Tallbike painted

So, cousin Kate is going to marry Angela Merkel, is he? Well if you can't be king of England you might as well be chancellor of Europe.

Where were we. Yup, the tallbike is even finisheder. It got racks welded on and it got painted. It can now stand innocently until the tyres go flat or I think of a use for it.

Still no triangulation of that whacking great big unstable parallelogram. We shall see if we ever need it. Unlikely if it never gets ridden and becomes a mere shed encumbrance.

Moving on, a big fat German plumber came to stay with his slender wife and tiny child and demanding activity after he'd eaten two dinners and helped himself to several evening beers and smoked a cigarette in bed, all of which made me wonder who won the war, and lacking a baby seat we had recourse to phoning Suzanne, who volunteered either of her machines, one a huge Dutch bicycle and the other a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle, if I'd fix the seat of the one and the tyre of the other. Nothing loathe, since the option was watching the perfumed plumber (he'd occupied the bathroom and emerged leaving behind such fumes of eau de cologne as would eliminate borer insects deep in the beams) eat his way through bacon eggs tomatoes sausages ("The German are better, English no good, like their cars. My Mercedes van has 130 horsepower, nothing it can't conquer." - Oh,thank you for that enlightening discourse. Anything else you'd care to tell at me?) several times, I walked down to the wharf where Suzanne lives and located the bikes and effected the one repair with nothing more than a track pump, and the other by riding it home on a wobbly seat and welding reinforcements to the whateverit'scalled gizmo atop the seatpost. Here's a before and after:

 Before. The cradle thingy for the seat rails bent, as you may imagine, where those thin bits either side of the hole lie.

After. 3mm steel welded in place and left untouched as much as possible to give vertical strength. Not much to show for three hours of a Saturday morning. Still, one hopes it works.

When the plumber went off in his camper van to Picton normal service was resumed, which is to say Carl the electrician telephoned and suggested I repair his tandem. This will have to wait till another post gets itself blogged.

Tallbike luggage rack

Out with the weekend welder, and the Tallbike which was finished is now even finisheder. -

On with a front mudguard - easy - and then on with a rear mudguard, which required two tags welding to the frame for 6mm bolts, and a bit of alteration of an old TV aerial to turn it into a mudguard stay which, hitherto, was missing.

'kay, that dealt with the non-issue of riding it through puddles which I don't propose ever to do.

It had struck me that since it's easy to mount and dismount, it wouldn't be a bad plan to use that most valuable of space, low between the wheels, for luggage. Accordingly I propped up the world's standard disposable container (a banana box) underneath the pedals and welded on a couple of hangers for a roller-skate wheel to hook the floppy-half of the chain out of the way. One of those rubbish folding chairs gave of its flimsy, lightweight, very thin-walled 5/8" ERW tubular legs and got turned into a rack, and a piece of old sturdy mountain bike (perfectly good, thank you PC Morris, a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle) front fork got sawn off and welded to the lower mainframe to attach the front thereof.

 Now for weight to test the wobbliness. Garden raided of river-cobbles, 51 lbs of which were uploaded into banana box.

Onto rack, and round and round the garden like a teddy bear, digging deep grooves into the grass which I don't care about. What's the purpose of a lawn anyway? You only have to mow it, and nobody actually enjoys a lawn. We ought to keep a sheep.

Well, it rode okay, but was wobblier than it should've been. Scratch head: grab rack, wiggle, determine that there is movement in the two rear members.

Decide to add triangulation, gaining the approval of all the world's engineers.

Lo! It no longer wobbles. Moreover I discovered that the left-hand pedal is a folding one, which I had not spotted before. Amazing what you find when people dump bikes on you.

So it is becoming a useful cargo bike, like one of those ancient Trades Bikes that Chris Darby used when we were kids and he wasn't distracted by November the Fifth and blowing up cowpats with bangers. And I bet young teenagers would be a jolly sight keener on delivering groceries on a Tallbike than one of those heavy things, if there were groceries requiring of delivery, if anyone used bicycles for delivering anything these days where one cannot function one child to school without the aid of a ton of four-wheel-drive metal.

Current weight increased to 38lbs. Still thinking about bracing that worryingly empty parallelogram.