Tomicles' Blog » Outdoors

crisis averted while biking today

tomicles — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:06:25 +0000

This afternoon in my spare time between opportunities I went for a bike ride. While I was climbing I stopped once or twice to check on a sound that my rear wheel kept making, something to do with the spokes, but I couldn’t identify it. After a little bit more riding, and climbing up Overlook Road in Los Gatos, I decided it was something I should have checked out. I turned around and headed for Summit bikes which was literally all down hill from where I stopped. There was no obvious problem with my wheel other than being out of true which means the spokes are giving uneven tension from one spoke to the next and it results in a slightly crooked wheel. While fixing the truing on the wheel one of the spokes popped, and split the rim down the center. Had I not gone in this probably would have happened while I was riding. Good news is that it was all covered by the warranty as the wheels, and the bike are only about 4-5 months old. There was also another spoke a few spokes away from the split where there evidence of more splitting. Below is a photo of my split rim. I am just happy this happened at the shop and not while I was on the road. Summit bikes gave me a loaner wheel to ride home on and will work on getting my split wheel replaced under warranty. As always, Summit continues to impress.

Preparing for Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2008

tomicles — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:51:28 +0000

The Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2008 is almost here. Last year mountain bikers came by the hundreds, many carrying complete meals to share with everyone at the top. This year I am excited to have more of my friends interested in this ride as they will be joining me to the top of the hill. To prepare we started to go on longer bike rides, the first of which was to the top of Kennedy trail. I am glad we started to get ready before the big day because we were clearly needing to rest a few times. I wanted to do it again last weekend but the rain prevented us from leaving the house. Weather permitting we should be up there again getting in better shape for a more enjoyable ride on Thanksgiving morning.

It looks like people just started to talk about the ride on the mtbr forums located here:
http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=465893

If you don’t know what the Turkey Ride is, here is a brief overview.
On Thanksgiving at ~7:00AM, Summit Bicycles in Los Gatos provides coffee and healthy refreshments and is open for business for a short time to help people prepare for their ride up Kennedy trail. Many people have kid trailers for their mountain bikes and they fill them with ready to eat turkeys and all of the other yummy stuff everyone likes to enjoy on Thanksgiving. Other people bring beer and other things to drink. People share everything that they tote up to the top and everyone is very friendly. The ride to the top is not very technical but its also not easy, especially if you have not been riding, but people seem to rest everywhere along the way and there are enough people that you never feel left behind. Last year was my first year and I didnt bring anything, this year I will figure out something to bring to share.

… also if you have not read my previous post from last year about Turkey Ride 2007, it has some videos and additional information. It is found below, sadly it has been a year since my last post.

Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2007

tomicles — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:56:58 +0000

This Thanksgiving I woke up at 6:45am so I could put on all my cold weather bike gear and leave the house by 7:30 on my bike. I was headed to Summit Bicycles to go meet up with a bunch of other mountain bikers for the annual Los Gatos Turkey Ride. That may not be its official name, but the idea is that everyone meets up at 8am to go ride up Kennedy Trail, which has its trail head located half way across Kennedy road in Los Gatos. The trail is a large fire road that is quite steep in some areas, but big enough to allow many bikers to ride at the same time. I was very surprised to see that there were several hundred people at Summit Bicycles so early in the morning, and they were kind enough to have the shop open for business until the ride started, and they provided free breakfast rolls and coffee.

The ride started at 8:15 or so and it took me 1:15 to climb 3000′ to the top in about 7 miles. The very last section of the ride, just before the peak where the party was had a 24% incline and was brutal. This was the first time (out of about 8 attempts) that I’ve actually ridden all the way to to the top without having something go wrong on that section of the hill. That incline is steep enough that a single rock, a chain issue, or anything out of the ordinary will completely throw you off balance and its too steep to start again. At the top, there were turkeys, beer, someone actually hauled a keg up on a bike trailer. Someone carried up an entire cooked pig to share, and there was no shortage of brownies, cookies, and other good thanksgiving food to be shared. Next year i’ll have to bring some food to share. I dont know if I’ll go as far as to carry a trailer on my bike, but we’ll see.

Here is a little video clip from my digital camera.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqTWjTKJruY[/youtube]
This was such a fun ride that I will for sure participate next year. I hope that I can get more of my friends to come with me as it would make a huge difference once we were at the top. The whole ride from my house was about 20 miles and the whole trip was about 4 hours long, and I was home in time for thanksgiving with the family, or I would have been if we had plans this year. My mom got sick at the last minute so we had a very low key day.here is a link to the message boards where everyone who participates talks.
http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=359615

New boat blog setup!

Tomicles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:05:38 +0000

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is FAIL check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

Tom’s Boatyard

tomicles — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:16:44 +0000

Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo. I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion. I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid. After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)

Sailing rules of the road

Tomicles — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:17:52 +0000

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

Building a snow making machine

Tomicles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:22:40 +0000

Today I decided to figure out how snow machines work, you know, the kind that the ski resorts use to make snow when its cold but not snowing. I found this cool site, http://www.snowathome.com/ which has several different plans for making snow machines of different kinds. I chose this one because it was the only one that didn’t require a pressure washer, only an air compressor. On the down side it doesn’t have the highest output but we’ll see how it works, that is of course if we get another cold enough night. I’ve setup the air compressor in the sound room so I can run it at ~4am without disturbing anybody while I make my snow.

