2011 Riding Totals- Here's to 2012!

I've been tracking my miles since '04. Every year right around New Year's I record the DIST2 and zero out each speedometer. It's always a good reminder of how much time I actually put in towards my riding goals for the year.

This year with Elliot in the house I'm going to have to put in a more concentrated effort. He should be old enough by the end of the summer to strap on the back of the big dummy (in a baby seat, of course) and take him out riding.

(example of a Pea Pod on a Big Dummy)

With studded tires, cold weather riding gear and lights I hope to keep on riding to work through the new year. I'm also planning on entering the Dakota 5-0 for 2012- perfect motivation to ramp up the miles. I also really want to improve my technical skills. I don't know if I'm going to have to build a few stunts in the back yard to practice on, but I need to get organized and put some real effort into it.

In any case, here is to a great 2012!

Fixing Kitchenaid KUDS01FLSS6 Dishwasher

This is round 2 of a rather crude DIY fix for our KitchenAid dishwasher. We noticed that our dishes just were not getting clean, and there was lots of particulate left on the dishes after washing. We first tried removing the spray bars and looking for any clogs- nothing. We took apart and cleaned the filter screens in the bottom of the tub, also to no avail.

This dishwasher has a two position upper rack. There is a set of rubber seals that only allows water to flow out of the proper hole to the upper rack. We noticed that the rubber seal that shuts off water flow to the lower hole didn't seem to be sealing properly. Rather than spending the money on the replacement part on the chance that was the issue, we decided just to seal it ourselves with some aluminum ductwork tape to see if that was indeed the problem. We disassembled the seal, applied tape, reassembled, and ran the dishwasher. Quite to our surprise, it actually seemed to work. The only disadvantage is that you can't lower the rack to the lower position.

Fast forward just over a year later, and the aluminum tape finally failed, and the dishwasher was up to its old tricks. This time, I decided to make the fix a little more permanent by inserting a small piece of plastic cut from the lid of a dishwasher safe container to form the seal. The combination of aluminum tape plus the small piece of polypropylene should make the fix permanent.

Aluminum tape over lower water outlet. Make the tape wrap around the edges of the part, but not so far as to obstruct the snap-fit features. If the snap-fit features are covered with tape, the cover won't snap on properly.

Polypropylene insert between rubber seal and plastic cover of water outlet. (only visible through circular cutout in rubber seal) You can pull the rubber seal out and use it as a pattern when you cut the polypropylene insert.

"outside" view of water outlet, polypropylene insert visible in lower outlet. This is before re-assembly.

Re-assembled water outlet before installation into dishwasher

All parts assembled and back in the dishwasher. You can see the lower water outlet is now permanently blocked

Winter is here, and studs are slow....

Took the Big Dummy out for the first spin with its new sneakers. 19.1 miles, and the incredibly fast 11.7 mph average speed. It turns out the studded tires really suck the energy, particularly on pavement. For some reason they don't seem to be any worse than normal tires on hard pack snow, though. They did work well- I didn't have any issues on any of the icy sections, even on climbs. You could feel some small amount of slipping, but nothing like what you'd get with normal tires.

I met John on the paved trail on the west side of 494, then we headed over to Minnetonka to have some coffee. All in all, a fun ride.

Funny how the 29'er makes even the Big Dummy look like a kid's bike!

Surly Big Dummy all dressed up for winter

I just installed some Nokian Mount and Ground 1.9" 160 studded tires on the Big Dummy. I'm hoping to keep riding in to work, no matter the conditions. I've never tried studded tires before. These things look like they'll make a huge difference. Not only will the studs help, but the rubber is also super tacky and there are wide gaps between the lugs for shedding snow chunks.

I took the liberty of putting the bike on my bathroom scale- standing it up on the rear wheel. With the studded tires and light setup it clocked in at a round 50 pounds. Ouch. No wonder why it was a little tough to get out of the work stand! At least it'll be great training for spring.

Riding to work in the winter beats driving even more than in the summer, at least in my opinion. Every ride is an adventure. Plus, there is nothing like riding home with the trail lit up by your lights and being surrounded by twinkling reflections from each falling snowflake.

DIY Wooden Beer Case

I'm on the Instructables weekly mailing list, and a couple months ago I saw a neat project someone had built- home made wooden beer bottle cases. I thought this would be a great Christmas gift for my brother, who is an avid home beer brewing enthusiast. Shh, don't tell....

The instructable project was nice project, but I thought for a gift I needed to kick it up a notch or two. For one, the referenced project used simple screw and glue construction to join the four sides of the case together. That works great, but isn't the prettiest. I thought I'd try dovetailed joint construction instead. I've never tried it, but I thought it would be a great skill to learn. It also a much nicer looking and stronger joint.

I picked up a General Tools dovetail jig from Home Depot. It's pretty basic, but much cheaper than a nicer setup from Rockler. Since the sides of the crate are 12" tall, you have to reposition the jig three times per side. A bit time-consuming, but not a big deal. Once the board is clamped in the jig, you use the included router bit to form the "tails" and "pins" of the joint. I chose to use a half-blind dovetail, with the exposed tails on the handle side of the beer crate.

