BOAT, or Adventures In Stupidity, part 1: My campaign for the Darwin award begins
Rick Onanian
This post will be barely a step above g.daniels on the
comprehensibility scale, because I'm really tired and my mind is
feeling weird, probably a result of this experiment. Maybe my body
produced some "runner's high" cannabinoids or something...
-=-
Salvaged treadmill. Backup bike. Bicyclist who won't ride in the
winter weather. Brain missing in action.
Luckily, my buddy came over and was ready to dial 911 if I
accelerated my campaign for the Darwin Award.
First issue: Drat! Before I even started, I shifted the chain off
the side of the freewheel, so it got stuck between the freewheel and
the spokes. Broke a piece off one of the rear derailer's pulley.
Bike seems to shift fine anyway. The read derailer in question is an
old Simplex, IIRC, and has plastic pulleys. "Derailer? I hardly knew
her!"
Attempt 1:
Bicycle is longer than treadmill. Rest front wheel on treadmill
head. Treadmill runs really slow until I realize that the head is
not structural and is adding major resistance to the belt. Still, it
is surprisingly fun.
Treadmill has a piece sticking up that looks very much like a fork
mount. It's nearly the right width, and has holes the right size.
Unfortunately, it's too low, and the pedals will strike the
treadmill.
Remove handles, stick front wheel between edge of treadmill body and
wall. Papers are torn from the wall by the tire. Ride a bit. This is
fun!
Not satisfied. Remove head cover from treadmill and look to
backward-wire the motor. Wait, can an AC motor be backward-wired? I
thought not, but I was wrong. The motor has a black, two reds, and
two blue wires coming from it. One black and one red meet a circuit
board next to eachother; I reverse them, and voila! The motor runs
backwards.
Back wheel on treadmill. Front wheel on carpet, front brake on,
start treadmill, ride. Fun!
Treadmill is running slow; oops, belt has slipped off to the side.
Stand sideways, brace against desk, run treadmill and push belt with
feet. Hard work!
Try again. Fun! Can only do it for a half minute, maybe a minute
before I get bored of holding on to the desk and try to balance, and
end up grabbing the rear brake, which destroys my balance.
My legs and back hurt from straightening belt so many times.
Take some pictures. Make short video. Leave them in camera until
tomorrow.
Office is now a major mess. Besides this experiment, I also worked
on my primary road bike; tools and parts, and printouts of Barnett's
chapters, are littered all over the place.
I'll see about putting the pictures and the vid up tomorrow. Now, I
need to clean the office enough so that it doesn't look like
somebody broke in and tried to rob us.
--
Rick Onanian
Ryan Cousineau
Rick Onanian <spam...@cox.net> wrote:
> BOAT == Bicycle On A Treadmill
> Salvaged treadmill. Backup bike. Bicyclist who won't ride in the
> winter weather. Brain missing in action.
> Attempt 1:
> Bicycle is longer than treadmill. Rest front wheel on treadmill
> head. Treadmill runs really slow until I realize that the head is
> not structural and is adding major resistance to the belt. Still, it
> is surprisingly fun.
> Not satisfied. Remove head cover from treadmill and look to
> backward-wire the motor. Wait, can an AC motor be backward-wired? I
> thought not, but I was wrong. The motor has a black, two reds, and
> two blue wires coming from it. One black and one red meet a circuit
> board next to eachother; I reverse them, and voila! The motor runs
> backwards.
> Treadmill is running slow; oops, belt has slipped off to the side.
> Stand sideways, brace against desk, run treadmill and push belt with
> feet. Hard work!
> Office is now a major mess. Besides this experiment, I also worked
> on my primary road bike; tools and parts, and printouts of Barnett's
> chapters, are littered all over the place.
> --
> Rick Onanian
Damn, you in Minnesota? It must be awfully cold for this to make sense.
I encourage you, brave pioneer!
BTW, I saw a pic of a bike treadmill being touted at Interbike or
something this year. Long treadmill, harness for the rider, looked hokey
but workable.
--
Ryan Cousineau, rcou...@sfu.ca http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club
Rick Onanian
wrote:
>Damn, you in Minnesota? It must be awfully cold for this to make sense.
Nope. We're having a heat wave here in RI -- it was three degrees
above freezing yesterday and rainy! That's nearly summer...
>I encourage you, brave pioneer!
Thank you.
>BTW, I saw a pic of a bike treadmill being touted at Interbike or
>something this year. Long treadmill, harness for the rider, looked hokey
>but workable.
Would a bike treadmill be effectively any different from rollers?
Riding on this treadmill, for as long as I could do it steadily,
felt almost exactly like how I imagine rollers feel.
