Archive for June, 2005

What better time?

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005

I’m preparing for my first long organized bike ride. I have never done a century before. So… I decided to do the MS 150 ride, which can go up to a double century, if you’re foolhardy enough to try it. I’ve been getting a lot of support from friends, family and coworkers; I have raised my goal twice and now estimate I’ll have raised over $1000 towards finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis.

I’ve been riding my old Jamis Aragon for almost a year now, to and from work, but I decided it was time to upgrade. That thing is HEAVY steel (it’s a cross / hybrid bike) and in a fairly upright position. I have put over 3,500 miles on it in the past year, replaced hubs, tires, upgraded a bunch of stuff… I was running out of things to upgrade. :) Time to start all over again!

A week or so ago I was going to ride the Lake Shore bike path, to and from 71st street up to Bryn Mawr (about 36 miles round trip) two times, figuring 72 was close enough to 75 for government work. Except… I kind of got sidetracked on my first trip down. For a while I’d been wondering about my front wheel. I’d upgraded the back wheel to a beefier entry-level XT rim, and put a Continental tire on it, but the front was still a fairly stock, cheapo rim which I’ve beat on quite a bit. And I’m convinced that it’s a little out of true, but I may just be paranoid.

I stopped at this bike shop I’d heard good things about, on Michigan just south of 14th, called Cycle Bikes (formerly recycle bikes) and asked the guy what he thought. And, uh, allowed myself to get distracted by other bikes… and saw a nice Jamis touring bike, cromoly 520 with carbon front fork, marked down because it was last year’s bike. I was riding a 23″ (58.42 cm) frame, not quite enough length, and this bike was a 62 cm which is better suited to my height and leg length. It has Tiagra components, flight deck integrated shifter/brakes, Ritchie wheels and other components.. etc. Nice bike! Called Mark (who originally sold me my first bike many years ago) and got the thumbs-up from him, so I bought it. Had them put a rack on it and I moved over my cyclocomputer, lights, pump, etc.

Ended up doing the rest of my two there-and-back rides on the lake shore path that day on the new bike and left my old bike there; I went back to pick it up the other day, and had him put the same crank bros. steel eggbeater pedals on there for me.

We also did Bike the Drive, which was great. Wish we’d have registered earlier so we could just start off by riding down the drive in the morning with our numbers attached, and started earlier in general so there’d be less “Sunday bikers” (pardon the expression) to deal with. I mean, it’s bad enough when you have to ride on a bike path every day that’s congested by walkers, joggers, rollerbladers, other cyclists, and those morons who rent those ridiculous 4-wheel things. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d still take it over driving a car down Lake Shore Drive at certain times of the day!) But it’s even worse when you have ALL FOUR LANES of Lake Shore dedicated to cyclists and some folks form a nice slow line of riders like six people across, blocking up a few lanes. That’s just pretty ridiculous.

So BtD counted towards about 48 miles that day and I did the bike path again that night in its entirety, about 84 miles in total that day. After that I felt ready for the MS 150 ride. Have been trying to take it easy since then but it’s hard, some days I just feel a compulsion to go really fast on the new bike. :)

We went to REI on Memorial day and picked up a bunch of stuff — some new socks, a new jersey, spare tube, crank-bros. multitool, etc. Also got a cleaning kit for my camelbak and did that last night.

Today I took the new bike in for a pre-MS-ride tuneup, and on the way over there I almost ran over this woman and her kid as I rounded the corner by the Shedd aquarium; I skidded quite a bit and looked down to realize I was getting a flat tire. Managed to keep most of my weight on the back wheel and nursed it over to the Cycle Bike shop; got the tube replaced and had them put kevlar tires on there. Also had him cut in some brake levers on the inner portion of the handlebars, so I can ride with my hands there and still have the brakes handy.

So now I have a spare tube, some spare tires, a multitool, enough jerseys, yadda… hopefully I’m ready for the ride! Wish me luck.

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Yes, it DOES go both ways

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005

We’d been looking at combo washer / dryer units for a while and seeing a lot of mixed reviews on epinions. Lots of people said, “buy the service plan! It’s hard to get them serviced.” Others warned about the longer washing / drying time and the fact that they can only dry half of what you can wash in them. And it seemed like not many places in Chicago carried them, but Best Buy does.

