So many beautiful cards in my mailbox! Thank you, everyone.
~~~~~
u/ninajyang Thank you so much for this Congrats card. This is the type of pretty stationary I would never dare to buy for myself, so it was a treat to receive. I appreciated the stickers as well! 🌈
u/stillsheryl I really can't believe you made this! What tool(s) did you use? The stamps of your cats are so precious too. Thank you for describing the beautiful scuba experience. 🐢
u/grasshopper2231 x2
Such a delightful St. Patrick's Day Card! The 3D stickers are so cool and insect stamps are so cool. I'm enjoying being on your mailing list, thank you! 🍀
Look at this beautiful Ramadan card! You even wrote my name in Arabic. Thank you so much!! ت
u/melhen16 Thank you for the sea life card! The coral design is so unique. You always include excellent quotes. Where do you find all of your cool vintage stamps? 📮
u/unseenbowl Butterfly day!! Wow, so many stickers, ephemera, and even an anatomy diagram! I'm so glad you're building a garden that both the caterpillars and butterflies will enjoy! They're lucky to have you as a neighbor. 🦋
u/DianaPenPal It's a perfect mythical postcard! I never even knew about Grassman. Plus, you picked a perfect Emerson quote about nature. Thank you! 🧌
u/HeyMorganM I love this "sunshiny" door and bike! Did you take this photo? The metallic gold washi tape goes perfectly with it too! Thank you so much. ☀️
u/Fancykiddens x2
This lowrider is awesome! I live with a car enthusiast, so I'm excited to share info about this museum! The Barbie Jeep sounds particularly en vogue. 🩷
I love this Reese's Puff postcard! So clever to make it yourself. Our household "trash" can hold such gems. Personally, my favorite cereals have been Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Trix! 🥣
u/Strong-Finger-6126 Thank you for the moon postcard! I'm really into phases of the moon and even track them on my calendar. Interesting to hear about the nurses' theory! 🌓
u/DPClamavi Thank you so much for this excellent French tourist card. The stickers and stamps were especially fascinating for me. Plus, as I'm sure you know, your handwriting is beautiful! 🇫🇷
u/LavendarLarry Haha, thanks for sending an "ugly" Hawaii card! I agree that it looks dirty... or they meant for it to look vintage? I laughed at how the "ugly cat" tarot card sticker was labeled "THE DEVIL" too, haha. 🌺
u/Sable__ Thank you for this delightful 101 Dalmations card! This is such a precious scene in the movie. I loved your description of the shooting star too, wow! 💫
u/Adoreible95 Thank you for the 100 Congrats card! It feels so good to contribute to this community. I always enjoy seeing your lovely handwriting and punny jokes! 💌
u/Medium_Carrot I loved this postcard of Bombay, The Museum. The washi tape, weather status, and stamps are so great too! I'm so glad you liked the Monet. 🎨
u/cookalot Such an adorable Easter card! The stickers and encouraging message really made my day. Cheers! 🐣
u/alyxandr1a Yay for being 100 buddies! But boo to the creepy talking doll. 😂 Thank you so much for the stickers and tea!! PS. That wax stamp of a cat and mushrooms is... everything.

Hi! I've completed building my mpcnc lowrider v3. I've gotten it to run a few great projects, but my z endstops are VERY inconsistent. I've done some looking and it appears to be a problem with the model of skr board I received. There are two fixes I was able to find: 1-scrape the indicator LEDs off the board, or 2-add in a pull up resistor.
Option 1 isn't preferable because I'd rather have the board in as close to pristine condition as possible. Option 2 is my preferred choice, but I can't quite find out to do that. I was able to find some generalized wiring diagrams, but nothing about where I would connect the resistor on the board.
Ideally, I was hoping to get info about how to add a pull up resistor to the skr board for the z limits. If there's an alternative I'm just not aware of, please let me know!

Hello all! I own a lovely 2009 XR1200, and I want to do a kind of sacrilegious mod to it: I want to change out the gauge(s) to one from the new Lowrider S. I know, you don't have to tell me how stupid this is. I don't want to absolutely ruin this piece of history, but I do want to make it my own. The biggest cosmetic thing I want to do to it is add this Rizoma fairing, which while it'll take a LOT just to accommodate it (changing the gauges to a single, using the gauge mount/handlebar clamp from a Forty Eight to lower the gauge properly, different triple trees to eliminate the stock headlight cowl, and a modified headlight mount), I think it'll set it out from the crowd while being reversible to stock and not entirely egregious.
