Laundry Hamper

For a long time I used to put my dirty laundry into a milk crate that lived under my bed but my current bed doesn't accommodate that set up, so I needed a new hamper. I decided that I wanted to come up with a way to keep the hamper in my closet since I wasn't using all of that space anyways.

I found a plain laundry bag sitting around somewhere which was the perfect starting point for this project.

Next I punched a 1/4" brass grommet into each top corner of the bag.

Then I fashioned two little hooks out of coat hanger which I put around the closet rod.

Finally, I hung the bag onto these hooks. This is actually an old project, but I liked it a lot. I've been using this for three years or so, and it's pretty stellar. It hangs high so I can keep some boxes of stuff below it, and I put the grommets both slightly towards the back of the bag so that the front lip hangs out. This makes it easy to toss things into it from across the room... a very important feature of a hamper.

Coldset Kabuki

I present to you my Kabuki. I pulled this bike out of a dumpster in 2002 with downtube shifters and a 5 speed freewheel. I put around 4000 miles on it in this setup. It was my transportation, recreation and I even toured a little on it. About two years ago when I was waiting for the fork on my track frame, I decided to strip down this bike and make it fixed. I took off the freewheel and threaded a track cog onto the hub secured with the old lockring from my bottom bracket and Locktite. Because of the vertical dropouts I sawed off my axle so the only thing going through the dropouts was my QR skewer and used a ½ link to achieve perfect chain tension. This clever set of hacks came to me courtesy of the late Sheldon Brown. When this setup finally failed during a skid and my cog popped off I destroyed the threading on the rear hub. Fortunately, after I changed to my winter gear ratio, my rear axle was actually centered perfectly in the rear dropout and so I was able to use the wheelset that I had been saving for my track frame. At that time I decided to strip it down and paint it black which it still is. Once I had the fork for my track frame, I put all the parts on that and haven't built up this frame since.

I decided about a year ago that the next life of the Kabuki would be as a touring bike. I currently lack a good touring bike and this would make a very sweet one. It's got perfect geometry and the frame is pretty light. I can't think of a better frame for the job so I've started getting parts and prepping the frame.

The first step in preparing this frame to be built up is to re-space the dropouts. It was 122.5 mm and I need to get it out to 130mm to accommodate a modern 9 speed hub.

 

First I ran a string through the dropouts and up around the head tube to check that the frame was starting aligned symmetric.

 

I accomplished this alignment check by measuring the distance from the seat tube on each side out to the string. Indeed, the frame was in good shape to start out, so all I had to do was bend out each dropout the same 3.75 mm.

 

It looks barbaric but this delicate task is best accomplished by jamming a 2x4 under the drop out and prying up just a little. Then I re-checked the alignment to make sure that I had gotten it symmetric.

Finally I would check to see if I had gotten it out to 130 mm. I was being pretty careful not to over spread the frame, so it took 3 or 4 increments to get it there.

Although my paint job was pretty decent, I decided that I wanted to get a professional job that would last a little better and look a little nicer. The last step in prepping the frame for painting was to pop out the head cups from the headset (which desperately needs to be replaced).

 

And now it's ready to paint. I've already got some of the components and but I still have a bunch of parts to get together. It's going to be very pretty. You'll hear about it when it's done.

Almond Milk

I had been drinking almond milk for few months before I got so fed up with those obnoxious little hard-to-recycle 1-quart cartons that I decided to try making my own. I found a recipe and gave it a shot. It turns out that it's really easy and comes out very good. Now I've been making my own almond milk every few days for the last 4 or 5 months. I get my almonds in bulk and use a re-usable cheesecloth (see note at bottom). I use the leftover almond pulp in other baking I do, so my almond milk production has reduced my contribution to the waste stream by a significant margin - and that makes me very happy.

I start with 1 cup of raw, unsalted almonds.

I soak the almonds for at least 6 hours to soften up.

I usually just let them soak overnight and then I make the milk fresh in the morning for my cereal. (I took this picture of the full moon rising over the Atlantic on Jekyll Island, GA)

After the almonds have soaked, I give them a quick rinse...

...and toss them in the blender with 3 cups of water for a total of 4 cups of stuff in the blender.

Then I blend the almonds into the water on the highest setting. I've found that by leaving it blending for a full minute or longer, I get more milk out of the almonds and end up with a finer pulp.

Next I pour the blended almond mixture into a cheesecloth...

...and squeeze all of the milk out through the cheesecloth.

I pour the milk into bottles to store in the fridge. Even my finest milk will start to settle out pretty significantly after 4 or 5 days, so I only make two liters at a time so I don't have to store it that long.

Assuming that I've soaked the almonds overnight, making the milk takes me about 5 minutes in the morning. It is super easy and accomplishes all of my original goals - to have tasty non-dairy milk without all of the packaging. I highly recommend it!

