Outsourcing

Now as a number of large organisations have discovered outsourcing saves a lot of money and all those pesky OHS laws. So tonight I thought I'd give it a go. One of the recurring problems as the long time reader of this blog will realise is the cotter pin. Now I've said twice now that I've fixed it and each time I've been more wrong than it is to marry your cousin.

So tonight I summoned spirits using a dark and super mystic spell and I had just the target in mind Mr X*. Now Mr X is an extremely talented and knowledgeable man who has worked a lot of his life with metal and other materials, he has also made all sorts of interesting tools for us including the crank evenness checker jig thingy and a new one for scribing a mark on our headset (that i will talk about another time). Now with Mr X under my spell he proceeded to do my bidding. Whilst his better judgement was under my control I set him to work fixing finally my ACPC (axle cotter pin conundrum)

His persistence considering the state I had left the ACPC in was above and beyond the call of duty. In memory of his performance I hereby award him the Bikesnobnyc approve for curating my ACPC to within a poofteenth.

After Mr X fixed that I still had some goats blood and oil of Newton from my spell (it's surprisingly easy to get oil off Bert Newton , you just really really have to want it)

 I set Mr X to work on cutting my rear wheel reading for pinning.

Upon completion of this task the spell wore off even with a giant finger upon him, so regrettably I had to do some stuff.

I felt we as a group had a stellar night of performance, we rocked and rolled all night and  partied ev-er-y day

Tonight we got the last of the wheels profiled and then all the wheels turned. Here is me turning my rear wheel which I believe ended up around 17 inches diameter but I can't really remember.

Once the rims were rolled we then had to cut them as Mr X showed earlier. Resulting in an angled join. 

Once cut and encouraged to line up we then cut out a piece from the remaining metal that will sit inside the rim. Here is a set up gratuitous action shot.

This is what you end up with.

We then drilled a hole through each rim and put a nail in to hold it together, it appears I didn't get a photo of this so you will have to use your imagination.

It looked just like that but my wheel doesn't have stars on it... yet.. Now the wheel was temporarily joined Brett will braze the rim together and we can then start work on the spoke holes etc. If you click on that link and read that article you will see why I have no intention of attempting that on a critical component like the rim.

But most importantly at the end of the night we had a fully functional invisible penny farthing that wonder woman would be proud of we could RIPF (Ride/ing an Invisible Penny Farthing)

I can tell you it was scary at that height. Here is a man who is a natural at RIPF

 RIPF away my good man RIPF away.

* For the sake of anonymity names will be withheld in case of con artists who are building their own ordinary bike and troll the Internet for people who are competent, I'm very safe from this scam.