--
Rick Onanian
Robert Chung
>
> Would a bike treadmill be effectively any different from rollers?
Depends on the treadmill but, yes, it can be. Speaking of cadence, here's
a link to a paper that put a bike on a treadmill in order to examine
uphill cycling. Note that you can't do this test simply by propping up the
front end of a normal cycle ergometer.
http://aemes.mae.ufl.edu/~fregly/pdfs/jb2002.pdf
David Kerber
spam...@cox.net says...
...
> Luckily, my buddy came over and was ready to dial 911 if I
> accelerated my campaign for the Darwin Award.
If you end up Darwinning yourself, I'm going to feel awful for giving
you the idea! So be careful!
...
> Try again. Fun! Can only do it for a half minute, maybe a minute
> before I get bored of holding on to the desk and try to balance, and
> end up grabbing the rear brake, which destroys my balance.
I don't think there's any way you're going to get it to balance unless
you get both wheels on the belt, allowing you to make
corrections by steering. Of course a fork mount would take care of
that, too.
--
Dave Kerber
Fight spam: remove the ns_ from the return address before replying!
REAL programmers write self-modifying code.
Rick Onanian
<ns_dkerber@ns_ids.net> wrote:
>> Luckily, my buddy came over and was ready to dial 911 if I
>> accelerated my campaign for the Darwin Award.
>
>If you end up Darwinning yourself, I'm going to feel awful for giving
>you the idea! So be careful!
If it happens, don't feel bad; I had the idea before we discussed
it.
>I don't think there's any way you're going to get it to balance unless
>you get both wheels on the belt, allowing you to make
>corrections by steering. Of course a fork mount would take care of
>that, too.
I believe you are, in fact, correct.
--
Rick Onanian
Rick Onanian
I quickly skimmed a few pages; I'm not sure what "Crank inertial
load" is, and "efficiency" appears to be unqualified -- per the
thread of the last few days regarding cadence and efficiency, it's
important to know exactly what efficiency they're measuring; input
power (fuel) to output power? Aerobic capacity preservation? Etc.
--
Rick Onanian
Rick Onanian
Short movie: http://members.cox.net/thc69/BOAT-1.MOV
Sorry, no sound -- you could have heard me laughing my balls off
over the sound of the treadmill running.
Altogether, the clip is boring and uneventful. I wish I had been
filming the whole time, there were some more exciting attempts where
I ended up riding into the spot where I later set up the camera...
The bike is an old Peugeot, salvaged and fixed up. Shortly before
attempting the experiment, one of the idlers on the Simplex rear
derailer broke; it rides anyway, but there is additional resistance
as the chain catches on that portion of the idler. The damn thing is
plastic! I'll replace that, sooner or later.
The rider is me. You don't get to see my face, and I was too tired
from fooling around with the treadmill to do another take.
My buddy Jon is in the background, ready to pull the safety key if
it becomes necessary to abort, and with "911" dialed on his phone
waiting to hit send in case I try the Darwin Award accelerated entry
program.
The room is the office, which is even worse of a mess than usual.
The concrete floor where the carpet is cut out is because of some,
er, digestive issues my cat had. She's better now.
--
Rick Onanian
Claire Petersky
news:qa1220leb7bgd7q34...@4ax.com...
> Short movie: http://members.cox.net/thc69/BOAT-1.MOV
Oooo Rick! What legs you got!
--
Warm Regards,
Claire Petersky
Please replace earthlink for mouse-potato and .net for .com
Home of the meditative cyclist:
http://home.earthlink.net/~cpetersky/Welcome.htm
New CD coming out this month! See: http://www.tiferet.net
"To forgive is to set the prisoner free and then discover the prisoner
was you."
Robert Chung
They're referring to gross efficiency. It was defined at the top of the
third paragraph of the page I pointed you to a couple of days ago:
http://www.bsn.com/Cycling/articles/cadence.html
"Crank inertial load" refers to momentum, but I was pointing to the
article mostly because it's an example of a bike on a treadmill.
Rick Onanian
wrote:
>And, to bring it all back around to cadence: The treadmill I used is
>Wesley Cadence 715.
Dam speel chekker. It's "Weslo", not "Wesley".
--
Rick Onanian
Rick Onanian
<inv...@nospam.com> wrote:
>They're referring to gross efficiency. It was defined at the top of the
>third paragraph of the page I pointed you to a couple of days ago:
>http://www.bsn.com/Cycling/articles/cadence.html
OIC. From that page:
:These efficiency measures were 1 ) gross efficiency, the ratio of
:the work accomplished to energy expended, that is, the effectiveness
:of converting chemical energy into mechanical work
There were three other efficiency measures, all concerned with how
much chemical energy was converted into how much mechanical work.
