Wheels for evapotrons

[Ember]

Hello all of you potential evapotron builders --

Within 24 hours of the evapotron announcement in the Jack Rabbit
Speaks, all four workshops filled, and I'm now waitlisting additional
burners. I find this exhilarating! but I'm worrying about one
thing: bike wheels. They're surfacing as the bottleneck in the
project.

To prepare for the workshops, I've been collecting discarded wheels at
my local bike shop since last October. I knew I would have to rely on
the larger Burner community to find as many as we'd need, and that's
why I asked each of you to bring three wheels to your workshop.

The wheels your evapotron will use aren't the wheels you might bring;
they're from my stockpile. The ones you bring, I take home and adjust
until they're good enough for graywater (but still not rideable.)

What do I do when a builder brings only two wheels, or one, or none
though they've looked really hard? Well, heck. I set them up with
three usable wheels, and the stockpile diminishes. If too many people
show up without wheels, I won't have enough of them to put on the next
workshop.

I have thought of two things I can do. One is to contact the S.F.
region's Burners who work in bike shops and ask for help. The other
is to alert registrants (that's you), and offer hints for more
productive wheel-scrounging. That's what I'm doing here.

Bike wheels that aren't repairable don't last long in a bike shop;
mostly, they get tossed into the dumpster the same day they come in.
The easiest way to get hold of these wheels is to talk with a
mechanic, or maybe a manager. They know about Burning Man; they may
be Burners. They are often sympathetic to helping worthy causes, and
may agree to hold sad wheels for a few days so you can swing by once a
week, say.

A great motivator is to bring with you the two evapotron pictures (00
naked GBG front, and 00 naked GBG side) in our google group: click on
"files" in http://groups.google.com/group/gray-b-gon .

Another way to get the wheels is, of course, to go dumpster-diving
daily behind the bike shop. I've done that too. Yet another source
is recycling centers. Some have strict rules forbidding reuse of
tossed bicycles, some don't. Carrying an adjustable wrench might make
it easier to take away only the wheels.

Some wheels are truly useless, so don't collect them. Steel-rim
wheels: heavy, look chromey, and usually rusty. Wheels smaller than
22 inches in diameter (so-called "24 inch" wheels). Wheels whose
bearings are missing, or which are missing many spokes.

Alloy-rim wheels are what we want, even if the bearing is loose or
gravelly, or the rim's potato-chipped. They can usually be
refurbished to "good enough."

Ironically, "unusable" wheels have emerged as a critical resource, and
I am eager for your comments and suggestions. I will post this note
in the group's Discussions area, so everyone interested can
participate. To chime in, just beome a group member and start
talking.

[Leah Chubb]

My brother is the cofounder of the Reno Bike Project and he and his
cohorts recover hundreds of bikes every year from the burn in addition
to refurbing bikes year round.

I called him this morning and he said he would start collecting all
the old wheels they would normally throw away and I can bring them
down to the bay on the 24th of June and then again on the 23rd of
July. Would you want to call and talk to him about what would work
best for you?

Leah

[Ember]

Thanks to Leah's help I picked up twenty-five wheels in Reno. I've
also talked with the SF Bike Kitchen, and I got four wheels by asking
pafree (my local Freecycle list.) After spiffing them up, and
recycling the wheels I can't use, I have enough wheels for the
Berkeley workshop, but I'm currently short 20 wheels for the Sports
Basement workshop.

[Ember]

I think we've got a solution to the bike-wheel problem: pay for them.
Bike shops, even nonprofit co-op bike repair shops, respond to money.
So late this past summer I began to ask builders to contribute $4 per
wheel (which they did gladly), and passed the money on to the bike
shops. Thanks to The Missing Link (Berkeley), the Bike Kitchen (SF),
and the Reno bike project, I had a more than adequate wheel supply,
and they were better quality wheels.