So instead of the Harley OE accessory Combination Digital SpeedometeAnalog Tachometer, I want to go with the gauge off of a Lowrider S, shown as number 12 in this diagram/INSTRUMENTS_-_FXLRS/ac280bf2-e714-411f-8d02-cd58e6c63f3f/56e5fa9e-5894-4b5b-8bb8-07a372f8da4a/y). I can see that the 12 way socket in that diagram is the same as the one on my XR1200, but does anyone have any insight as to if this would be a plug-and-play procedure? Would I be able to copy the odometer reading, install it, and be on my way, or does the gauge being from a different model family and being from a 2018+ CAN bus bike cause any issues? Will I have to do any wiring? Should I give up on this flight of fancy? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop? Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!

Introduction/Warning: Extremely Long-Form Kind of Rambling Content Below

Let's get the tldr out of the way: it's new bike day. Pics are in the album.
 
That said, I thought I'd add to the conversation by diving into how this bike came about. I argue that this bike is unusual and deserves some explanation. It's the year 2018 and I built up a 26er road bike. This post is a design and build summary of my first custom bicycle: a Bantam Bicycle Works small-batch Allroad bike. It's a skinny-tube, steel, low-trail, randonneuring bike with disc brakes and clearance for 54mm tires. It's my hope this post will serve to inspire and inform those who are interested in this genre of bike. Let's get into how and why I specced this bike.

Design and Motivation

I can't go too far into talking about this without a brief diversion to my other bike, a Soma Grand Randonneur. I've talked extensively about that bicycle here and here, so without re-hashing all that, I'll summarize how it fit into the long term plan that produced the allroad.
The GR (Grand Randonneur) was an experimental bike from the start. At around $450, the frame was a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to get into an interesting genre of bikes: low trail, smaller wheel, fatter tire, lighter-weight steel bikes, or randonneur bikes. Every component on that frame was chosen to give me ground-truth experience for what could be my ideal bike.
How far "off the beaten path" can I take a 42mm slick tire? How do I feel about wet mountain descents on cantilever brakes? What chainring does it take to make 1x really work in the mountains? Can it work? How big of a bag do I need for 100km of riding far away from other people? How about 200km? More? These were all open questions in 2016, but by December of that year, after riding the GR for some months, I was well on the way to answers. When I caught wind of an open pre-order on a small batch of frames from Bantam Bicycle Works due out in a year, I knew it was a good time to hop on board.
Broadly, this batch of Allroad frames would have custom sizing and tubes, disc brakes, low trail, and perhaps most importantly, clearance for wider tires, all for a lower price than most custom frames due to the more limited options inherent to the "small-batch" build structure. All I needed to do was wait a year -- plenty of time to ride, to think, and to dial-in a future bike with the one I had on hand. So what were the lessons learned over that year, and how did they affect the Allroad's component selection?

Drivetrain

I went with 1x because it makes rides more fun and it makes the bike look cool. I loosely equate the feeling of having a single shifter for the rear to riding fixed: it's fun in a weird mental way. In a more practical sense, the shift pattern is simpler and the clutch in the rear mech makes the bike quieter on the rough stuff. For cassettes, I've found Sram's 420% and Deore XT's 417% to be fine in rolling-hilly Georgia and outright mountainous Colorado.
On the front end, having one chainring makes tooth selection important. My method for picking a chainring is to first select three good cruising gears and bias them towards the top (harder part) of the block. The reason being I want more easy gears below my cruising gears for long climbs. For mountainous places, you end up spending a long time in easy gears climbing and a short time in hard gears descending or sprinting, so you don't even need the hard gears for very long. Even on the Soma's highest gear of 40-11 (95 gear inches) I feel the speed at which I spin out is about the same speed I enjoy coasting. For the Allroad, I bumped up the high end slightly while losing a bit of low end.
To optimize q-factor and chainline, I chose a square taper crankset from White Industries. The cool thing about square taper is you can select different spindle lengths to alter both q-factor and chainline. Thus, I went with a the narrowest spindle I could fit: a 107mm Shimano UN55 to give me a chainline of 44.5mm and a q factor of 144mm.
Recalling that the standard road double chainline is 43.5mm and that the disc hub out back spaces that out by 2.5 mm (going from 130 to 135 spacing), I get a "cassette chainline" of 46mm. Thus, my selected cruising gears sit slightly outboard of a straight chain. I thought this was an acceptable tradeoff to get a narrow q-factor and a better chainline in my lowest (most inboard) gears.
For reference, I'm including the last 2 bikes' worth of gear inch charts. The AWOL was my touring bike and it's spread of gears got myself and 40+ lbs of my stuff across the US just fine. The GR changed a lot as I got the top and bottom limits for 1x dialed in. Finally, the Allroad represents my current ideal setup for the terrain and style of riding I plan to do. Note the ever-decreasing low gear on the Soma. Between the initial configuration and config. 3, I dropped from 32 to 25 gear inches to match the length and steepness of my rides. At config. 4, I went to an 11 speed M8000 cassette to further increase my available range while keeping acceptable gaps. After finding the 22.9 gear inch combo in config. 4 to be a bit spinny, I opted for a slightly higher lowest gear for the Allroad. The increased range of the SRAM cassette means that I lost a bit on the low end but gained more than I lost on the top end.
