What has 6 wheels, 4 feet, 1 motor, and lots of free time?

It's election day, and one topic that is on a lot of people's minds is energy, oil, and clean transportation. What's the solution? Electric vehicles? Car pooling? Bicycles? Skateboards? Randall Munroe and I decided to try all four at once. Here's a quick video of Randy on his electric skateboard holding onto a nylon strap tied to my bike carrying me holding a camera.

This turns out to be an extremely fun, albeit a little bit scary, method of travel. We all have to do our part to conserve energy. If commuting to work this way is what I have to do, well, I'm comfortable with that.

Province Town Century

If you're not a avid cyclist, a computer programmer, a Free-Software enthusiast, and from around the Boston area, then you've probably never even heard of the Tour De Nat. The Tour De Nat is a one-day, 120 mile bike ride from Boston's South station to Province Town, MA followed by a ride on the day's final ferry back to South Station just in time to go out drinking.

Last summer Owen and I took this ride ourselves with a few adjustments. For starters we didn't plan to take the final ferry back the day we arrived. We planned a camping trip around our ride with several other friends. Secondly, we started from Braintree T station, the end of the Red Line, to cut out the cross-city ride and then took a less-direct, more scenic route across the South Shore.

When we began planning the camping trip, we realized we didn't have many friends who drove, so space in cars was at a premium. We ask the rest of them what was more important to ensure made it to the camp ground safely, the tents or Owen and I. The group unanimously voted on the tents so Owen and I had to find another way to get to the Cape. We spent the next couple of months trying to figure out what to do but with Owen's time warp portal only in pre-Alpha stage and the trebuchet being as weak as it is, we figured the only other option we had was to bike it. At least we wouldn't have to bike with tents.

We spent the summer training. Owen and I went on a 40-mile ride right at the beginning of the summer for a quick warm up. I continued this regiment by spending the summer programming and building things out of PVC while Owen chose to focus more on the riding aspect of the ride for his training. He took several more lengthy, one-day rides over the course of the summer but made to sure to keep me updated so that I wouldn't miss out on that part of the training.

The day of the trip approached and we were ready. We got up at about 5:00am to take the Red Line down to Braintree. We weaved across the South Shore on our circuitous path, hoping to, at some point make it to the Sagamore Bridge. With nothing to guide us but our wits, sense of direction, street signs, highway markers, a map, and a Garmin etrex GPS device, we set off into the great known, bound for adventure or at least a few cramps. We occasionally stopped off along the side of the road to get pictures, take some video.

Let me give you some advice if you're driving a car on route 6A down the Cape. If you see a cyclist riding in front of you, don't assume he's going to turn off any minute now; just pass him. I realize you're old and the road is narrow but seriously, you're holding up a line of ten cars.

Camping in Province Town was a blast. The town has a great strip with lots of nice places to eat and more than its fair share of celebrity look-a-like cross dressers. The beaches were beautiful and if you get to the park services office at 9:00am you can get in line to get a fire permit for the beach of your choice which they will happily give you when they open at 4:00pm.

The ferry ride home was rather expensive but well worth it. For starters, it's a lot quicker than driving or riding a bicycle. Secondly, you can bring your bike on the ferry. One of the things about a century ride is that unless you're lucky, the second half of the ride is pretty much just the first half in reverse. It's nice to be able to take a long ride straight away from your origin and then magically (ferries count as magic) appear back where you started after you're done. The view on the bay was nice and I got a couple nice shots of the Boston skyline as we strolled into the harbor.

That's my report. Owen grabbed our statistics from his GPS device:

Total distance: 108.23
Time moving: 7:44:57
Time elapsed (includes train ride from Davis to Braintree and lunch): 12:30
Average speed: 14.0
Max speed: 31.0

Not bad. We plan to do it again this summer. If you're interested in joining us, let me know.

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Catty Scrap Tall Bike

Several weeks ago I was in Pennsylvania visiting my friends Sean and Nicolle again. This time I went down there with a great idea, which, like all of my other great ideas, was actually just a really bad idea backed up with a whole lot of zeal.

