What's Really Behind HOV Lanes Running Slow in Silicon Valley?

For the first time in the history of this site I am delivering a video message - but for continuity’s sake I’m sticking with my favorite form of communication: HO scale miniatures (I finally found the box they were in when setting up my new workbench).

I recommend - especially if you live in the Bay Area - that you do two things: pretend someone with a nicer voice than me is narrating it and, if you like the video, share the link. Also you can click here if you haven't seen the July 27 NBC Bay Area news report by Kim Yonanaka I’m referring to in the video.

Thanks for watching and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris

Moving to Silicon Valley: Part III - Rebuilding the 304

The 304 in Stamford

Building a new bike work stand was done, and now I needed to reassemble the 304 - or the cabinet made up of small, plastic parts drawers used to hold the world’s most organized collection of clutter.

In Stamford I used a collection of nine metal two-drawer cabinets as the base of the cabinet standing on frame I welded. The frame was recycled in Stamford, so I resorted to using an industrial shelving unit as a base and reasoned I could arrange the two-drawer cabinets beneath however I wanted. 

That’s the thing about workshops: ideally, everything should either be modular or, like with the Part II post, be on wheels.

The first thing I needed to do was replace the countertop. Just like I did with the last 304: I checked the As-Is section of Ikea. But instead of going to the Ikea in New Haven, I went to the one in Palo Alto. It was there I found an 8-foot piece for $45. As luck would have it, it matched the fantastic $5 Connecticut yard sale find rolling hospital table. So I made sure the section of the 304 where my feet would go would be wide enough to accommodate it.

Speaking of $5 yard sale finds: the speaker stands I found at another CT tag sale - which were quite useful when making the Bikeducken during the DIYBIKING.COM Salutes the Cargo Bike special - were perfect for installing shelves: I just leveled the shelf, set up a bracket as an extra set of hands, and it all stayed nice and even during the install.

Putting up the cabinets themselves was easy even though I knew I’d one day have to go through all the drawers and rearrange everything since the movers in Connecticut packed some of the units sideways for no reason. 

Yes, it’s a grisly mess - what with bodies lying everywhere and all - but it looks good against the new countertop, doesn’t it?

Now that I’ve put the LED shop light in I can now say it is ready to go. 

It was good for morale alone just to get this up. Now anything I need from small wood screws to shower curtain rings to HO scale miniatures to batteries to shark shaped valve caps are in easy reach. I’m feeling a lot more normal now…and the sight of it is putting me in the mood to build something. Hope you find that mood too. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris

We Interrupt 'Moving to Silicon Valley' For This Spec...Well, For This Bulletin

Moving things from the garage to the house and back again on one of the swirl of days I was doing so I noticed something peculiar on the street. 

Wow, I thought. I didn’t realize a Toyota Prius could tow such a heavy load. 

Back and forth in the house throughout the day I took a closer look and realized that what I was looking at wasn’t a tow package for a Smugmobile, but an abandoned bicycle trailer. 

Not my problem. Or so I thought.

Later, leaving the house to get dinner with my wife, she said there was a sign attached that read ‘Free.’ 

In my defense, she happily turned to me and enabled me - specifically asking if I wanted to stop and get it. Next thing I knew it was in my still unfinished and still crowded workshop.

Even though I appreciated the artistic touches in the sign, I was annoyed. Who gives away a bike trailer on my street when my workshop isn’t ready? Honestly. How insensitive can someone be? They were probably watching from their living room with binoculars laughing me.

“Look, Walter. He’s going for it. LOL.”

Now as you know I did give away my bike mover trailer to Domus, left the Bikeducken in Stamford, and was still looking for the rest of my DIYBIKING.COM trailer made from a Bike Friday suitcase trailer frame. I didn’t not need a trailer, but taking unwanted items and making something kinda useful out of them is…well…it’s kind of My Thing. 

With much grumbling, I dismantled the trailer…and on doing so I discovered three unopened bottles of water inside. I poured them on my plants (I’m living in Silicon Valley now. There’s a drought on).  

Everything else went away and now I’m left with a trailer frame I do not yet know what I am going to do with, but it’ll be something. And I’m taking it as a good sign that I’m still following my instincts even though I’m on a new coast. We’ll come back to this trailer later. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris

Moving to Silicon Valley: Part II - Where Do I Park the Park Tool Workstand?

Click here for Part I

You never realize just how much stuff you’ve acquired over the last ten years until you see all of it delivered to your house inside of five hours.

Let me back up a second. 

I was thankful I had painted the walls of my new bike workshop in Silicon Valley before my stuff arrived because when it did I couldn’t even see the walls. Boxes were piled as far as the eye could see…and you couldn’t see more than five feet in any direction for quite a while.

When unpacking, I quickly discovered two things: first, the movers in Connecticut had wrapped everything in paper, which meant that each empty box would produce various items and an equal volume of paper that had to be dealt with. Secondly: I think the Connecticut movers got disgusted, bored or both and just labeled most of the boxes from my workshop ‘Bike Parts/Miscellaneous.’ Occasionally they renamed some of my unsold artwork.

No, it’s not a ‘Wire Man’ and it’s not ‘Johnny 5’ either. I welded it from a $5 garage sale typewriter and it is known by his Rowayton Arts Center name of ‘Making a Friend.’

But I’m off the subject. 

The first thing I needed to establish was a place to put bike tools and work on a bike. As I discovered during my brief stay in Mountain View: my PCS-9 was mistakenly left out of the ‘early out’ container so I felt as though I hadn’t fixed any of my bikes properly in months.

