steine13

Life is complex, and dealing with old bikes on top of an old house and occasional automotive repairs -- it gets complicated. More and more often I wish I had one place to put any information that will be useful later -- like when I do a maintenance job that comes up once a decade and I do not want to re-learn how to bleed my car's brakes after swapping in a new caliper.

For general life/work/password stuff I have a text file at work in a private and protected area. Being searchable, it doesn't matter it's a jumble, so for simple ASCII information, that works great, all five thousand lines of it. Being at work, and in my private area, it's unlikely to get hacked. Really important passwords are not written down, of course.

I've been thinking about using a blog on a public site and restrict access for privacy. That way I would have access to it anywhere I have internet, and by using tags I could sort out house/bike/car/camping/life stuff and post pictures and whatnot. I have a decade's worth of home improvement information that is basically all in pictures, and I have to re-copy them every time I get a new machine. That's clearly not the way to go.

You C&V tinkerers must have accumulated a tremendous amount of specific knowledge about your old bicycles. Where do you keep it?

Thanks in advance for your insights!
cheers -mathias

bark_eater 

I like the idea of mind mapping software, but can't justify the data entry time. What I really want to find is as program that I can dump 20 years of internet book marks into and get a visual frame work to flesh out.

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Steve B.

Quick notes I put into Evernote on my iPhone. Its multi platform so I have access to them everywhere. Stuff I know Im keeping I do as a doc on Google Drive, also multi platform.

Chuck M 

I have multiple Apple devices. I use the Notes app a lot. It takes everything I need and makes it available on all my devices that are connected to my iCloud account. I’m sure it will do more than I want or need as I probably haven’t utilized it to its full extent. The blog idea would probably work for what you want but you need to be connected to the internet to access it. As long as all my Apple devices have been connected since I entered it on one device, it somehow gets to them.

Wildwood 

I forget things - it’s fun rediscovering.

jdawginsc 

I use next generation technology composition books...the graph paper ones. Doubles as a doodling pad!

Mr. 66

I'm sorry that information is proprietary...

tkamd73 

I second the notes app on iPad and iPhone, or it’s counterpart on android.
Tim

mstateglfr 

I just remember it. If I forget, it means it isn't super important and/or I have too much to try and remember which is a good indicator that I should sort out what's currently in my possession.

I don't track repairs because I don't think that helps me as a cyclist and it isn't interesting.
I don't track maintenance because I don't manage maintenance based on miles/hours of use, I manage maintenance based on observation thru use.

Nothing I do to my bikes necessitates hints or reminders from previous work. I have older friction shifting, modern shifting canti brakes, rum brakes, hydraulic brakes...but nothing needs hints or reminders.


ETA- modern 11sp front derailleur cable routing and setup is something I have YouTube referenced a couple times now. So I guess I keep my info on YouTube thru other people's bids.

elcraft

I used to just bookmark or set up a”Favorite” for info. But some of these sites or urls seem to die. So I have taken to printing out copies that I actually keep in a file. I can still find some of the data on line, but some of it is lost and not resurrectable.. Recently, an article on wing nuts from Classiclightweights.com, seems to have completely disappeared. I hadn’t gotten around to a hard copy for my file, so now it is lost.

Bianchigirll 

I stupidly never thought to keep track of anything, hence why I always feel like I lose money when it come time to sell.

I can tell you however that if you're building a set of Gel 330 rims on to Record 6 speed hud the front spoke are likely 299 and the rear 298 NDS and 297 DS or pretty close.

hose

I have a filing cabinet!

kroozer 

Word documents.

merziac

I store mine in an ever increasingly fragile and unreliable place, my head.

Really going to be a struggle in the not to distant future.

iab

People, places and stuff are pictures on Flickr.
CAD files are on my hard drive but I can't see why anyone would want those.
And for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would want personal notes. I did write down some spoke lengths for particular builds, but there is a way to calculate that too so why save it.

What exactly are on these notes that's worth saving?

steine13

>> What exactly are on these notes that's worth saving?

One example I gave above was swapping a brake caliper on a car. I'd sworn off that sort of thing but my mechanic was on vacation so I went ahead. Which meant re-learning everything from the last time, like ten years ago.

I buried some wires in the wall in my kitchen. It's against code but not much choice, splicing into existing wiring. So I used metal boxes so nobody drills into it, and took pictures with tape meaures showing where they are. I also remember, but not to the nearest inch.

Someone just asked about vertical dropouts and an IGH hub. I did this in 2008, and got a spreadsheet of the web that helped tremendously in figuring it out. It wasn't 100% but it was close, and it was spot-on when going from one chainring/cog combination to another. I don't have it anymore.

At least I found the order from where I bought spokes for a wheel I built a few years back, and the spokes are now breaking. My LBS rebuilt it and saw nothing wrong, still breaking. So I'm going to redo with new spokes from a different manufacturer. So I knew what length to order without measuring.

Stuff like that.
cheers -mathias

iab

This is just a guess, but ...

1. youtube video
2. ??? Are you waiting decades to get up to code? Don't care about code? I really don't understand this.
3. Google fixed gear chain calculator
4. A ruler is inconvenient?

I think my point is the organization of stuff is more work than just doing stuff.

iab

I should note, I find flipping a switch easier than saying "Alexa, turn on lights." So I may be biased.

mechanicmatt

Google docs can be a good way. I have built plenty of stuff on there. You can even upload old MS stuff and it concerts.

leftthread

Since this is C&V, index cards and a recipe box.

A small spiral notebook while wrenching in the garage.

Large storage needs for digital work: Toshiba 12 TB drives in an OWC RAID DAS, HGST drives in a Synology NAS RAID.

OTS 

I use the OneNote App.
It's free and will synch across multiple devices.
I'm a fly tyer and use it to keep track of fly patterns and materials used and patterns I tied.
You can include pics and YouTube link easily.
Check it out.
It's been super useful.
https://www.onenote.com/Download

nlerner

Much of what I’d look for is on email transactions, PayPal, or eBay receipts on my laptop. I do wish there was a search function for PMs on this forum (or if there is, I haven’t found it). Otherwise, I don’t know what notes I’d need. When I homebrewed beer, I kept written records of each batch, but that’s a completely different need for records.

randyjawa 

Being somewhat old fashioned, I made a form for myself and use it to keep information pertaining to bikes found over the years. This is partially what it looks like and has proved useful time and again...

Cougrrcj

My cars always have a bound 3x5" logbook. Gas purchases are recorded on one side, and any repairs/maintenance (oil changes, brakes, tire rotation/winter changeover) is noted starting on the backside. I have yet to meet in the middle! Oh, and I typically keep my cars until dead... My current car is only four pages of gas purchases in 33k miles... My old truck with a thirsty 460-inch engine used only 30 pages on the gas-side in ~125k miles.

Steve B.

Not sure, you might be asking about cycling data, in which case I use Ride With GPS as my activity tracker. Has a place for notes