The Mountain Bike Chain and Cassette Relationship

Unfortunately Riding a bike is not free, it requires maintenance (and energy). One important maintenance item to take care of is the drive train. Bike chains and gears eventually need to be replaced. This is from to the stress put on the chain when riding will stretch it out and gear teeth getting warn out. As the chain is streched, the gears conform to the new chain length. This of course happens over time and is hard to actually see in action. However it’s effects can be easily seen. Swapping a new chain on an older cassette can leave a rider very unhappy when the chain continues to slip as it catches the molded gears from the previous chain. The bike almost becomes so irritant to ride that it’s not worth riding. To solve the chain-cassette warping problem there are two avenues to take.

Two Chains of almost the same length, with 2 extra connectors on the left chain

Chain Swap(<1000 miles): Replacing the chain less than every 1,xxx miles should keep the Rear cassette fully in tact and accepting of new, unstretched chains. However, this can become costly depending on the amount of riding you do. Of course your mileage may vary depending on how much you are torquing on that chain.

Chain & Cassette Replacement (>1000 miles): If the chain has been stretched beyond what the rear cassette has been warped too, the good news is you can continue to ride your bike as is and get some more millage out of your C-C combo. The bad news is that both the chain and rear cassette will need to be replaced to have the bike operate as planned for next time. 

Gold Powerlink can come in handy on the trail!

Another issue that may arise from chain and cassette combinations, is chain snapping or teeth chomping. These two hurdles can be frustrating when encountered on the trail, so it’s important to keep your bike up to snuff with some TLC and preventative maintenance. Of course keeping your chain well lubricated and out of the rain will give it a longer life. Cassettes can also be cleaned of residual grease that can build up to keep the gears shifting smoothly. When a chain snaps, a chain tool will most likely be necessary to push out the pin (not all the way) to allow for links to be replaced and put back in. One piece of equipment I don’t ride without is a power link. These little chain connectors can allow a chain to be broken easily and put back together without any tools. If your chain supports this type of connector, I highly recommend it!

When cassettes are toward the end of their life span, they tend to loose teeth. The wrenching on the teeth can snap some gears right off the cassette. While this may cause an unpleasant riding experience, it’s important to keep in mind that certain gears will continue to provide slippage and avoiding those gears will provide more power. Depending on the type of cassette and the teeth snapped, the individual gears could be replaced, but I would just recommend replacing the whole cassette with stronger one.

In wraps, keep your chain well lubricated and estimate of the number of miles on your chain and cassette. Doing so will extend the life of your chain, and keep you happy knowing what maintenance is planned ahead for your bike.

-Matt

p.s. More Chain Art here!

A Week With The Go Pro

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends GoPro (tm) camera for an extended period of time. Each day I would try and figure out something else to do with the pictures or videos from it to see what was possible. Here is a summary of each day and what I tried to do with the camera.


Sunday: Security Camera Casing
I wanted to place the camera out on a ledge on my back porch, but I didn't want the camera to be exposed to thieves. I decided to look through my recycle bin to see what I could come up with. In about 20 minutes I had my self a fully disclosed GoPro Camera inside a old tin can. Luckly no slices to the skin occured in the making of this nifty encasing. While it wasen’t perfect, it was much more disguiesed then the heavily advertised clear plastic of a go pro encasing.

This casing can easily be reproduced if your looking for a hidden GoPro camera to be mounted somewhere for a bit.

Simply follow the steps below to make your own Security camera casing for a GoPro:

1. Find a normal 16 oz tin can.
2. Empty contents
3. Take off the lids from both ends. Also you may want to trim the length of the can by cutting off 2-4 cm from one end.
4. Warp container to become ecliptical to allow Go Pro camera to slid in
5. Find where the best location for a hole to be for the camera to see out of
6. Create a square hole at this location (one of the easier cuts done for this project)
7. Slid camera in, recording before sliding in, and mount in location

So there you have it, a Go Pro turned into a disguied tin can that’s ready for mounting.

Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for someone taking your camera because it was hidden in this 100% disguised security casing. This is a complete ad-hoc attempt to hide the camera, so don't take it too seriously to put your camera somewhere for a few weeks and expect it not to be discovered.


Monday: Time lapse All day (Attempt #1)
The whole point of Sundays tin can encapsulation, was to mount the camera outside for a day and capture a picture periodically to then speed up and watch in fast forward. I decided to look up the GoPro manual online and change the settings to make sure the project would be a success. I decided to snap a picture every 5 seconds at r5 (highest resolution).

