tbh, but mostly because those log every save, and more often than not there isn't much new to see. It would be more useful to have a system to manually ping an update page (or twitter bot) when there's an update worth reading, and not just a slight change in the page's background color or something.

Logged in to tilde.club last night via sftp to back up my site once i saw that nothing was lost in the crash. Felt a little like cheating. It's interesting that i was followed by a couple of fellow tildenizens on twitter during the outage, and i followed some too. It's like we needed the break from the site itself to connect other ways, and also a way to stay on top of some of the community; otherwise impossible with now 615 members (though not all active yet).

http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-08.html http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-08.html Mon, 21 Mar 2016 01:57:56 +0000

I've been working on my house all summer, one of my bigger improvement projects. The short version is that my house was built in 1909, and hence originally featured an icebox in the back hallway, with no space anywhere for a refrigerator. After living with a partially blocked door for 14 years, i decided the solution was to close a door and open a wall. Specifically, the wall between my pantry and back door hall.

Moving the fridge opened up a shallow corner, so i was able to build a custom cabinet to fit there, making some welcome new storage space that's convenient to both cooking area and dining room.

I knew the floor where the ice box was had rot (maple that's hard as nails elsewhere in the house was crumbly here), but i ended up both replacing the sub-floor as well as sistering the joists there as well. It's nice and sturdy now, and tile went in this past weekend. This is the approx. 5x5' space behind that wall, standing where the wall came out, entrance to the left, blocked door (eventually to be a wall) to the right.

I'll add before/after pix when it's closer to really being done.

New background photo from my 2013 trip to Japan, where i was taken by the craftsmanship of everyday objects enough to make a whole flickr set of the textures of Japan.

My first tilde was at bitstream.net/~connell, where i published casserole recipes and ran a little magazine of short stories called Guff.

I was unknowingly primed for building websites in my first job typesetting on a VAX system, falling in love with messaging co-workers and learning how to mail, setpers, and finger. I'm an online editor now after years as, variously, print designer, web developer, admin, etc. In some ways, since i haven't been actively develop sites lately, editing this in a terminal feels more natural and direct than the machinations required for many modern development platforms.

I'm not usually a joiner, but tilde.club was too oddly appealing to pass up. It's good to reset once in a while. When society collapses and all that's left is smouldering ruins and canned spam, you'll still be able to find a unix prompt somewhere, and maybe you'll find a friend there too.

http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-03.html http://tilde.club/~wjc/blog/2014-10-03.html Mon, 21 Mar 2016 01:57:56 +0000