Adventure Journal is a printed quarterly dedicated to the thrill of exploration and the joy of motion in the great outdoors. Each issue is printed on heavyweight 70lb uncoated body stock and 130lb soft-touch cover stock. Our operations are powered by solar, we use certified-sustainable paper, and we plant a tree for every copy sold, replacing...
My wife mentioned that she’d like one of those makeup mirrors with lights around it (which are apparently called Hollywood mirrors), and it just so happened that she was about to go away for a few days, so her absence made for the perfect opportunity to build her a nice surprise for when she got back.
Back in January, I set two New Year’s biking resolutions for myself: Ride at least 2024 kilometers until December 31st. Do at least one 100-kilometer ride. I still have a ways to go on the first one, but I am pleased to report that I’ve finally completed my first metric century. I know it’s not much for some of you out there, but it was a big...
Read this short story here or download a DRM-free version for your e-reader:
Read this short story here or download a DRM-free version for your e-reader:
You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: Buy experiences, not things. Have you noticed how it’s always delivered with more than a hint of smug condescension? How it always seems to be a value judgment on the way you live your life? It seems to me that the advice is almost always coming from two types of people: the extroverted, or the terminally online....
Our family has grown by 50%! About two months ago my wife and I adopted this lovely little bundle of energy and joy. Her name is Mimi, she is six months old, and she is half Chihuahua and half who-knows-what (the people at the shelter we adopted her from didn’t know). She likes treats, belly rubs, and napping in my arms in the mornings before work.
Our old privacy fence has decided to finally give up the ghost a couple of weeks ago during a particularly windy day when it came off its bindings and started to fall. I was planning on replacing it anyway at some point, so this provided just the motivation that I needed.
Here’s a restoration project I’ve been planning to tackle for a long time now. I’ve had this bow for more than a decade, but for the past few years it’s been lying in a basement, neglected and abandoned (but mercifully dry). Of all my bows, this one has always been closest to my heart. It’s the one I have the most fond memories of. I went...
But first, a demo! Click the image to see the full-size (potato-quality) clip: Winter is coming. I normally visit my club’s 3D archery range either early in the morning before work, or in the evening after, but with the lengthening dark it’s getting harder and harder to spot my arrows in the targets1. Lighted nocks to the rescue!
I’ve been thinking lately of ways I could shave some grams off my new bike, especially around the wheels, but without spending too much money. I’m no weight weenie by any means—my kickstand attests to that—but I’m also not above reaching for some low-hanging fruit if I can. Enter TPU tubes. If tube manufacturers and the Internet are to be...
I still love these colors! That is all.
No, I’m not that aero yet, I’m talking about chain wax. I’ve been meaning to ditch chain oil for a while now, because I’m really fed up with cleaning my drivetrain and un-gunking the jockey wheels all the time. Wax also doesn’t turn into abrasive paste when it meets road dust, which means the drivetrain should also last longer, so double win, yay.
I love these colors! That is all. Before After
If this post’s title sounds a little familiar, it’s because this is the second time I rebuild one of these K2 bikes. The bike itself is nothing special–though these entry-level MTBs from the ’90s never cease to amaze me with how well they hold up and how versatile they are–but it does have the distinction of being the first project I do in my...
In my last post I wrote about Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. The article sparked a really nice discussion over at Hacker News, where a user had this to say: Ideas should be judged on their merits, but based on previous behavior I wouldn’t necessarily trust Johann Hari’s writing out of hand - ie other things in the book....
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly of suggesting personal...
I’m kicking off the new year with a new category on the blog: reviews. There will be books, movies, video games, and maybe even tools. As with everything on this website that practically no one visits, I’m doing this mostly for my own benefit. I’ve found in the past that writing down my thoughts after finishing a book or video game helps me...
I don’t have much to say about this bike other than, boy, what an interesting life it must have had. The ceramic wheels can’t have been part of the original equipment, and the AMP Research linkage fork sure wasn’t. The fork looks cool, but feels weird as hell to ride, so I can understand why the design didn’t catch on, but I can still appreciate...
Oh boy was this bike a lot of work! By far the hardest out of all my projects so far. I went into this build highly determined to avoid all the mistakes I did last time, so I spent an ungodly amount of time wet-sanding the old paint down to the bare metal. The hard to reach areas I assaulted chemically with a paint stripper, which actually did a...