This will make some interesting reading. However, of what concern is
it to us? The only way I can think of to apply it is to maybe modify
my preferred cadence when I go on long rides on which I could bonk;
this would make my fuel last longer. I suspect that there are other,
more important issues (aerobic capacity, lactic acid buildup, etc)
that become overriding concerns very quickly.
>"Crank inertial load" refers to momentum, but I was pointing to the
>article mostly because it's an example of a bike on a treadmill.
And, to bring it all back around to cadence: The treadmill I used is
Wesley Cadence 715.
--
Rick Onanian
Rick Onanian
<cpet...@mouse-potato.com> wrote:
>> Short movie: http://members.cox.net/thc69/BOAT-1.MOV
>
>Oooo Rick! What legs you got!
All the better to ride with, my dear!
Signed,
Rick (the Wolf in Granny's house)
Robert Chung
> This will make some interesting reading. However, of what concern is
> it to us? The only way I can think of to apply it is to maybe modify
> my preferred cadence when I go on long rides on which I could bonk;
> this would make my fuel last longer. I suspect that there are other,
> more important issues (aerobic capacity, lactic acid buildup, etc)
> that become overriding concerns very quickly.
Sigh. Everything I've been pointing to suggests that cadence varies a lot
according to conditions and therefore it doesn't make much sense to set an
exogenous cadence as if there were a single "optimum" cadence. There
isn't. The bottom line on the efficiency and cadence articles (and the
inertia article, and the torque-cadence article) isn't that one should
pedal at a particular rate; the bottom line is that people shouldn't think
they're pedaling at a certain rate because it's efficient. They pedal at
that rate for a host of other reasons, including the power they wish to
put out at a particular moment, the torque they can comfortably handle,
and the amount of crank inertial load, not because we're trying to save on
an extra Clif Bar.
Cadence is a dependent variable, not an independent one.
A Muzi
-snip-
> The bike is an old Peugeot, salvaged and fixed up. Shortly before
> attempting the experiment, one of the idlers on the Simplex rear
> derailer broke; it rides anyway, but there is additional resistance
> as the chain catches on that portion of the idler. The damn thing is
> plastic! I'll replace that, sooner or later.
As are almost all derailleur rollers. Suntour rollers fit
Simplex. Shimano doesn't
Or did you mean the Delrin derailleur body? That's a neat
material, an oil-absorbent nylon( also used in Chevy V-8
timing gears). When it's dry and chalky you'll have
problems. Smear oil on it. When these are shiny and wet
with oil they work great. Spring tension is adjustable, top
and bottom.
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971
Rick Onanian
wrote:
>> as the chain catches on that portion of the idler. The damn thing is
>> plastic! I'll replace that, sooner or later.
>-snip-
>As are almost all derailleur rollers. Suntour rollers fit
>Simplex. Shimano doesn't
Oh...I thought they were metal. How about that... ;)
>Or did you mean the Delrin derailleur body? That's a neat
>material, an oil-absorbent nylon( also used in Chevy V-8
>timing gears). When it's dry and chalky you'll have
Nope, the idler, or "jockey" or "guide", depending on who you ask.
It occurs to me that I can epoxy it back together and avoid having
to disassemble the derailer.
--
Rick Onanian
dvt
> It occurs to me that I can epoxy it [the jockey pulley]
> back together and avoid having to disassemble the derailer.
Good luck! The surfaces have probably been coated with some sort of
lubricant. That lubricant will probably act as a release agent, making
it very difficult to get a good bond.
You might be able to clean the surfaces with a few household products
(alcohol & toluene, found in rubbing alcohol and nail polish remover).
Disassembly would make it a lot easier to clean thoroughly.
Recommendation: Try it, see if it works. The odds are against you, but I
don't think it's a safety issue if it fails. If it doesn't stick, get a
new pulley.
Dave
dvt at psu dot edu
A Muzi
> On Wed, 04 Feb 2004 23:44:43 -0600, A Muzi <a...@yellowjersey.org>
> wrote:
>>>as the chain catches on that portion of the idler. The damn thing is
>>>plastic! I'll replace that, sooner or later.
>>
>>-snip-
>>As are almost all derailleur rollers. Suntour rollers fit
>>Simplex. Shimano doesn't
Rick Onanian wrote:
> Nope, the idler, or "jockey" or "guide", depending on who you ask.
> It occurs to me that I can epoxy it back together and avoid having
> to disassemble the derailer.
It's a nylon and that sort of thing ( think about a
CrazyGlue container top) doesn't glue well.
Rollers ( or pulleys) are dirt cheap and any Suntour roller
from a scrap derailleur will fit fine. Lube the bushing.