It's almost Christmas.

It seems that the Christmas - or whatever you want to call it, anyway, the time when people buy each other all kinds of nice things - will come early this year. So behold! my the new-to-me 19" Beargrease frameset is here.

Now, I should have been doing some real work today, but instead I have been caressing this beauty, doing calculations about its weight and in general, ranting about it in social media and different websites. The next, logical move was of course continue here. So. As you can see, I now have a frameset, a crankset (Middleburn RS8 or something; not sure, but it looks nice and undoubtedly it is also light), a Ritchey cockpit and heavy-ish but trustworthy and comfortable SDG saddle/seatpost combo. There is also a Paul Chain keeper (73 g; I wonder if I could do without it). The whole package weighs in at 4150 g, which is, like, comparable to a weight of my Pugsley's frameset.

So, now I'm basically waiting for the wheelset. The next four weeks will be very long...

UPDATE: I took off the cranks, found the weights of BB cups and headset from teh internetz, and deduced that the frame weighs in at 1643 g(nice!) and the fork is 718 g (a wee bit heavier that is should be).

Viimeinen atsteekki.

Ajattelin tänään että jos ryhtyisin askeetiks. Arkisin nokkisin silakoita ja nahistuneita perunoita.  Juhlapäivinä pukeutuisin rohdinpaitaan ja hakkaisin selkäni verille.

Tai ehkäpä en kuitenkaan.

Pahkasiassa oli muuten joskus sellainen juttu kuin "Viimeinen atsteekki". Se oli kirjoitettu lehtiartikkelin muotoon, jossa ilmeisen typerä toimittaja tekee juttua askeetiksi itseään tituleeraavasta itsensäkiduttajasta. Harmi vaan että se Pahkis jossa Viimeinen atsteekki oli, on joutunut kadoksiin :´(

No helkkari: moar plastic madness. Seuraavaks varmaan pitää hankkia alipainepumppu, hartsia ja hiilikuitua...

My DIY plastic frame bag.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch will probably fill the whole stinking ocean on of these days, so why not use the plastic instead of dumping it? (To be truthful, I bought new plastic bags to this specific project as I did not have enough them at home so this is not so ecologic as it could be, but you get the idea).

So, I needed a frame bag to my fat bike, and as waterproof/resistant fabric is quite expensive thought of making one from laminated plastic. I had previously done some DIY ass savers and fenders from laminate, so I figured it could be possible. Now, the first attempt was an utter failure, but I tried a new method, made a small handlebar bag and proceeded to make a full-sized frame bag.

Now, the instructions of making plastic laminate can be found by googling, so I do not write them here, except that laminated pieces are easy to sew, and one can actually weld the seam with hot iron so it does not leak. Also, the laminate tends to deform when it is heated, so I laminated the pieces between 2 baking papers and when the laminate was still hot, I quicky put a glass shelf and some pressure over it and let it cool.

Oh, and OPEN THE WINDOWS. The fumes of melting plastic cannot be good for health.

The ingredients of my hideous creation were: laminated plastic, some spare plastic bags, baking paper, cardboard, iron, straps, d-links, some velcro, a zipper and alcohol (the last in order to make my thougths flow more freely).

After I had laminated enough plastic, I made a cast from cardboard. The measurements are quite close to Revelate Design's frame bag [bows to that direction] although mine is a little narrower at the front and wider from the rear. I could have made it a little wider as laminate bag does not bulge very much.

A picture of the cast. Note that one should not use gorilla tape/jesus tape/roadie tape as it melts into plastic, and that's not good (I noticed that when it was almost too late):

Next I cut laminate to appropriate-sized pieces and started plating the cast. I had an old iron which is heated on a hotplate, so there were no wires into which trip myself, but keeping the iron in right heat was a problem. Below is the bag without a zipper panel:

I sewed the zipper (and some velcro for a zipper-protecting flap) to right panel and welded it to bag. Now, I had almost frame bag ready, but the cast was inside. Thus the first durability test was to rip the cast in pieces and remove it from the zipper hole. All went well:

At this point I noted that all seams were not thick enough, so I laminated some more plastic to critical places. After this I made some slits for straps and small holes to bottom, as I chose to use the bottle cage bolt holes as attachment points. Then I put the parts together and attached the bag to my bike:

The bag looked like it was made from a hide of a cancerous, Unclean beast. When I mentioned it in a social media, a friend misread "tein sen pedon nahasta" (I made it from a hide of a beast) as "tein sen pedon mahasta (I made it from a belly of a beast) so I promptly christened my creation to Pedon maha (which means belly of a/the beast in english). The bag worked well even when fully loaded (its volume is approximately 8,5 liters) but I felt it still lack something, so I made a small compartment to right side:

And as I had some gray and phlegm colored plastic, a P (cross) M decal (also laminated) in a mock death metal cd cover style. The cross should have been upside down, but it seems that the fumes from melting plastic have affected my brain:

The total cost of this frame bag came to be <10 euros (not counting the time used which was probably almost as many hours).