Some final thoughts:

• I've found that my almond milk has a slightly nuttier taste than the commercial stuff. I happen to like it but there are a few things I've tried to play with flavor. I tried substituting about 1/4 of the almonds with cashews. This seemed to mute the almond flavor without adding much from the cashews. I've also added small amounts of vanilla extract, agave syrup or molasses to flavor the milk. I found the results pleasant but I just prefer the plain flavor. I also made chocolate almond milk by adding cocoa powder and agave syrup. That was mighty tasty.
• I now use a muslin cheesecloth that I made. This small change of equipment has been a dramatic improvement for several reasons. The first is that I have much smoother milk with virtually no detectable particulates. Second, it's a much tougher material so I can squeeze a lot more milk out of it without worrying that it will split open and dump almond pulp into my milk. Third, the coarse cheesecloths that you can buy in the grocery store cost about $3 for a square yard or so. I tried washing and reusing one of these cheesecloths once and it completely fell apart. In contrast, I've been using my muslin cheesecloth for a few months and it's holding up very nicely. It is just a funnel shaped piece of unbleached cotton muslin. I just rinse it out after each batch and let it dry in the sun.
• I found a place I can get raw almonds for $3.99/ lb. At this price, I can make a quart of milk for about $1.60. In most stores a quart of almond milk is between $2.50 and $3.50 and comes with all of that horrible packaging. Given that I use a quart of milk in my cereal almost every two days, that small savings adds up pretty quickly. It's also very convenient that I never have to worry about running out of milk. Because the raw almonds store very well, I can get a month's worth of almonds at a time so if I'm out of milk, I just have to soak some almonds before I go to bed and then I can have fresh milk in the morning.
  
• After you've squeezed the milk out, you're left with about a cup of almond pulp. I still haven't figured out exactly what the best thing to do with this is. I put it in all of my bread and into my pancakes, but that doesn't use it up at nearly the rate that I produce it. I tried making crackers with it but because I didn't want to use any flour, they were all crumbly. Recently I tried making cookies by adding banana, peanut butter and honey. These were pretty good and had a much better consistency, but were still a little off. If anyone has any suggestions for almond meal based recipes, I'm all ears. I did find that by blending the milk longer, I got a finer meal which was better to bake with. 

Pack Straps

I have far more packs than I can reasonably justify owning, but I must honestly say that this one is amongst the best. It weighs just 11 oz and I can do a 4 day backpacking trip out of it. The framesheet is the perfect density of HDPE so that it is thin and light but still stiff enough to carry a fairly large load well. Overall, this pack does what it does better than any comparable pack I've ever seen.

All of that praise notwithstanding, this pack was designed with one major flaw. The straps are extremely thin and cut into the shoulders with almost any amount of weight in the pack. I usually just stuff my extra socks/mittens under my shirt to pad it out, but I decided it was time to take my improvement to the next level.

I decided to add some padding to the straps. For the padding I used 1/8" closed cell foam and cut out the shape I wanted the straps to be.

  I doubled up the foam to make a 1/4" sheet and then sewed the pad between two layers of nylon.

I then cut out the pad and singed the edges to keep them from fraying.

Finally, I sewed the pads under the existing straps.

Here's the result. The day after I finished this modification, I got to field test the pack. I had an alpine rack, harness and a full days of layers, food and water and after a tough 12 miles, my shoulders were NOT where I was sore.

Bumper Sticker

This is the back of my bike trailer. I've wanted to put a bumper sticker on it for a long time, but I couldn't find the one I wanted to I decided to make it myself.

I started by tracing the lettering in pencil to make sure that it would be straight and well spaced.

Then I painted in the letters. I used a stencil with a little spray guard I made.

Of course it won't be visible when the trailer is really full and the tailgate is down, but everyone will still be thinking it.

Leaky Faucet

We've had a drip in the kitchen faucet for months now. It's one of those things that isn't a major emergency to take care of, but never lets you forget that it's a problem. Before I could work on the faucet, I needed to shut off the water, but because there was no shutoff valve on the hot water line, I had to shut off the water to the whole house. [I may end up installing shutoff valves but the will be a tale for another day]. When I finally took the thing apart I found that the control ball (this is a single lever faucet) was made of brass and had been rubbing against a steel nub for years. This eventually wore a groove into the ball that created slop in it's motion and prevented it from sitting perfectly in the 'off' position.

As it turns out, my faucet was a Delta compatible style faucet that meant that it had a standard set of replacement parts. I took the damaged control ball down to the hardware store and the plumbing people handed me this little baggie of replacement parts. Fortunately, they now make the control ball out of stainless steel.

