Final touches

Here we are: finished. Click to biggify the better to appreciate.

Rear Rack

Yesterday, before riding to the gym, I realized that I couldn't go into the gym with cleated shoes. Which meant, I had to carry my regular gym shoes. Which meant, I had to have a pannier. Which meant, I had to mount the rear rack. I've not wanted to do that, because the rear rack lacks the shininess of the other parts. It has some kind of anodized or powder-coated gray finish and so many fiddly bits it would be impractical to try to strip and polish. But, I can't find anything nicer online. So I put it on. It provided a place to hang the panniers and mount a blinky light.

One option for the BionX motor is to mount the battery within a modified rear rack, so that rack might replace this one. We'll see.

Cleaning out the shop

This morning I spent a couple of hours cleaning out the shop area where I'd worked on the bike. The "shop" is an enclosed piece of the garage with a deeply cracked cement floor, usually a sort of ground-level attic. Before starting this project I cleaned and organized it and set it up as a bike garage. Now the job's done, I cleaned it out yet again.

Fairing

As mentioned below, the fairing I ordered from Zzip Designs was too large. This afternoon I drove over the hill to Bonny Doon, up a rutted quarter-mile driveway through a forest, to where Carl has run a one-man business making bicycle fairings and windscreens for 25 years or so. He told me a lot about how you go about bending and stretching Lexan to make an optically-clear elegant bubble windshield. He has to cook the plastic for a day in a heat cabinet to drive the moisture out of it to get it to stretch without voids.

He had what he referred as a Sport fairing, one of a run he had made for Connie McAyeal and her friends up in Portland, a group of female recumbenteers who called themselves the Golden Girls. It's the Sport fairing because, Fast Freddy Markham told him, "nobody would buy something called the Golden Girls fairing."

That's the end of Phase One of this project. Phase Two, installation of an electric stoker, will begin next week when I take the bike up to Joe at Velolectric to arrange for that installation. I'll post one more update then to say what details we settle on.

Almost immediately after we head out for a 3-week holiday in the RV (one of those condition-killing off-bike vacations). When we get back, we start Phase Three ("in which Doris gets her oats," John Lennon). No, in which we try out the 'letric stoker at different assist levels and on different kinds of terrain and stuff.