My wife's blog

I thought I would take a moment to brag about my wife's blog she has been steadfastly working on. It deals with how to grow cook and raise all your own food and livestock. Shows you ways to deal with things that might pose problems for new comers to the world of self sufficiency. She has only been working on it for a few months and it is starting to gain some popularity.

                                                        www.mysuburbanhomestead.com


Check it out, spread the word. It has something for everyone.

It has been some time.

I finally got the frame and fork out the door to AMS in New York, gosh that took forever. Sorry. Since my last post I was unemployed, Summer was approaching and I thought I was going to be cranking out a frame a week. Oh dreaming is so much fun. I got back in the saddle looking for work as our health care costs were more than my unemployment. The daily grind of looking and applying and all the bull shit companies make you go through to fill out THEIR forms and the drug tests. Blood, Urine and hair. Needless to say I did land a decent job and have been working for the last 6 months. I loose two hours of my life in a car every weekday which really digs into my bike time and my personal and family time. Summer goes by fast and when it is 80 and sunny you have no desire to be in an unconditioned garage, you want to be outside far far away from a welding torch.

AMS updates

I have finished AMS's fork and front triangle. Will be working on the rear triangle this week/end. Photos soon.

Need a bike?

Creatures at our house (Native)

So we moved into our new house in Aug of 2009. As spring rolls around the wild life here is amazing. Here is what I can list in no order.


Rough Skinned Newt

Pacific Tree Frog

Gardner Snake

Mountain Jay

Humming Birds, So far we have seen about 4 different types.

Dove

Band-Tailed Pigeon

Raccoon

Robin and her eggs and babies.

Moles

Mice

Yellow Jacket Wasp

Multiple other birds, but I have not 100% ID'd them. It's kind of funny, I used to make fun of BIRDERS out in the park. Pretty sure my wife did too. Last night we both were on the couch with binoculars looking out the window at birds. I'm getting old.

Things we have heard but not yet seen. Multiple Owls and Coyotes.

Bikesnob

I bought the newly released book by the famous Bike Snob out of New York. So far it is great. He slowy breaks into the history of the famous two wheeled contraption and then migrates towards the different worlds of bicycles. Roadies, Cyclocross, MTB's and Contraption Captions, The Messenger, Beautiful Godzilla, Lone Wolf and such forth. I will do a formal review when I finish but so far it has been very entertaining.

I will leave you with a quote from the book.

"Well we cyclists are often subject to similar ignorance. And when it comes to cyclist slurs, there's one that towers above the rest. It's the "L" word. I'm not talking about the TV Show the L WORD about the lesbians-or as my old boss might have called them, "Gertrude Steins." No, the L word is "Lance Armstrong."

   Everybody knows who Lance Armstrong is. He's easily the most famous cyclist in the world. But what most people don't know is that we cyclists consider "Lance Armstrong" a slur."

Book Review

Lugged Bicycle Frame Construction: A Manual For The First Time Builder by Marc-Andre R. Chimonas.


I bought this book a few months ago from Amazon

I bought it because it seemed like a simple process to building a frame and the price was very fair compaired to the over complicated Paterek Book Paterek Manual for Bicycle Framebuilders Don't get me wrong, I own and love my Paterek Book but for the novice it is a lot of info to digest.

Marc's book is a quick read and offers some neat and simple ideas to building a frame. I do have a small issue with his love of power grinders for the novice builder. Dremel and bench grinders. I use grinders from time to time, but it is so very easy to really detroy a tube or lug with a grinder. I would recomend buying some quality files instead. Nicholson Files
The other items I was disappointed in was the lack of custom fit information. There also seems to be a lack of charts to help decipher critical information. Overall this book is well worth the money and sits proudly on my bike book shelf. It does what it says it does. It helps a novice build a frame with limited resources. I have recommended this book to several friends and loaned it out on several occasions... I would rate it an 8 out of 10.

I love this quote.

Eddie Merckx who said “Don’t buy upgrades; ride up grades.”

Sunday Morning

Bees

I recently dove head first into the world of Honey Bees. Beekeeping. I had received a book "The Backyard Beekeeper" by Kim Flottum. It is a very glossy and pretty picture book. Needless to say it got my intrest in keeping bees to the top of my priority list. I did some reasearh and found a great bee supply store called Ruhl Bee Supply nearby in Gladstone. I decided on ordering a package of bees (A starter Pack of about 10,000 bees) called Carniolans (Apis mellifera carnica) in January. The bees would arrive the first week of April. The reason I choose this breed was due to the fact that the can with stand colder weather than the classic Italian Bees. The Carniolans also ramp up there population quicker and slow down production quicker based on the weather. Seeing that the Willamette Valley has some wacky weather, it seemed like the better breed.
April 6th, I picked up my bees with my son. Man he was excited. The box they came in was like a little heater, the bees were making themselves warm for the queen. I had purchased a Langsforth 10 frame hive, with two supers and one medium frame for the honey. I set the hive up the day before their arrival and painted it white. Once we got home I sprayed them with a mist bottle full of sugar and water mix to keep them from flying, pulled the queen out and dumped them into the hive. I tried watched some videos on You Tube about the proper way to do this. In retrospect, I did a shitty job. One thing, buy the more expensive bee jacket with the bee veil built in. I bought the bee keeper hat and the veil you add over it. Two bees promptly figured out how to get inside and stung me in the ear. Wear the long sleeve white jacket, not a white t-shirt. Promptly stung in the belly and also wear white leather gloves. Don't wear black, cool on the construction job black gloves, two more stings. Also keep your little black dog away from you during the transfer of the bees into the hive. My poor dog got stung at least 10 times yelping all the way back to the safety of the house.
 Spend the money on the equipment, don't go cheap.
    I also totally screwed up the placement of the feeder bucket.Pull the top Inner cover and place it directly above the super that is setup on top of the base. The second super is added on-top of the inner cover that is sitting on the base super. Leave all the frames out, this way the feeder bucket is inside of the hive, no animals can mess with it and it makes less air space for the bees to heat. Put the roof onto the second super.

Anyways, the bees are really cool and I'm starting to get into them more and more. I recommend a good book put out by The University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education. It is called Honey Bees and Beekeeping: A year in the life of an Apiary. Third edition by Keith S. Delaplane.