The idea was to rummage around in Sean's scrap metal yard for discarded bicycles and weld them together into one giant bicycle. Building a tall bike is a pretty straight-forward process if one has access to just a couple of suitable bike frames and knows how to weld. If one has access and endless supply of unsuitable bike frames and knows someone who has seen someone else weld, the process is significantly less straight forward.

We spent the first day piling up bikes that we found in the yard and discussing plans at the Allentown Brew Works, which was hosting their annual Brew Fest while I was in town. Keep in mind, inspiration comes faster when you're drunk and in Pennsylvania. I had found a couple of similar size BMX bikes and noticed that they both had those distinctive four-bolt handle-bar clamps and the handle bars with a cross bar on top. Sean and I decided it would be cool to take one BMX bike and flip it up-side down on top of another BMX bike. We'd take the handle bars off of the top one and use its clamp to hold onto the cross bar of the bottom bike's handle bars.

I thought that if we did this, the two seat tubes would line up and I'd be able to put a seat post through both to connect them, but I was wrong. So we took the plastic off of one seat and arc welded the remaining metal wire to the up-side-down bike. This allowed us to connect a regular seat tube to the top bike and slide it into the seat post of the bottom bike. I like to think of it as a bike that has a bike for a seat.

We then had a bike with pedals three feet off the ground, a fork for handle bars, and no place to sit. We solved the handle-bar problem no sweat. We just took another fork and connected it right-side up to the up-side down one. The existing wheel and axle made a perfect connector for the two forks so that's why there's a decorative, fourth wheel on top of the bike.

Now for the real challenge, where do you sit? We both agreed that putting my weight on that little seat-wire-welding number we whipped up earlier would probably cause my death, so we decided to cut the seat tube off of another bike and weld it up right coming out of the bottom bike. To brace it we drilled a huge hole through the bottom bracket of that same bike to put the seat tube through and welded the chain stays to the bottom bike for support. We found an extra long seat post in the yard to toss in there and presto! A very high seat.

Then we realized the major problem. The frame was in the way of running a chain from the crank to the rear hub because it was designed to have the chain go out the back. Now anyone reading this is probably thinking to themselves "Oh that's easy. Put the top bike's chain stays in a vice over night and force them apart. Then stick a five-speed mountain bike wheel with a cassette in the newly widened frame, run a chain from the crank back to the cassette, and finally run a second chain from the cassette down to the rear hub." Now, I admit that, in retrospect, we should have thought of that sooner but it was late and we weren't really thinking all that clearly (which we probably can't blame on the late hour.)

The bike was complete and there was only one thing left to do. I put on some thick gloves in case I had to brace myself during a fall and Nicolle got ready with the video camera in case anything more dangerous happened. As soon as I got on for the first time it was obvious that the bike would immediately do a wheely if I put any weight on the seat. It was so high up that it was behind the rear wheel, causing the seat post to act like a big lever. So we figured what, the heck? Toss a couple 20 lbs. weights on the front handle bars. It's not like we're going to being winning the Tour de France on this thing.

The first few trial rides revealed a flaw in the vertical chain. There was no way to tension the chain so it kept falling off. We added a derailer to try to pull up the slack. This fixed the problem enough to ride but it was still error prone and fell off fairly often causing the bike to lose speed, stall, and ditch its pilot.

We ended up using parts from six different bikes, two whole frames, one extra fork, one set of hacked up frame parts, an extra five-speed hub, a derailer, a seat, and a bunch of spare chains. I admit it wasn't pretty but it was so beautiful. Next time I visit we'll try to fix the chain situation.

How I Accidentally Joined a Bike Gang

Late last Saturday night Pascal and I were riding through Davis Square, heading to a party, when a fleet of intergalactic transport ships flanked us at a traffic light.
"Hey, nice bike!" said a Skunk, four feet above me.
"Thanks. You too!" I said as I looked up to admire his Cloudbuster.

"Now these are my people." I thought to myself as the light turned green and we all rode down Elm Street. We got to talking about bicycles, art, how to make PVC hinges, and the finer points of welding a disco ball to ones handlebars. They had plenty of questions for me and I for them.