I found most of the parts at The Home Depot tonight with Matt Jeff and Jeff. It cost me ~$34 including a new garden hose and seems to spray the water in a fine mist that will hopefully make nice snow if it gets cold enough outside. The only issue with this method for making snow, at least with the way its currently built, is the possibility that water will push back into the air hose and into the air compressor. This would destroy the air compressor and would most likely cause other problems since the air compressor is practically inside. The weather report says it wont be cold enough tonight so all I can do now is hope it stays cold for a while. You can see my pictures of this build on flickr

Freeze 2007

tomicles — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 03:19:38 +0000

This week has been very cool. So cold in fact that the driveway at my house froze over and I am now unable to park my car in the garage (down the hill) for fear of not being able to drive up the hill when I need to be somewhere. Yesterday the ice on the driveway didnt melt because the house blocks the sun from the driveway all day. This picture was taken at about 1pm and only some of the ice had melted.

I remember as a child during a big freeze year we would run the hose all night to create an ice hill to sled down in the morning. I think I’ll try it again tonight and see what happens in the morning. There are sill a few more days of sub-freezing temperatures at night on the forecast and I hope to bring back some memories. Now if it would just snow so I can take some friggin pictures!

A few Days in Sausalito

Tomicles — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 02:01:41 +0000

I spent a few days in sausalito last week. Alfonso helped me work on a few projects on the boat including cutting all of the uprights to support the floor, as well as fabricating the boards to cover the floor. He was also kind enough to let me crash at his place overnight. It was very stressful as usual driving the trailer through 19th street and across the Golden Gate Bridge. As I was pulling into sausalito, I went around a sharp right turn and the car made this awful sound like I had hit something, and the boat looked crooked on the trailer. My first thought was that one of the bunks had broken a and punched through the hull, but after careful inspection, nothing was wrong with the trailer or the boat. I had to drive to west marine down the street from his office once, and while turning sharp out of the driveway of west marine, I heard a big pop again. After returning home, I dropped off the expedition at our mechanic and there are two different problems with the suspenssion. Both problems are being fixed so we can tow the boat up to huntington.

Below is a video of some of the things I worked on in Sausalito.

Highway 17 takes SI Crew’s Boats, Trailer, and Pickup

Tomicles — Mon, 08 May 2006 08:46:46 +0000

Today started just like any other Sunday, I woke up and decided to ride my bike. Jess wanted me to come say hi to her and her family up at the regatta at Lexington so that’s what I went to go do. I rode up the creek trail to the lake, and just as I went up the first little hill, before crossing over the spillway, there was a group of people gathered pointing up the hill. As I approached, I looked up and my stomach sank. There was a pickup truck, with a rowing trailer with five 8-person rowing shells on it, half way slid down the hill, facing backwards. The truck was in very bad condition; it looked like the truck bed was bent at about a 30-degree angle to the cab. The driver and the passenger were OK and climbed out the passenger side window and up to highway 17. This all just happened about five minutes before I arrived at the scene. I immediately called Jess who was at the boathouse and told her what had happened, and I think she was the first to tell anyone who was still there. Most of the people had left the regatta by then, but the few that were still around went to go help out. I rode over to the boathouse to show them some pictures, and then headed home. On my way home I decided to go up St. Joseph’s hill to see if I could see the accident from above, and sure enough, I could. I whipped out my camcorder again and proceeded to film for an hour, or until the tape ran out, while they removed boats from the trailer and pulled the truck and trailer back onto the freeway. The story I’ve heard thus far is that the brakes on the pickup gave out, and the trailer wanted to go faster than the, causing it to jack knife and fall off the freeway. At $20,000 – $30,000 each, this was no cheap accident. I dont even know if they will be able to repair the one boat they removed by hand before pulling the rest up the hill, as it was missing its entire bow. (see video)

Video Footage: SI-Crew_Boat_Accident.mp4

Except for the first 15 seconds or so, I took this footage from half way up St. Joseph’s hill in Los Gatos. To the very left of the main shot, is Lexington Dam, and to the right, is downtown Los Gatos. The camera shot is from at least a mile away, zoomed in all the way on my little Panasonic 3ccd minidv camcorder. I didn’t use any digital zoom. I took interest in this accident as I rowed for LGRC for 4 years and know the kind of dedication those rowers have put into their sport. Hopefully they have more boats at their boathouse so they can continue their season.

If you have more info about this incident, or if I didn’t quite get something right, let me know. If you’ve come to this site, and are a member of SI Crew, I’m very sorry for your loss and am very happy to hear that both people in the truck are doing well. I can provide a DVD copy of this video to those directly related to this incident.