8.8.8.

Last report on the Venture Invader before I write up the couple other clunkers tomorrow.

Got another booster shot yesterday and not enough sleep, feeling like a wreck. It'll be gone tomorrow and well worth it. Doing basic stuff was a struggle of fumbling things everywhere, which makes this a perfect day to talk about sewing up a tire!

I take a crack at sewing something once every couple years and it hasn't ever gone all that well, as though I've suddenly got no experience working with my hands and can't find the dexterity. I don't have the knowledge of technique to come up with any useful tools to make things easier the way I can with bike mechanics. Kinda like the experience of learning mechanics and coming up against that 'do I even know left from right anymore...?' bit of 3D visualization as things are turned while flipped around.

There's lots of inexpensive quality materials that you can use to make a sewed-in tire boot, good adhesive and tapes, durable and stretchy thread like nylon. or! you can have a little fun ripping up the bead of a used Gravelking for the kevlar thread, and peel apart layers of the tire to get a nice thin piece of rubber that won't dig into the tube. You can do a bunch of work for materials that aren't as good or easy to use as stuff available most anywhere. So that's the way I did it.

I find some good ideas for the sewing part, and automotive tire video where the guy makes a little loop on the inside with an awl and pulls thread through that loop, so the stitch is almost all inside the tire. I mess around trying to find something to use as an awl and fail, then just start stitching, then get the idea of doing short outside stitches within the grooves of the tread where they won't contact the road as much.


Beautiful. Right up there with all my other fine needlework. (I'll put some shoe goo over this and sew through the boot too when I use the tire again.)

Cleaned up the inside, glued the boot in with rubber cement, clamped in a vice overnight, and later I'll probably do a few more stitches through the boot. The tire got through the challenge with just the boot, figure this extra will be fine. I'll reuse this tire on a bike of my own to see how it holds up.

Lots of big ideas I didn't get around to:

• No bottle cages yet! There's a right angle drill with a seized chuck for cheap that I'll grab to fix and put in some rivnuts.

• I need a little extra clearance at the fork crown to run a 1.5" tire. This is partly a mitering issue as with the bottom bracket, but I don't want to remove material from the fork. I found an excellent suggestion from FBinNY to space it out with a ball bearing and use automotive body filler to make a flat surface. I borrowed some filler from my sister-in-law over a month ago that I should use & return. I did all the riding with the wheel clamped in the dropouts and nothing taking up that extra space to see if it'd move at all, no issues.

• Not a major issue, but a major fix: the dimpling on the chainstays lines up perfectly with the tire without a claw hanger, and then with the claw it's less roomy than I'd like. Then again, there's a broken spoke on the rear wheel that I keep forgetting about as it is. It's a 36 spoke rim holding quite true.
  • Been trying to think of hack fixes here - of course brazing on a hanger is the right thing to do, but I can't braze. Processing scrap frames at the co-op gets me thinking about modifying dropouts cut from another frame to somehow clamp on as a no-weld fix. Would take a great deal of grinding and fitting, but serve the dual purpose of spacing things out to run normal length quick release axles. It'd be a nice-to-have on my CCM Mistral too. If I ever come up with a decent idea on it I'll post here. Happy to hear suggestions!

• I'll need get or make some proper aero junior levers. Those Dia Compe Vxs have high leverage, but some of the worst fit for small hands with super long reach. There's some posts by puchfinnland on here that may help.

Then the simple stuff I just plain don't get to:

• Never bothered setting up a rear brake knowing I'd need to change levers.
• Didn't put those stem shifters back on.
• Didn't wrap the bars! Hummed and hawed about colour and how to do something free, the levers, etc., no complete complete photos for me.
• Didn't ride the the last 0.6km. I was going to do this with tape and both brakes to finish things off. This weekend I have other stuff to do, so I'm resisting that completionist impulse and calling this...

challenge incomplete! Our running cost is $39.50 and we're at 99.4km.

Ultimately I got distracted and lost my resolve to do things the hard way, building up two other clunkers I could ride for real. I'll keep at the other stuff off and on so I can eventually give this bike away to someone keen on it. The truly hacky stuff will be de-hacked. In addition to shortest bike I hope for a runaway win in the hotly contested Incomplete Challenge - Shortest from Finish Line category. Perhaps also in I've Learned My Lesson - 1000 Words Ain't No Photo for starting so late with not enough posts.