Bottom line: think of the dolphins (or your children, or yourself)! Don't throw plastic bags away, laminate them.

There will be a Skinny fat bike.

I should be working with my thesis, but I find myself looking Excel charts, and how to squeeze my next project's weight to sub 12 kilograms.

Now, I already have a Pugsley, but I felt that I need another fat bike. In fact I felt that I had earned a new one. I did  not wat another heavy one, especially as the Pugs gives enough floatation with 82 mm rims and 4" tyres. Thus, it had to be light. Options were basically 9 : zero : 7 with Carver O'beast fork, and Salsa Beargrease (cannot afford titanium). And as the BG is - save for perhaps (custom) ti - the lightest frameset out there, to LBS I went to discuss about options.

So, I ordered a Beargrease frameset. With headset, it should weigh little over 2500 g, and the wheels (Marge Lites, DT Comps and Hope hubs with modified QR:s - see pic below) approximately 2400 g. The drivetrain will be some nice fat bike cranks (probably Race Face or Middleburn) with single ring and the rest will be some reasonable SRAM stuff. Pedals will be Ritcheys, as I am an SPD man, and the Pro Paradigms are 90 grams lighter than my Shimanos. Probably the bearings will fail prematurely, but this is a WW project, not some bombproof steel anchor built as my Pugs is.

As for brakes, if I find some light hydraulic brakes in sale, I'll take them - otherwise I'll settle to Avid Elixir 5's or something like that. And in any case if the WW fever gets aggravated, I can buy Ashima Airotors and save 100 grams when compared to Avid's stock discs. Of course there are some durability issues which may mean my horrible and futile death as the ultralight brake discs explode in downhill...

I already have some weight weenie-ish parts - for example handlebar + stem + grips (foam! I like it, it's warm in winter, and light) should weigh in about 370 g. Seatpost and saddle combo will be relatively porky, as I have a SDG Formula FX saddle which I like very much with 400 mm seat post. Their total weight is about 460 g.

The greatest problem in getting the weight to desired 12 kg will be the rubber parts. Rim strips + Schwalbe FR tyres make 500 g of rotating mass which is good. But the tyres have to be either 45NRTH Escalators, or 120 tpi Hüsker Dü's (providing that I can get a pair from LBS that weights about 2400 g). The lightest reported Dü I know has weighted in 1180 g, but the average weight is closer to 1250 g, which is a little too much. 45NRTH bragged that their Escalators' weight should be 1115-1130 grams, but alas, their real weight seems to be somewhere around 1200 grams, which I find a little disappointing.

The price of the project? About 3K€, if I cannibalize some parts from my FGCX bike* and swap them to Pugs which in turn will provide some parts to BG. Ouch. But then again, some people put ten times more money to their fume-producing, metal coffins - and in any case, vita brevis.

More to follow, hopefully before next March. As of now, my project looks like this:

*probably I'll sell what's left of it and buy some CX fork to my Vigorelli, as it has enough room to 35 mm rear tyre - but that will be another story ;)

PS: My fat bike musings are in english because most fat bike enthustiasts can read it :)

FAT BIKE

Viime aikoina ei olekaan tullut paljoa kirjoiteltua, koska FAT BIKE. Kauniina, siunattuna Jumalan päivänä yhdeksäntenä maaliskuuta Herran vuonna kaksituhattakaksitoista, soitettiin minulle Suomen Turun Foxcompista, että tilaamani Surly Pugsley oli saapunut. Laitetta on nyt piiskattu kaksi viikkoa pitkin turkuja, toreja, hankia ja muita pöpelikköjä, ja hauskaa on ollut. Paitsi ehkä silloin kun hanki petti pellolla jossain Topinojan lähistöllä ja päätin rämpiä adrenaliinipäissäni eteenpäin sen sijaan että olisin nöyrästi palannut takaisin omia jälkiäni pitkin.

Valokuvata en valitettavasti osaa :(