I painted a bike! For a long time I’ve wanted to introduce painting to my restoration process, but I was always held back by not having a well-ventilated area to do it in. I kept putting it off until later this year when I’ll move into a proper house with a yard, but then this bike came along, with its cracked and peeling layers of clear coat, so...
Have you ever tried taking your hands off the handlebars while riding your bike? Scary, innit? The bars start wobbling all over the place, and images of the front wheel suddenly becoming perpendicular to the rest of the bike–followed immediately by you making like the payload of a catapult–start flashing through your mind in great big neon...
When I was a child, growing up in post-communist Romania, very few people owned cars1, and those that did usually had some real clunkers2. Every single weekend some neighbor would be outside from dawn to dusk, banging and fixing on his car for the umpteenth time, trying to get it road-worthy for the week ahead. This bike and I have developed a...
I briefly mentioned this bike before, when I talked about how I got into bike repair. The bike was “analog” back then, but my wife has meanwhile developed some problems with the tendons on one of her feet, which have impeded her ability to climb hills on the bike. So I’ve built her an e-bike!
I don’t know if this is a new trend or if I’m just noticing it now, but more and more the popular wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t monetize your hobby. That if you do, it turns it into a job, a hustle1; that it sucks all the fun out of it. Putting aside for now the fact that some people might want to turn their hobby into a job, monetizing a...
Serendipity the first When I was fifteen, I scored badly on my high-school placement exam. Not terribly bad, but just enough so that I didn’t make the cut-off point for the specific high-school that I wanted to go to. My mom (who had been a teacher for decades at that point) pulled some strings, and the high-school added an extra spot to one of...
This bike is as old as I am! In a time when everything is made to be disposable, and half-obsolete by the time it leaves the factory door, bicycles are truly one of the last bastions of future-proof design that we can still rely on. This particular model also happens to be a small piece of Austrian history; it was one of the very last bikes made...
Ah, my trusty steed. This bike will forever hold a special place in my heart as the first bike I built for myself. I bought it last year off the local marketplace for €50, which was a steal at that price for how well the frame had been kept (I uploaded some “before” photos here). Only the frameset is left of that initial bike; everything else I...
What is it exactly that’s so great about riding a singlespeed? What draws people to it, and what makes them abuse their own knees like that? I’ve built and ridden a couple of singlespeeds recently, and I’ve been thinking about what makes them so much fun. Part of it has to be nostalgia, of course. Most of us have fond memories of a particular...
A user of /r/bicla (a Romanian cycling subreddit) generously gave me this bike for free after they saw one of my previous projects and enjoyed it. I gave the bike a complete overhaul and a well-deserved facelift. The word “singlespeed” is in quotes in the title because the bike technically has two speeds. It’s equipped with a cool SRAM Automatix...
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could use a cheese grater to remove the skin off your...
I had the pleasure of taking apart and servicing this cool piece of cycling history for one of my builds recently, so I decided to take a couple of pictures and write a few words about it. The SRAM Automatix was1 a truly automatic internally-geared hub. Unlike a regular kickback hub, where you have to pedal backwards to engage the gears, the...
Most of the times when I build a bike, I have a pretty good idea of what I want the end result to look like before I even start. Sometimes, however, the bike will tell me what it wants to be instead. This vintage Bottecchia used to be a pretty boring city bike that I wanted to convert to single speed and drop bars. I was actually almost done with...
This is the first build where, instead of starting from a full bike, I started with the bare frame and added the parts that I thought would best fit the image I had formed in my mind the first time I saw it. An interesting hack is the 10-speed SRAM GX MTB shifter mounted to the 31.8 mm section of the drop bars. I wrote a short tutorial about the...
Update: A front-derailleur clamp for braze-on front derailleurs, like the BBB ShiftFix, might be an even better option than the seat clamp. I especially like that an FD clamp hinges open; this eliminates the risk of marring the finish of the handlebars when sliding the clamp over the thicker part. Another big plus is the lack of an inner lip that...
This website is where I ramble on about random topics that catch my fancy now and then. Please don’t expect any particular theme. Things that interest me include programming, bicycle repair, archery, books, and writing, but I’m probably going to write about other stuff too when I feel like it. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to get in...