Well, we happened to call the right Best Buy. Normally I absolutely hate buying stuff from them. I got my TV for about $1500 less by shopping online, for example. But in this case, they had the largest LG combo washer / dryer unit — the model is the WM3632H — and it was marked down to $1400-something from $1900. Why? A large dent and scratch in the front bottom. Someone else had refused delivery. Cool, sold, ours. We had originally been looking at the WM3677HW, which is a little shorter – the controls are on the front, it has one less temperature setting and two less cycles – but after seeing this thing on special we went for it.

When they delivered it we realized it also had kind of a big dent on the left side which we couldn’t see. But heck, we figured if it didn’t work, we’d just get someone out to fix it — we also got the service plan.

Pros: It runs on 110. No special electrical outlet needed. It only uses hot and cold water to dry – some kind of use of condensation – so no exterior venting required. Some models run on gas but ours does not – again, one less thing to have to get hooked up. It fits in the front hall closet of a one-bedroom condo. It’s about 36″ high, 27″ wide, 29″ deep and needs another 1″ on each side and 4″ in the back. It uses a lot less water than a normal washer; you don’t see the drum fill up, you just see water chasing down the sides as it agitates. Best part? You know those yellow tags that tell you an estimate of how much it will cost to operate the appliance for a year? This one said like $18. Amazing. (What does it normally cost? Not sure.)

Cons: It will wash a 22 pound load (I think that’s ‘dry weight’) but only dry an 11 pound load. That’s okay, we use a drying rack for a lot of stuff. And like I said before, it takes a LONG time to wash and dry clothes, but that’s okay. You just get in a different mindset about it, plan differently. (After all – it’s a heck of a lot more convenient having one of these things in your place rather than having to go down a few flights of stairs to a communal washer/dryer room where it costs $1 to wash, $1 to dry, and sometimes you have to do multiple dryer cycles… heck with that!) Oh, and it takes another kind of detergent – one specially made to have ‘low foam’ for high efficiency washers like this one. But you can use a smaller amount of normal detergent and it will work fine.

Weird: The drum rotates in both directions, usually alternating. (Is this normal?)
Cool: It has these ‘rollerballs’ on the agitator arms.

Setting it up: First I just indiscriminately cut a bunch of holes through the wall separating the back of the closet from the kitchen. Needed one hole for the electrical and another for the hoses, which would run through an unused (corner) cabinet, behind the dishwasher and connect under the sink. (Ended up making two extra holes, one where I hit a stud and another where I didn’t have enough clearance for all of the hoses. Oops.)

I bought a bunch of stuff for 1/2″ pipe thread. We’d already split the hot water as a supply line to the dishwasher, so I put another Tee above that, with another shutoff valve, then a hose connector. Did the same thing on the cold water side. The hoses for the sink started to leak so I replaced those too.

The drain line was the worst; there is a 1 1/2″ diameter straight PVC under the sink with an angled inlet for dishwasher outflow. But the thermo-hose from the washer / dryer outlet was 3/4 inner diameter, so I got a 3/4″ tee and brought the dishwasher’s outlet into the top of it (nice flexible rubber piece on the end of it). Then I realized I didn’t have anything that would reduce a 3/4″ to a 1/2″ inner diameter effectively.

What the heck, we were itching to see this thing work. And we figured, ‘they said it uses less water than a normal washing machine does, right?’ So we put a big many-gallon bucket under the sink and stuck the barbed 3/4″ tee in to empty. The very first water cycle filled it about 3/4 of the way up. Fortunately it emptied in waves, so we had time to dump it in the sink and put it back under there another two times. (Oops…) Definitely time to get that issue solved!

First I tried one of those cheapo kits from Ace hardware with multiple segments (cheap) hose clamps on them. The idea is, you cut pieces off until you have the right size inner diameter on each end. Well, I cut it down, but it still seemed loose with the hose clamps cranked all the way down, and sure enough! Water came squirting out the first time we ran a load of clothes. I got a higher-quality one from Home Depot and it worked quite a bit better.

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