Gear Inches

Wheels

This, I'd imagine is the elephant in the room. Why 26" wheels on a road bike? As the most dynamic part of a bike, wheels are of fundamental relevance to the handling of a bike. With that in mind, I began with my current 650x42b wheels and focused in on the main area of improvement: off-road capability. Ideally, the Allroad wheels should be nimble like those of a road bike, giving up little to no on-road performance while simultaneously being more capable off-road. As a fun exercise, I attempted a simple numeric comparison using a couple of metrics, detailed below:

1. Weight -- easy to understand. No one wants heavy wheels
2. Air volume -- this is a function of the tire size. Bigger tires mean lower pressures. Lower pressures mean more passive suspension and a more comfortable, confident, faster ride.
3. Outer diameter -- Going back to why I like 650b wheels: the outer diameter of a 650x42b wheel and tire is similar to that of a 700x23c setup. For the same outer diameter, you get a much larger tire volume. Going to 26"x54mm is just taking that one step further. For the same outer diameter, you shrink the rim, grow the tire, and increase your available air volume while keeping a wheel that should handle similarly to a pure road bike.

To illustrate these metrics in a comparative way, I threw together a table with a few different wheel / tire setups. I compare several wheel sizes, tires, and braking systems. For the physics-oriented folks, I also included the moment of inertia (MOI or "rotating weight") of each wheel/rim/tire/disc combination. Every combo was modeled assuming each component was a ring of radius equal to the bead seat diameter for rims and the tire centerline for tires. Disc rotors were modeled as solid discs. Volume was calculated using a cylinder with a diameter equal to tire width and a length equal to the circumference of tire centerline. Percent differences are made relative to the baseline road racing wheel equipped with a light alloy rim and 26mm tires.
Table here

Takeaways

The first thing to realize about this comparison is how limited it is: just looking at the weight and size of a wheel doesn't capture anything about aerodynamics, suspension losses, or hysteretic (tire flex) losses, and looking at MOI only barely says anything about the rotational dynamics. What this table can show us is how the fundamental principle of "grow the tire, shrink the rim" affects the mass distribution of a wheel.
When I was speccing this bike, I wanted to see how the 26" fat tires compare to other options, namely my then-current setup with 650x42b tires and the popular "road-plus" format introduced by WTB a few years back. For kicks, I also added a pure road wheel as a baseline. First let's look at weight -- no surprises here, a skinny tire rim brake wheel is the lightest of the bunch. A tubeless 650b rim brake wheel comes in close to a high-end 700c disc wheel, and my proposed 26" wheels are still significantly lighter than a road-plus wheel.
Mass Graph
Okay, so what about moment of inertia? This is where things get interesting. Recall that MOI as modeled here is a function of mass times radius squared. Thus, the location of mass relative to the wheel center becomes more important than the total amount of mass for the system. The 26" wheel is unique among the other high volume options (i.e., the last three) in that it has more mass closer to the wheel center. Thus, even though the allroad wheel is about 30% heavier than a 700c road wheel, it actually has a pretty much equivalent moment of inertia!
This fact was enough to convince me of at least some level of parity between the handling characteristics of a traditional road wheel and my proposed allroad wheels. However, saying much more than that is not really possible without more in-depth analysis. Again, I mention various dynamic phenomena, each of which warrant weeks or months of research on their own.
MOI Graph
The final deciding factor here was air volume. Comparing this was a real eye-opener for me since I found huge variation between the different wheels for this important metric which ultimately puts a hard cap on how far off the beaten path one could take this bike. Whereas before we saw percentage differences on the order of 50%, we can now differences on the order of hundreds of percent. Namely, we can see the 26" Allroad wheel has over 300% more air volume than a road wheel. That's 300% more suspension, comfort, and confidence for when the road turns really rough. Interestingly, the 26" wheels also beat out the road plus wheels by a significant (29%) margin.
Volume Graph

Conclusion

My proposed 26" x 54mm allroad wheels would be about 210g heavier in the tire and rim department than a lightweight road racing wheel. In exchange, I'd get a similar moment of inertia which suggests some level of handling similarity between the two wheels. In addition, I'd also get a tremendous increase in air volume.
Relative to a 650x47b road plus wheel, the Allroad wheel would be better in each one of the considered metrics: they would weigh less, have a lower MOI and have more air volume. This analysis suggests that the Allroad wheels would be faster on and off road.
