Great success and great failure

Well,  raceday was yesterday. I managed to get the bike in reasonable condition by Friday night. Although far from perfect and really untried, I decided to give the "Storm the Trent" elite category race a try. I knew this was pushing the limits of an untested, homemade bike. The first event was the 11 Km kayak, I did reasonably well in that leg, finishing around the middle of the pack. I then transitioned to the first biking leg which started with a fairly long road leg through two checkpoints. After about four hours of racing and two hours of biking, the course started to be offroad on some ATV trails and power cutlines. Things were going relatively well until I started applying more force to the handlebars while working on the hills and the rougher terrain. While heading out from one of the checkpoints I pulled on the bars as I was accelerating and heard a loud crack from the front end. I immediately knew that I had cracked the modified headset that I had rebuilt with epoxy, aluminum, fibreglass and CF. I hoped there was enough strength left to get me to a road as at that time I was a fairly long way in the bush with just trails leading to roads. Luck wasn't on my side as a few hundred metres later the steering mast came right off. At that time I was about 5 hours into the race.

The fibreglass that released from the aluminum

The aluminum that wasn't prepared with etching acid before applying the epoxy. All my other aluminum/epoxy joints were prepped with West System etching....so far so good.

Now the fun really began as I had to figure out how I was going to get "Mad Max" out of the woods with no way to steer the front tire other than hunching over and steering by the remaining knuckle at the top of the fork tube.....this worked for a few hundred metres before I decided I would need to carry the bike on my shoulders. I had around 2-3 Km to go out, once the bike was up on my shoulders it wasn't too bad, although climbing some of the sandy hills was a bit of work, it wasn't as hard as Melissa was working as she had carried on with the race and eventually completed in just over 9 hours, winning first place in her division. She is an awesome athlete!!! It took about an hour to make it out to the road where I met up with another rider who had just lost his teammate to an injury. Watching the ambulance pull away made my broken steerer seem quite minor. We waited in the rain for about an hour until we got rescued by one of the racer recovery trucks. Overall the race was an excellent experience for me, I learned lots about race preparations as well as about my bike, which I am happy to say worked quite well. Overall, I am extremely proud of my accomplishment so far. I am sure the bike will never by finished, so I will continue with modifications and always make it better.

Mad Max as I her carried out of the woods. Spare bungy cords kept the loose
steering mast from flopping around.

So I am back to the drawing board with my steering. I am going to temporarily rebuild this piece so I can at least ride to work on the roads a couple of days a week, but will need to get a proper piece from Terracycle. My friend Richard is now using the Terracycle glide on his bike and it seems to be working quite well. He was the winner of our division at the race yesterday. Congratulations Richard!!!

The modified part before the race

Reworked Rear Suspension=SUCCESS

Last night I was depressed with the sag in my rear shock. It was causing problems with bottoming out the shock, chain management issues and poor gear shifting. Tonight I decided to move the rear shock mounts from underneath the swing arm to the top of the swing arm. My hope was to raise the back of the bike and create some more clearance so I wouldn't bottom out the shock. What happened was the angle of the shock changed from almost straight up and down to a lower angle. The shock works perfectly now. Obviously these shocks are designed to work on an angle instead of straight up and down. Another lesson learned!

The seat is quite a bit higher now, but it feels really good and the shock works as it should. I have a lot more confidence now that I will make it through the ride portion of the race with the bike working as it is now.

I do need to add some epoxy and CF to the bottom bracket, it isn't strong enough yet. I will work on that tomorrow night. Things are on track for Saturday, with no spare time for any more problems.....I know they are coming anyway!!

Oh yeah, I think the name of this monster will be "Mad Max". I am thinking I should mount a machine gun on the front!

Finished???

I am nearly finished. The last several weeks have been extremely busy with selling the house, going to Florida to find a new place to live and visit the kids' new schools. I have been trying to balance construction time with getting fit enough to race......oh yeah, the race is six days away!!!

The good news is that I finally got the bike out onto some trails today. It rides alright, but I have some tweaking to do this week as well as a bit more epoxy work for the bottom bracket.

I have major rear suspension sag problems right now, it is causing me to bottom out constantly and is causing havoc with my chain management. I will recheck the air pressure in the shock tomorrow and work on some adjustments. The lockout lever is due to be delivered tomorrow. Once I have that installed I should have good control over stiffening up the rear end. I hope so anyway, as it is not good the way it is now. If all goes as planned with that tomorrow night I will get the epoxy finished Tuesday night and then tweak the derailleurs Wednesday. Time is tight, but things will work out.

Oh yeah, I will be trimming the end of the steering mast as well, that piece sticking down by the front tire is just waiting to ensure I have the length right.

WOW, that thing is HUGE!!!