I set the camera on the ledge outside in the morning before 6am and had it record. When I headed out for the day, it seamed all was going well and I would have a bunch of pictures to turn into a movie when I got back. It turned out that the capture only lasted for 4 hours before running out of memory. Here is a video of that:

This video uses a command line to generate a list of images and compile them into a movie. More information about that can be seen here at this blog talking about the command line code to make the video.

I decided to make some modifications to the image size and try again the next day!


Tuesday: Time lapse All day (Attempt #2)
I guessed the 16GB memory card wasen’t enough to hold so many high resolution pictures. I decided to cut back the resolution but increase the frequency at which the pictures were taken. Setting it to the lowest resolution and a 2 second interval I set up the camera in the morning again and went back to bed. When I headed out for the day the red light was still blinking on the camera snapping pictures every 2 seconds!

At the end of the day, when I checked up on the Go Pro it was still on, but said it only took about 6,000 pictures. For some reason it stopped snapping pictures right around the time I left in the morning. I guess I pressed on something and made it stop. Regardless, here is the video from that capture.

Wednesday: Slow Motion
I decided to give up on trying to get a all day time lapse, and instead try to mess with slow motion. I saw some GoPro promotional videos that used a slowed down effect when the subject was in mid air. Doing some reasearch on the GoPro camera, I found that it takes 60 frames per second video. What does this mean? Typically for a series of pictures to be considered “moving” they need to flicker at 24 frames per second. This is just a minimum however. So capture 30 frames per second gives a nice seamless moving video. If we jump this up a notch we can get into slow motion cameras, by taking a few thousand frames each second. So, 60 frames per second allows us to slow the video down at half the speed without any noticeable frame difference. We can slow it down even more if we don’t mind losing some quality in the frame rate.

I tried this slow motion effect on the best video I could make in doors, cracking an egg. Here is the slowed down video.

While this is not the best example of slowing down a video, it’s a start. Editor Note: The audio from the crack of the egg was a bit loud, so I swapped it).

Thursday: Slow Motion (again)

I wasn't done with the slow motion effect just yet. I wanted to try and make a video that seamed normal and then went into slow motion. Again, all I had was an indoor setting, so I had to make do with what I had.

Here’s a quick video of a slow down segment within the video that is at normal speed.

Friday: Fast Forward Video
Instead of using fast flipping of pictures from the GoPro, I decided to try and film a video and give it a fast forward effect to make a few hours go by in seconds. My attempt was a failure. While this can easily be done with some modern video editing software, all I am using is a command line on a Ubuntu setup. I thought the slow motion effect could be used to speed up the film as well, but it appears that that gives errors. I ended up splitting the film into a picture every second and then compiling all the images into a movie file as I did on Monday and Tuesday. The result was a low quality, choppy fast forward of a typical morning sequence.

Saturday: Time Lapse while Shopping

Who said the Go-pro had to be used in "extreme" activity's only. I figured I would have fun with it by wearing it on my head when running some errands with some friends. It mainly considered of gathering ideas together for an art project at Joann's Fabric. It also had some driving and grocery store shopping. A few people found the camera disturbing and asked that they were not filmed. Others thought it was very cool and did not mind being filmed (like the guy in sprouts who was buying some bananas and a bottle of wine).

End Of Week Conclusions
These little experiments were an attempt to learn more about the GoPro camera and to try and think of shots, angles, activities that can use these features to improve future Go Pro action videos! Hope this helps with your future videos!

Randoneering: Gear Check List

Do you ever wonder how far you could ride a bicycle? Think, how far can you pedal and pedal and pedal until you couldent pedal any more? 50 miles? 100 miles? 300 miles? While a group of long distance riders call randoneers attempt to answer this question. Randoneering, acording to wikipedia, is long-distance unsupported endurance cycling. It has a series of rides ranging from 200 kilometers (~125 miles)  to a 1200 km (~745 miles) event in France taking place once every four years. Each ride is self supported by the rider themself and must be done within a given time range. 13.5 hours is allowed for the 200 km, while 90 hours is allowed for the 1200 km.