Since I got a full set of new parts, I just went ahead and replace the whole mechanism. There are two little spring loaded rubber gaskets that sit over openings where the hot and cold water come into the faucet head that I replaced. Then the ball, and finally this nylon retainer. Another problem was that the notch in the faucet base that is used to keep the nylon retainer properly aligned had become malformed and was preventing the old retainer from seating. I reshaped the notch with a small file to allow the new retainer to sit all the way down onto the control ball.

And now I can sleep at night knowing that I'm not wasting any more water!

Sledge Hammer Repair

As you may recall, I recently had to bust up a big block of concrete in the back yard. To accomplish this task I was borrowing a sledge hammer from my landlord. As it turned out the handle of the sledge had a small crack in it that started to become a major crack after a few hours of pounding on concrete.I wrapped the handle up with some duct tape and it held together perfectly through the rest of the job. It seemed to be a completely functional repair, but I felt bad returning the tool in this condition so I decided to do a proper job of repairing the handle.

To start, I got a new handle from the hardware store that was supposed to the designed for the size head that I was working with. It turned out that it was not quite the right size, so I had to cut it shorter.

Now the head could seat all the way onto the top of the handle.

The next adjustment I needed to make was to the width of the handle. No amount of pounding and pushing could get this handle even half way into the hammer head so after some research, I learned that one is meant to trim the handle so it can fit inside the head. I approached this task carefully not wanting to remove too much material, so I put a sanding bit into my rotary tool and took off a little at a time. I tried putting it back into the head often to make sure I didn't take off too much wood and took note of the high points that were getting stuck so that I could contour the end of the handle to the inside of the head. I stopped when I got it to a point it didn't easily go on, but seemed that with a bit of effort it would be able to.

You can see here, that the wood looks a little darker than before. I used mineral oil lubricate the inside of the head and was then able to get the handle all the way through. The next step was to drive a wooden wedge into the slot in the top of the handle. The first thing I had to do was trim the wedge down to the width of the handle.

It turned out to be very difficult to pry the slot in the handle open again to get the tip of the wedge in there. I ended up pounding a razor blade into it and subsequently widening it with pry bar. Once I did get the tip of the wedge in, it was trivial to drive it all the way down. I was able to use the weight of the hammer head to my advantage here and just pounded it straight down against the floor of the garage.

Ok... we're almost there. I cut off the part of the wedge that stuck out so it was now flush with the top of the handle.

The last step is to drive in a steel hammer wedge perpendicular to the wooden wedge. At this point the wood flares out in all directions above the hammer head so I'm pretty confident that it's not going anywhere. This certainly wasn't the easiest fix

Milk Crate Attachment

I've been doing my groceries on the Cetma rack with a basket for about a year and a half and it has served me very well. My only complaint has been the interface between my basket and the rack. Thus far I've always used bungees. It never comes off, and it's reasonably fast to put on and take off, but I would prefer something that couldn't wiggle. When I've got 40 lbs of groceries up there and I'm trying to hold a track stand, small wiggles make a big difference.I had a number of ideas on this one but the clear material of choice ended up being 16 ga bailing wire.

I started by putting a small bail on the back of the crate to slide over the back of the rack. This will keep the crate from sliding forward once anchored at the bottom but also serves to keep it in place while I'm attaching it at the bottom.

Here you can see the wire bail that neatly fits over the back of the rack.

The attachment device needed to be extremely secure but also able to just snap on and off. For a long time I had been scheming up ways to use standard draw hasps but they would invariably require me to mount some wood to the crate and the rack. The next idea was some type of over-center buckle with a similar type of action but for webbing. I would have a strap that goes from one lip of the basket, under the rack and then back up to the other lip that could be instantly tightened with the flip of a lever. No such piece of hardware was immediately available (I found a place I could order such buckles, but there was a minimum order of 500 pieces), so I came up with a way to manufacture such a buckle. When I was at the hardware store selecting my materials to manufacture my over-center buckle, I came across this spiffy little device. It's intended use is tugging barbed wire fencing tight across the posts. For all the effort I would put into making a buckle that may not work anyways, it seemed that I would be wise to just grab this thing and call it done.

The next piece I added to the basket was a pair of small loops that hung off the bottom. The wire tightener would grab the two loops and draw the basket tight to the rack. When the loops are being used, they need to hang down, but once I take the basket off the rack, I need them to stay tucked flat against the bottom of the crate to avoid getting bent. I glued small magnets to the bottom of the milk crate to keep the wire loops out of the way when they weren't needed.

Here you're looking up at the crate sitting on the rack with the two loops being pulled tight across the bottom of the rack.

I also found a very convenient place to store the wire tug when I wasn't using it.

Here's the first load of groceries I did with the new set up. The on/off was as smooth and quick as I could ask, but while riding, the basket didn't budge, sucess!