Kingfish said:
Reflector tape: Great idea
Now that I have some, I kinda use it a lot.
You can see it all over the kennel trailer and here and there on DGA; all but the red/white bars is the good stuff from 3M, in yellow, highlighter green, and white. The red/white bars are a friend's leftovers from HF, when he added a bike carrier to the rear of his car, and thought it wise to add something so people parking behind him at night could better see it without hitting it, when no bikes are on it, among other reasons.
Since I do not yet have a good paint job on DGA, I haven't put the tape on the way I really want to, so I don't waste it or screw it up trying to mask it/etc. when I do get the money to repaint it.
BioPace: AW, that is so funny you mention it:
The crankset is a Shimano Exage 400 LX Biopace. I inspected it last night and discovered that I had at least three chipped/worn-off teeth on the outer ring. Moments ago I placed an order with http://www.ebikestop.com and put in a replacement series.
Hmm...how much do you want for the old Biopace rings, shipped to Phoenix, AZ 85051? They *should* fit the LX cranks I have mine on. I was wrong on mine; I thought for some reason they were 24-34-44, but they're 28-38-48, same as yours, but these could be spares for later on (I have two complete cranksets found in a bike shop's used junk shelf, one in excellent nearly-new condition, and the somewhat worn ones I'm using now).
The original is 28-39?-48 which matches quite well with my 11-28 7-Speed freewheel. I just can’t seem to find a decent 11-X freewheel anymore; I am not putting on the knockoffs (have you heard the sound of those noisy cogs?).
I don't think I've ever had an 11T; I think 16T is the smallest I've had. I do have a 28" or 29" bike someone abandoned here over a year and a half ago, with a 9spd freehub cassette that I think is 11-34 or something like that, but the bike itself has a cracked rear seat stay (among other problems), and is an alloy frame, so I haven't actually ridden it more than to just check it out; I really don't feel like testing that frame much.
I don't have anything else the wheel will fit on (except two old very tall 10spds that I can't even get onto, much less ride--standing next to them, the top tube is somewhere above my bladder :lol: ).
I *have* had plenty of cheap freewheels, and the only way I can make them quiet is to grease them, not just oil.
At first after I do that, the pawls sometimes stick down, so it won't reengage, if it's cold. Fortunately it's hardly ever that cold here.
The truth is that the Biopace wasn’t working out for me and on these 100-mile rides I found that I was experiencing pogo from high-rotation trying to keep up with the bike which affected my knees
On any long ride I always have to take them slow so I would never notice that; I wouldn't be able to last very long even with motor assist if I had to pedal fast *and* provide useful power input. My knees are already shot, so that would be too much, even if I had the endurance for it.
I don't know what the longest ride I've ever done was, but over 50 miles in a day, when riding around looking for scrapped stuff for my projects mostly. That was before my ebike projects really started, and before my knees got so bad; I don't yet have enough battery power to assist me thru such rides yet. With the early version of DayGlo Avenger MkI's friction drive, I rode maybe 40 miles as it's longest trip, stopping to partially recharge the worn-out SLA a couple of times, and trying not to use too much battery power; I think I would've been better off not having the assist in that particular case, as the SLA and stuff weighed so much vs the assist I could ration myself to that it about made up for the power it took to haul it around.