    I recently had the chance to renew my spirit in randoneering with a local 200 km ride. The whether turned out great, and there was a good group of 14 riders participating. In the past I have done a different 200 km ride and a 300 km ride but it has been a few months since I have done a longer ride, so I wanted to get back into randoneering with a shorter 200 km. All went well with the ride taking 10.5 hours.

    

In randoneering there is a lot this entry could focus on, but for this entry I figured I would document the list of items I pack for the ride. I wrote this for a previous ride, but used it again for this ride, and it worked as a checklist for all the gear. Heres the list:

GEAR

• Bike
• Headlamp to be apllied to my head when it get's dark
• Hand pump
• Spare derailer cable
• Patch kit - loaded with chain link, power link, pactches
• Tire Irons
• needle nose pliers
• Chain tool
• Bike front light
• Bike rear light (attached to bike
• Allen wrenches
• Water bottles full of water
• Screw driver for + and -
• Cresent wrench (small)
• Spoke tool
• 3 spare spokes (attached to bike frame)
• Jandd Handlebar Bag

FOOD

• 6 cliff bars
• 3 Gu /quick energy packets
• Packet of Tums

CLOTHES

• Gloves
• Helmet
• Bike shorts
• Shirt
• Light weight jacket
• Bright Reflective Vest

MISC

• Gorrilla tape
• Sunscreen (brought and applied before race)
• Spare batteries for lights
• Pen
• First Aid kit
• Walet with $35 cash + cards
• Ipod suffle loaded with the best motivational music I could find
• Iphone Fully charged
• Ipod/iphone headphones
• Spare bike tube

This was a basic checklist I used for my 200 Km and 300 Km brevets. Yours may vary, but it should give you an idea about what to bring. Since the ride is a long distance, but self-supported the gear you bring is a trade off between weight and having everything you may want. While this wasn't the easiest bike ride I have done, I do plan on doing more of these longer rides. Some future entry could include details about my diet, before, during and after the ride, training before the ride, or just simply the ride itself.


-Matt

Rickett's Glen and its 21 Waterfalls

Louie and a group of three hikers set out on the 21 falls hike in Rickett's Glen state park in the morning of Sat Oct 22.

It had been pretty rainy most of the week leading up to the hike so the hikers were a bit worried it might be canceled. Although hiking in the rain adds a little spice to the hike just like chipotle seasoning adds taste to a plain scrambled egg meal, there were several beginners on this outing and we did want to take precautions to let them enjoy the hike as much as possible. Fortunately the weather cleared up and we set out for the hike at 10 AM, which was not too early but most of us had a 60+ min drive to the meeting spot.

The hike began in a forest where the fall foliage was in full effect. For you californians out there, fall foliage is when the leaves change color. This happens during the fall season, which is between the season of summer (stereotypes: sailboats, beach balls, sunscreen, and sunburns) and the season of winter (stereotypes: snow man with carrot nose, hanging stockings on the fireplace, sleds). Again for you california people, real winter is when the temperature gets cold and there is sometimes snow. Please google "winter" if you are still confused with what it is or come on over to the east coast between Dec and March for a real treat.

Anyways alot of leaves were already on the ground and the leaves still on tree branches were on the cusp of falling. It was a really colorful view, seeing all these different trees and leaves with amazing contrast, but a bit chilly though. The morning temp started in the high 40s but reached the mid 50s by lunch time.

Most of the hike was along a river and every quarter mile we would see a waterfall. We had our counting game face on from the start of the the hike and got fooled (rookie mistake) several times in thinking a sub 10 footer was included in the quest for the 21 waterfalls. The waterfalls differed in size but the rule of thumb for waterfall counting is that if its 10 feet or above its fair game and you are good to go for calling it a legitimate waterfall. Fortunately we had some locals point out the mistake early on and said many out of towners get tricked as well by this magic number.

Anyways the hike was a good 7.8 miler that we finished in short of 4 hours. Since the trail was a big ol loop we were fortunate enough to constantly have a different view but we could definitely see the trail getting crowded after lunchtime with people doing the reverse trail. Also this hike is a dog haven and the ratio of dogs to hikers was approximately 1:4 which is quite frankly an amazing ratio since the population of dogs to humans on planet earth is about 300 million to 7 billion or 1 dog for 233 humans. We were happy to get out early though and have alot of the trail to ourselves. Definitely a hike to do again and converting into a trail running course is a possibility. Boulder rock climbing could also be part of the itinirary, since approximately mile 4 has a group of 10ish 10 foot boulders that have climbing potential.