Well, what can I say? I own a big bike!! In this photo the seat isn't attached and the bottom bracket is just sitting inside the frame unbonded. Let me tell you, it felt great to put my full weight on the bike and hear no creaks or anything that sounds like a failure. I do need to add some air to the rear shock, it seems like there is very little pressure right now. Once I get it tuned properly there should be more of a downward angle to the swing arm. The rear shock has a lockout option which will allow me to lock it out with a lever on the handlebar. This is for climbing hills and times when you don't need the suspension and is supposed to help with losing power from you pedal stroke going into compressing the shock.

The long piece sticking out from the steering stem will be cut off once I know the correct length. I am going to try to make that piece of 1" aluminum into my handlebar. I have access to some pretty handy electricians at work and I am going to try to get them to bend the tube with a conduit bender. They made a great ergonomic kayak trainer paddle me earlier in the year, so I am hoping they can make me a custom curved handlebar. Once again, I can't do that until I am sitting properly on the bike with the mast adjusted right. I will most likely start with a straight bar and modify it once I have a few miles under my belt.

I bought two bike chains yesterday, my measurements show that I am going to be close to getting by with two, but I have a feeling I am going to need a few inches from a third bike......more parts for the next project!!!

Seat Update

Things continue to go well and now that the house is sold I can put most of my spare time towards the bike. The seat is coming along very well. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn't come up with a good way to mould the lumbar and horn. I decided to make things straightish and then add support once the seat is useable.

This weekend I got the seat base and the back ribs bonded and I layed the carbon on tonight, but I won't be putting on the epoxy on until tomorrow night as I ran out of brushes. A stop into the dollar store on the way home from work tomorrow will stock up my brush supply for the final few lay ups.

Busy Two Weeks

Progress has slowed down a bit, as we have put the house up for sale. To get it ready I had to spend a bit more time doing house stuff, instead of bike stuff. It all paid off, as we had an offer on the fifth day. As long as I get my posting message, the house is sold!! Now back to the bike.

The seat has taken shape really well, I thought I had some photos but I don't. Photos will come tomorrow as it is in the curing stage again tonight. The back frames got epoxied on this evening. The seat is a bit rough, but I think I got a pretty decent shape considering the rudimentary process I followed to make the thing.

If you can recall back to the small bottle cap filled with epoxy to hold the nut that will be the attachment point for the idler, this photo shows the piece CF'ed into the frame. I used some regular epoxy and some thickened with filler. The position is good and it feels very sturdy.

I have the new seat mounts built and installed. They are pretty good and very sturdy. I needed to use some scrap pieces of oak hardwood flooring. It added some chunkiness and alot of weight. but I didn't feel the pieces that I had were strong enough for the shock and the seat. The beefed up ones are definitely strong enough.

The rear shock mount at the swing arm is really ugly, in fact the entire swing arm is ugly. It looks to be functional, but I think I may be in for some cutting as it is starting to look like the shock housing is going to hit the arm when I hit a good size bump. I am going to give it a try for now. The most important part I want to happen in the next week is to ride it on the streets. From there I will fine tune to suspension issues.

The adventure continues......

Seat Action!!!

The frame and balsa (I swapped the insulation spacer for a larger piece)

Progress continues and the deadlines keep coming. We have decided it is time to put the house up for sale in anticipation of our posting message which should have already arrived and will hopefully be here anyday. With the house up for sale my "workshop" is going to have to be put away everyday. A hassle and a time consumer, but necessary to sell the house.

I have struggled significantly to come up with a good seat design that is both comfortable and buildable by a fabricator (hacker) of my caliber. This hasn't been easy and I have decided that the first version won't likely be comfortable but that I will hopefully be able to modify or add on to give it some curves to fit my cheeks and lumbar once I try it out. Once again, this is just theory. I know a good seat needs to have a "horn" in the centre of the seat area and some other shape to hold you in place.  I have also learned that it is very difficult to create that shape without some sort of 3d modelling clay or something along those lines. My theory is to add some foam once I am sitting on the seat. I will hopefully be able to carve and shape the foam to a decent form and then cover it with a layer of CF to create a masterpiece seat.

The balsa laying on the frames and posterboard

The parts, pretty flimsy by themselves

Profile of the seat.

Seat with 2 layers of CF, pink peel ply and custom clamp system (rice and flower in ziploc)

All this being said, the seat is another product of my own creativity. I couldn't find any info on how to build a seat similar to what I had in mind so I created my own concept. I already had the seat frames built from quite a few weeks ago. The plan was to lay balsa strips across the frames and then lay the CF sheet over the balsa. Cover the whole thing in a nice layer of CF and repeat. In order to keep the balsa flat I needed to add in a piece of poster board between the balsa and the frames. It all went as planned and this evening I just finished laying on the two layers of CF. So far so good.