I dropped back a little and met up with the fleet's tailgunner, Dozer, who explained to me a little bit about how the organization works. A lot of people know about or at least have seen SCUL around Somerville and Cambridge. They're a non-profit, artistic, bicycling, nerd gang based in Somerville, MA. They have missions once a week on Saturday nights which launch from a secret base and head off into the galaxy, blasting dance music from the fleets flag ship.

"The way it works is that you get invited to join by a member who's willing to sponsor you." Dozer explained while Pascal took notes. "You become their maggot for your first ride and your sponsor shows you the ropes dur... hang on." She banked quickly off to the right to pick up a set of brief, metacrapal connections at a high-five refueling station that materialized on the sidewalk near Porter Square's White Hen Pantry.

As we road on through Harvard Square collecting more high fives, cheers, and car horn blasts I learned about Operation Back in the Saddle Again and their objective for the night. The fleet was destined for Riverside subway station, the end of the Green Line's D branch, out in Newton, MA. The objective was to catch a glimpse of the stations planet Pluto model installed by the museum of science.

We road on through the night, out to Watertown, MA to a 7/11 to collect juice and candy bar rations for the mid-flight pit stop. We also had to make a few repairs. One of the maggots, Dishpan, altered the crew that her ship, War, had a wobbly wheel. Now, a little wobble never hurt anyone, but with a name like 'War' and three-foot ramrod mounted to your front, a wobbly back wheel can totally destroy your street cred. Threespeed, the fleet's resident mechanic aboard Starhustler, got out his tools and gave War a little once over. Dishpan then road three-quarter speed into a chain link fence head on with the ramrod repeatedly until she was satisfied that War had regained his original gusto. I went to talk to Skunk.

Skunk and I discussed hacking and the DIY community for a while and I was invited to next week's mission to a non-disclosed location which will be of particular interest to a hacker electronics geek like myself.

Now if you have good reading comprehension you've probably been think to yourself this whole time "Didn't he say he was headed to a party? How much time has passed since the beginning of this story?" Well yes, I was headed to a party, a party back in Davis Square no less. About an hour or two had gone by during our ride and pit stop and I was expected hours ago. So I bid my new friends good bye and wished them much luck on the remainder of their journey.

I've been instructed to send Skunk and email for more information and Dozer said she'd be happy to sponsor me on my first ride. I'm pretty excited and looking forward to exploring the galaxy in style next week; we'll see how it goes. The import thing to take away from this story is that I will soon be in a bike gang. One with secret meeting spots and all sorts of midnight shadiness. Needless to say I am certainly no longer someone to be trifled with.

How to Make Friends

This past weekend I went to Home Depot with a tape measure, some written measurements, and the intention of getting shelves for my closet. But as usual, I ended up wasting a lot more time than I should in the plumbing section. Literally four hours went by as I played with various PVC connectors like five-year-old at Toys R Us. I decided to take a break from setting up my new room and what better way to do this than to build a life-size stick figure out of PVC pipe to ride on the back of my tandem bicycle?

I walked around the aisle, measuring my arms, legs, and torso, drawing pictures, and laying pipes out on the floor in a roughly humanoid form.
"Do you need help?" one employee asked, choosing his words diplomatically.
"Yes", I said. "Do you have cross-joint for one-inch by half-inch by one-inch by two-inch PVC?"
"I doubt it, considering the way water flows. We don't carry every piece so it's hard to find things that aren't used for typical plumbing setups." He looked down at my head on a stick "And that is clearly not plumbing related."

I adjusted my plans accordingly, swapping out pieces in my drawings for the ones they actually carried in the store. Since I didn't know how big he'd need to be to fit properly on the bike I just modeled his sizes after my own. This is why his biceps are a half of an inch in diameter.

Later I went home to saw and cement together my new friend. After much deliberation with my roommate, Amy, we decided to call him Pascal Vanderbilt Chesterfield. I think it's a pretty fitting and dignified name.

Having a tandem copilot automaton around has a lot of benefits that you might not realize. I can finally ride in the carpool lane when I'm biking to work on i93. If none of my friends are around to go for a ride on the weekends I can still go without looking completely ridiculous. It's a lot less awkward if I meet a girl at a bar and she has a friend made of PVC. And best of all, he can wear the backpack instead of me. Now I just need to teach him how to signal.