Engines, Motorcycles

Former Triumph, RIP

For two years this 2001 Triumph Sprint ST got me all around the Bay Area and beyond. I racked up almost 45k miles on this. It was mainly used for commuting between San Francisco and Santa Clara, but it did get some time to stretch out on the backroads between Santa Cruz and Bodega Bay. And on one glorious 10 day stretch, we rode clear out to Utah and back.

Unfortunately a slow leak turned catastrophic one day on the freeway and it bled out of oil. A few moments later and a couple of lanes to the right, the piston was thrown into the head and the engine was effectively dead.

This is something of a backlog post, but since I don’t have the bike anymore I’ll probably never get around to any real detail. Below are some pictures from some of the projects I’d untertaken on it while I owned it.

Work history:

  • Plenty of oil changes
  • New throttle cable
  • Rear brake disks and pads

There are a couple of pictures of her all loaded up for the trip to Utah. One of the big cases was full of work equipment (I got to write off the first couple days as a business expense!) and was shipped back to CA from Reno before heading out onto the open roads.

Garden

Patio Garden Backlog

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Over the summer I moved from San Francisco to Portland, OR. When I left I had a pretty healthy garden set up with a couple peppers, tomatoes, and herbs. Since the move hit right in the middle of the season, I had to spread the plants around with some friends and prepare to start a new garden further north.

This time around I would be working with a south facing patio (hooray!) measuring about 5 feet by 20 feet. Because it faces south with minimal shade, its perfect for a lot of my potential crops. We’re on the second floor of a 4 story building, as well, so my plants get a lot of additional warmth reflected and a fair bit of wind protection. Both nice through the winter.

I decided not use use the self watering planters I had used in my previous gardens and went with some inexpensive felt planter bags. I’ve never used them before, but for about $20 a five pack I felt they were worth the risk. No problems so far.

In addition to the planter bags I got a couple of felt planters meant to be hung on a wall. I strung them up to the railing with paracord and planted a couple of tests in each side.

The current crops are:

  • Swiss chard
  • Collard greens
  • Purple broccoli
  • Spinach
  • Lettuce mix
  • Beets
  • Onions
  • Carrots
  • Parsley
  • Green onion
  • Oregano
  • Catnip

As for the succulents, they’ll get another post soon.

Hammock, Outdoors, Textiles

Costco Down Throw Top Quilt

This is my implementation of the topquilt build by u/jcb272 on Reddit. I followed his layout pretty much to the T, including the color. This is my first real project done using a sewing machine and I think it came out great.

I did add some grosgrain to the seams to reinforce it, later. After putting in a little more time on the sewing machine I realized that my work could probably use a little reinforcing.

The end result is a pretty solid, lightweight quilt.

Included are the only shots I got of my  Costco down throw underquilt build. It came out really good. Unfortunately, my car was broken into and the quilt was lost, along with my hammock, pack, and a good number of other things. I guess I’ll just have to start from scratch with a new setup.

Arduino, Automation, Electronics, Garden

Garden Automation

In my previous apartment I had set up a few self watering planters I made from recycled kitty litter buckets. The planters have a reservoir of water that keeps the soil moist longer. It reduces maintenance, but I still needed to top off the reservoirs every few days. So of course I set about on trying to rig up something to refill them for me.

The idea was to have a larger enclosed tank that can resupply the smaller reservoirs of each planter. To accomplish this, my system would need to:

  1. Monitor the level of the water in the reservoir
  2. Engage a pump to transfer water from the tank to the planter
  3. Disengage the pump

I had some IR transistors that I picked up a few years ago that never got used beyond turning on some LED’s and decided this would be the perfect application for them. I would use them to detect when the water in the planter got too low or too high.

The planter already had some basic floating water gauges. These were just bamboo stakes stuck into wine corks. I would use two thin slices of cork to trigger the IR sensors.

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This is a brief write-up of a project that has been postponed. I moved into a new place and my new garden setup doesn’t need this pump… yet.