Relative to my current 650x42b wheels, the Allroad wheels would be heavier mostly due to the influence of the disc rotor. The allroad wheels would still have a lower moment of inertia and a higher air volume. Finally, we can see that outer diameter varies by only a percent or two between all setups, which along with MOI suggests some level of handling similarity.

Everything Else

The fantastic thing about the Soma is that everything works really well on it, which makes sense since the idea of a "randonneur bike" from which it draws most of its features has been around since at least the mid-20th century -- plenty of time to hone component design. In broad strokes, the Allroad has the same features as the GR, with improvements where applicable.

• Fenders: The main drawback of having really durable, stiff, and quiet aluminum fenders is that they're a pain to remove. Thus, I added Rinko-style fender splits for this bike to make it easier to pack the bike or put it in certain car racks. I used a Heine mud flap again for this build. Anticipating making several of these things over time, I drafted a template for the Soma and simply made it wider to match the wider fenders for the allroad.
• Brakes: I chose mechanical Klampers in lieu of hydraulics since I've had good luck with mechanical TRP Spyres in the past. The Tektro CR720 cantilevers are fine for most use, but their limitations become too evident at the most inconvenient times: during steep, wet, or loose mountain descents.
• Luggage: I consider the rando bag an integral part of the bike, so its attachment and internal setup mirror this. I modified the Gilles Berthoud GB25 on the Soma to take a lateral stiffener which dropped some weight versus the stock version but more importantly, gave me a place to attach a pump and another pouch for a phone and wallet. I found that the 1/8" aluminum bar was thicker than necessary, so I used a thinner, narrower setup on the Allroad. To further integration, I directly mounted a OneUp EDC tool and pump to the inside of the stiffener (pic here). Since the tool/pump is effectively mounted to the decaleur, it will remain immobile even over rough ground. Additionally, storing the tool inside the pump frees up more space in the bag. The Z-packs cuben fiber pouch remains pretty much the same. I opted for shock cord attachment this time to keep the pouch more suspended from the bottom of the bag. Also similar to last time is the decaleur setup. I've had good luck with the Compass "Hirose-style" decaleur in the past and went with it again on this build.
• Bell: A fun byproduct of running 1x on bikes with downtube shifter bosses is the bell mounting location you get from the unused shifter boss. Since the Allroad is a more "modern" style bike, I added a raw Spurcycle bell instead of the PDW bell on my GR. Modifications were minimal: I just had to widen the mounting hole to an M5 width and get a 25mm screw to go along with it.
• Lights: Since the Allroad is a custom built frame, I could opt for internal wiring for my tail light. The popular option is to mount these lights on the seat tube, but I'm not tall enough to have good visibility over the rear fender. Thus, I went for a more visible but slightly less protected mounting location on the chainstay. For extra credit, I also added a TMAT stem cap switch from Velo Lumino. This complicated the wiring slightly, but I think the final result makes the extra initial effort worthwhile.The lights both use the frame as a ground. The SONdelux dynamo grounds to the frame via the fender daruma in the fork crown. For the front light, a Schmidt Edelux II, this is straightforward conduction through the front rack to the fork. For the rear light, the situation is more complex, the ground actually goes through the headset. To establish electrical continuity, I the anodization (an insulating layer) off the compression ring in the top bearing stack. The positive poles for each light are wired in parallel to the stem cap switch. The rear light wire has a bullet connector at the fork entry point it to let me quickly remove the fork if need be.For the curious, my (really rough) diagram for the wire harnessing is shown here: Light Schematic
  
• Geometry and Construction: I'll actually be pretty brief here since I didn't design this frame myself. Trusting the builder's experience, I only gave minimal input as a starting point for frame design. Things I specced:
  
  • An 80mm stem to move the bag's load further back on the rack and more ovebehind the front axle
  • Only front lowrider mounts with no rear rack mounts
  • The aforementioned tail light
  • Tubes to match my riding style and intended use (light loads on rough roads with a once-in-a-blue-moon overnighter)
  The resulting frame has:
  
• • 8/5/8 standard diameter Columbus Zona TT and DT
  • 40mm trail
  • 440mm chainstays
  • ~520mm seat tube (c-t)
  • ~555mm top tube (actual)
  • 72.5 degree Head tube Angle
  • 73 degree Seat Tube Angle

Build Impressions, Conclusions, and Part 2

There's no way around the fact that randonneuring bikes have the longest, most complex build process of any genre of bicycle. I really wanted this to turn out okay, so I necessarily had to do a lot of soldering, hammering, filing and wire routing to get the results I wanted -- all that in addition to all the "normal" bike stuff like building wheels, bolting on all the things, etc. That said, I am really pleased with how it all turned out. I'm in the process of riding the heck out of this one in the meantime, so we'll see how everything turns out in part 2 :)
 
Here's an album (the same one as up top) of the build process and completed bike.
 
For those curious about the particular build: Pedalroom