I sized the crate to fit 12x standard beer bottles. I discovered shorty Sierra Nevadas don't fit, but anything "normal" will fit fine. The sides are constructed from 1"x12" pine, and the bottom, sliding cover, and internal dividers are made from 1/4" birch plywood.

The internal dividers are cut from 1/4" birch plywood ripped to 6" tall strips, cut to length, then notched so they lock together. I didn't glue them together or to the box so they can be easily removed if necessary.

Crate 1 of 2 ready for finishing!

To finish it off, I'm planning on using T-shirt iron-on transfer paper to print out some custom brewery decals and iron them on to the wood. That should really add some nice personalization to the project. There is a nice article also on Instructables about this technique. 

Getting more life out of a 1997 Niterider Digital Head Trip

Now that I've gotten into electric RC airplanes, I have plenty of decent LIPO batteries and their assorted chargers around. This greatly simplifies making a LED bike light- now I just need the light itself, and the associated electronics to drive the light. I'd like to break this project into two components:

1) Build a device to allow me to drive my existing old-school 6V Niterider digital head trip lights off of 7.4V and 11.1V LIPO batteries. This will include a voltage regulator and a low voltage cutoff to prevent the LIPOs from being over-discharged and damaging the batteries.
2) Source appropriate LED lighting system to drive with the LIPOs.

So, my old Niterider is a 6V model, with maximum 15 watt power usage. (from my memory of the advertisements, not actual measurements)

Using P=V^2/R, and V=IR:

R = .42 ohms
I = 2.4A

A possible method to both regulate the voltage and protect the battery packs would be to use a UBEC. Hobbyking has one potential model: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbycity/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idproduct=2160. This product can output either 5.0v or 6.2v depending upon jumper setting, plus it is capable of 4A current draw and has a low voltage warning buzzer. And it only costs $11.25.

This seems like a good solution to me. Cheap, easy and simple! 

As part of an order from Hobbyking for some RC airplane parts, I added a UBEC to try with my existing bike lights. I ended up ordering a different unit than I specified in the previous post- I went with this one instead: TR-UBEC15. It was a couple more dollars, but it has a much higher current capacity as well as being in stock.

Converting the UBEC to power the Niterider Digital head trip was easy- but ultimately unsuccessful.

Step 1: Cut off stock connectors off of UBEC and solder on EC3 (to connect with my LIPO batteries)

Step 2: Cut open old, worn out Niterider NIMH battery pack to recover the cord:

Step 3: Solder the NiteRider power cable to the UBEC output. 

The NiteRider plug is a "N" style plug, available at your neighborhood RadioShack. It's also center positive. In my cable, the white wire was the center positive, and the black was the outside ground. The red wire was unused. The colors may vary, so be sure to use a voltmeter to double check which lead is correct.

When everything was soldered and insulated with heat shrink- I did a quick short check then fired it up. It worked just fine- unfortunately the UBEC didn't deliver 6V- it was closer to 5.8V. The NiteRider Digital head unit didn't like that, and registered it as a flat battery and went into the low power "limp home" mode.

Bummer. Next time I place a Hobbyking order I'll try another UBEC, and hopefully I can find one with a specified higher voltage output. This might be a good option- 7.2V output- will overdrive the bulb slightly but should avoid triggering the head unit low voltage error. 

FYI, I finally ordered and soldered together the new UBEC (which works). See the post HERE.

In the mean time, I made a simple charge adapter to allow my RC battery charger to charge my old NiHM NiteRider batteries. It just a Type N power socket (from RadioShack) connected to an EC3 connector.

It works great. The big advantage is that the charger is programmable- so I can have it run multiple discharge-charge cycles automatically to cycle the battery pack. This is particularly important since the packs have been sitting around half-discharged for the last year or so.

Lake Level Sensor- Success!

I was able to get the lake sensor system to successfully push data to google docs: LINK

The “lakelevel” is the distance in inches from the sensor to the lake surface. I need to change this to lake height above sea level in feet and inches. I also need to add some sort of smoothing function to remove ripples and waves from the output. The water temp is in degrees F. (not working correctly at the moment) The photocell is relative sky brightness- 0 is no light, 1000+ is full sunlight. Air temp is in degrees F, and air RH is relative humidity.

I’m having some sort of hardware issue with the lake temperature probe- you’ll notice the anomalous reading in that column. Right now it’s sending data to google docs every 10 minutes. Once I figure out the water temperature probe, I’m going to add some data visualization -graphs over time + a graphical current status icon - then attempt to send those to the Mooney lake association website.

Also, the current code is a resource hog on the host PC. I need to dramatically reduce CPU use and then export the application as a stand-alone executable. Right now it's running from the Processing development environment. 

It's been a very interesting project- a great excuse to dive a bit deeper into hobby electronics and programming.