I also knew that my recumbent - which, of course, was in a warehouse somewhere instead of riding in the Five Boro Bike Tour this year - and Budget City Bike were arriving. They both had been in storage for two months and I wanted to get them back on the road as soon as possible. Happily, one of the first boxes I opened contained my Park Tool PCS-12 work stand with a workbench mount…but I had no place to mount it. 

Before I left Stamford, I hatched a plan to use an old cabinet my dad got from the retailer G-Fox as a bike work stand: I attached the PCS-12 to the top of a rolling work stand meant for a car (where it could be raised and lowered at will) and all of my tools would be in the drawers near my knees. It would also help keep the shop clean since dirt and grime would land on a piece of paper spread on the cabinet and not the floor. 

The G-Fox cabinet had 2” casters on them but the seams in the concrete of my garage floor meant they’d get stuck all the time. Lucky for me I found all four of my 8” Mutant Giant Caster 3000s (or whatever the brand name is) from my ill-fated laptop stand project and set about attaching them.

I barely had any room to turn the cabinet on its side, but I just about managed it so I could attach the casters to scrap plywood. I had to use the drawers of the cabinet to make a crude workbench.

Since my hand power tools were in the car when my wife and I did our nine morning drive from Connecticut to California, I was able to attach everything without too much trouble…and realized just how big the casters were.

After gently placing it on the ground, I enjoyed putting things in the drawers. When you move across the country and every box is labeled the same and your big bookcases won’t even fit into the new home office it is nice just to put things away. I like these little $6 ammo boxes from Harbor Freight Tools to put parts and tubes for specific bikes inside.

I added a Thule fork mount to one side of the bench in case I ever wanted to secure bikes there - it also makes a convenient handle for dragging the workbench around.

I reattached the arm topped with the PCS-12 to complete the new bike workbench. Now all of my bike tools have a place to go and any bicycles on the PCS-12 would be just the right height for me to service them. 

Of course, I had to keep up emptying boxes…and discovering parts of the 304 and other things that just had no place to go yet. So they went on my new bike work stand cabinet. But it’ll be used for its proper purpose soon enough...as soon as I can find all the bike tools. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris

Moving to Silicon Valley: Part I - How to Use Your Garage

I’m very sorry, dear readers, for the large gap between posts but I can explain: I’ve successfully moved…well, I’ve moved from Connecticut to Silicon Valley. I’m unpacking and learning just how difficult it is to put things away when the away part hasn’t yet been established. It’s an episode of Hoarders in reverse. 

Nothing was damaged - but as you can see from a piece of the bike trailer I made, I lost an ‘I’.

I’m also getting used to new things that came with the house - such as a refrigerator that has the freezer on the left side instead of on the top where it belongs (I froze my milk by accident last week - but we’re getting off the subject). 

My workshop moved too. As I explained during the last days of the Bikeducken it was packed up by four guys I only knew by their first names and loaded into a truck. At the time I had no idea what kind of workshop I would end up with in California. But I now have my answer.

This is the third house I’ve owned in my life. Like the others, this has at least two rooms that you can put beds in. A room where you can cook food and load a dishwasher incorrectly. A room where you can sit and watch a television. 

This is the first house I’ve ever owned that includes a room you can put a car inside. It’s called a garage. 

It has a really big door controlled by a small box the size of a Generation 1 iPod. Push the button and it rumbles up. Push it again, it rumbles down. 

I put my car in the garage to see if it worked as advertised. It did, but I didn’t like the experience at all. Cars are very big things and I really don’t enjoy being in the same room with one. 

It occurred to me the concept of the garage as a building to put a car in is outdated. Unless you own a vehicle along the caliber of the Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you don’t need to put it in a building.

Instead you can turn the building into a space where you can be creative. Apparently that’s big here. I actually Googled ‘tech companies that started in garages’ and before I got to the first ‘g’ it filled in the blank. 

One of the companies that started in a garage? Google. Inc. Magazine spotlighted them and five other tech companies that started in a garage. Imagine what the world would be like if every garage was emptied of cars and filled with people who just wanted a space to build things and be creative? 

That’s what I want my garage to be: DIYBIKING.COM 2.0. Already a good sign: the people we bought the house from left behind bicycle hoists - a technology I have never used before. I tried it with the mountain bike I built (which made the trek across the country with me back in May) and it is hanging one foot over my head as I type this.  

I’ve already noticed a common thing with garages in Silicon Valley: when they were built nobody bothered to finish the inside - either that or I overlooked Urine Stain in the Benjamin Moore color catalogue. Since we bought our house two full weeks before our stuff was due to arrive (more on that horror later) I decided to put some work into it while I didn’t have my stuff lying around to get in the way. 

One of the things I had to do first was patch a few holes in the drywall. I got some drywall tape and joint compound (and a trowel and sandpaper since I had none of my tools with me) and set to work. 

This hole actually housed an electric car charger. I know this is going to sound made up, but someone else bidding on the house at the same time as us wanted the car charger to be left behind. The sellers didn’t like that, so they went with our offer instead. So someone’s fondness of electric vehicles - call it Car Culture 2.0 - got me this workshop. 

I won’t bore you with the details of every change (a lot of work had to go in the rest of the house during this period too) but two coats of Kilz primer went on the walls first - information supplied by a company that started in a garage said that’s a good way to start when putting paint on old drywall - before applying Benjamin Moore Concepts interior paint. The color is ‘wet cement.’

I was feeling really good about what I had done and how ready I was to get to building again when our stuff arrived - and I’ll cover how that was handled (and is still being handled) in my next post. In the meantime, if you have a garage, move your car out of it and move in some desks you found for free on Craigslist. Making a space to make things beats housing a motor vehicle anytime. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris