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| More rain - what a surprise! |
Well, it's official - this has now been the worst summer I have ever experienced in all my time on this planet! I have a total of five days of bike building time in since the snow melted and will be officially throwing in the towel this year. Normally, I can get three to five bikes out in a year, but this year will leave us with only one new bike plan, the Transporter Cargo Bike. Now, it may sound like I am giving up too soon, but with the fact that it rains almost 90% of the time here lately and the fact that I have oodles of yard work to get done mixed in there with a 10 hour work day, it's not lookin' too good, eh.
There have been some cool lightning storms this year which is pretty typical, but the rest of the time has been spitting rain every hour or so. I would rather have a massive downpour for hours and then some clear skies for a few days, but this year it has ALWAYS, ALWYAYS, ALWAYS been raining just a little. This makes it like a swamp down the hill in front of my bike building shack, and since I have to work and photograph projects outdoors, it is impossible. It's just enough rain to stop me. And, I have given up falling for that stupid "20% chance of rain" lie they tell on the weather network because what that really means is spitting rain every three hours so you can't work outside, Suckah!, bwa ha ha ha ha!
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| The line snapper after a good wind |
Another thing that is happening around here is intense bursts of wind. Now, I'm not talking about a nice summer breeze, I mean tree-snapping, furniture-flinging, tent-collapsing wind. This unnatural weather amplification downed this old +80 foot tall tree at the corner of our yard and it snapped the hydro line with such force that it broke a hydro pole in half down at the bottom of the hill. The good news is that I wanted to clean up this part of the yard and we now have a woodstove, so free firewood!
Being a noob at cutting wood, I took my brand new chainsaw and worked on this monster tree for three days, getting what seems to be at least a cord of wood out of it. But after a week of use my chain seems dull. Is this normal for a chainsaw? Hmmm...at that rate I might as well look for a huge bow saw and spare the hassle of fiddling around with mixing oil, bar oil, dull blades and all that noise.
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| This will be my view for the rest of the year |
So, instead of fooling myself into believing that I may actually get to build anything this year, I have decided to work on adding some useful stuff to the AZ site. We will be starting the new welding, grinding, and bike hacking tutorials /DVD production soon and I am dedicated to adding all kinds of bike tech calculators to the main site. I want to hear from our community and get a list of suggestions for making online calculators.
I am working on the following calculators and converters: tubing weight, metric/imperial, spoke length, Ackermann steering, chain length, rake & trail, and gear ratio.
If you have an idea for an online calculator, please suggest it in the forum: http://forum.atomiczombie.com/forumdisplay.php/189-Conversions-calculators-amp-more
That's all that's new here. I am looking out the window and guess what, it's gonna rain again soon!
~ Brad
