Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2024 Adrian Tritschler
pixelfed
Day 800 🌧 Friday commute and beer
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2024 Adrian Tritschler
It lives! Repurposing a retired MTB
Some time in the second half of last year we realised that number one son really had outgrown his 24" bike, the seat was up as high as it would go and his knees were wobbling wildly out to the sides. Upgrade time it was. Trouble is, he’s just as likely to shoot up in height in the next year or so and make any newly purchased 26" bike undersize, so with a definite “Aha!
A bend where no bend should be
A couple of months ago — January 22, wow I hadn’t realised it was that long ago — I was knocked off the road bike on the ride home by a guy on a MTB who suddenly braked and turned right without looking back or indicating. Big solid guy on a MTB, he took the front wheel clean out from under me. “Sorry mate, I was only listening for cars,” he said as he looked at the damage before riding off on his way.
Cycle Commute: Oakleigh to Clayton
Possibly the world’s shortest bicycle commute.
Looking back at the orange tree Oakleigh to Monash University, and home again. Here are some of the hi-lights and low-lights of my daily ride to and from work. The trip only takes about twelve minutes, nowhere near as interesting as my previous trip to Monash from Richmond!
A quick count and I’ve calculated that I ride along five roads getting there and an extra two coming home.
What is it?
The latest acquisition sits gleaming in the sun as I’m about to make my way to work. Dating back to pre-Japanese bicycles, its got “Australian Made” 28¼” Dunlop tyres, no brand name, and an English back-pedal brake. Why on earth did I collect it from the hard rubbish yesterday when we were out walking around the suburb?…
The new beastie arrives
A minor crisis in the bicycle storage facility — the new toy arrives at its new home… Half of it is my birthday present from Jo, half her birthday present from me. A brand-new second-hand Trek T-50 tandem. Three or four weeks since we first saw it, about a fortnight since we decided to buy it, but only this weekend have we finally had time to get down to Peter’s shop in Brighton and pick it up — after a little nagging, mostly because they want the shop space back!
Cycle Commute: Richmond to Clayton
Richmond to Monash University, and home again. Here are some of the hi-lights and low-lights of my daily ride to and from work.
Despite a personal dislike for “cycle paths” and most other cycle-specific infrastructure, most of my commute does use one of Melbourne’s bike paths… except that they aren’t really bike paths.
Every off-road bicycle path in Melbourne is really a shared-use pedestrian footway, where pedestrians have absolute right of way over cyclists, and there is no legal enforcement of the keep left requirement, or any of the other rules and regulations, which appear to be little more than local council suggestions.
Bikes 'n Houses
Housing Now this could be a bizarre house moving experience, potentially the world’s shortest. Joey and I went to look at flat number two, next door, and decided that it looks pretty good. Just like number one — only twice as big — and not twice as expensive!
Cycling Norky bike was ready for collection from the shop, Freedom Machine, revitalised after its sojourn in foreign places.
UK and France: Six weeks riding around the UK and France.
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Dom's bike hanging from the pub roof
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Look, up in the sky!
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On the road between Cordoba and Sevilla
Apollo II
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
1979-1983. A 27" ten-speed road bike. My first “decent” bike, used to and from school and university, for a brief introduction to road racing while in high school, and for several tours of the surrounding countryside. Stolen from UNSW while I was a student there, along with about twenty other bikes, by some thieves who cut the lock off the “secure” bike store and loaded every bike into a truck.
Apollo III
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
A 27" road bike – red – purchased second hand out of the newspaper – for $150. Bought a few months after my Apollo II was stolen and used for many years for touring and getting around town. First ever ride was memorable; after spending a weekend or so cleaning it and getting it rideable, I took off down the driveway, turned too sharp, caught the front wheel in a rut in the road and fell off and grazed up my knees.
Bikes on Airlines
Experiences with Bicycles and Airlines As they say in the classics, Your mileage may vary. Here is a summary of my experiences with taking bicycles on airlines, both within and outside Australia.
In general I’ve found that officially, all the airlines will insist that a bike is boxed. Bikes also count as oversize and fragile items, so if they choose, they can decide not to carry it, and if they damage it, in theory it’s your fault not theirs.
Cannondale R800 — 2003 roadie
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
Purchased second hand in 2010 through the BV forums from someone with too many bikes who was culling their herd. Like its Peugeot predecessor it doesn’t get ridden as often as it should be.
Cyclops Dragster
The first of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
1974-1976. My first bicycle! A present for my tenth birthday, it was stolen under two years later when I was 12, from my primary school, eventually the police recovered the bare frame in the garage of some local high-school students.
Memory is hazy, but it was yellow, had a sparkly-yellow banana seat, and a three-speed hub and dragster shift on the top tube.
El Tigré — singlespeed
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
2011…. A single-speed/fixie from Cellbikes, $450 in your choice of mix-and-match colours, as plain or lurid as you like and delivered to your door. Hopefully it’ll mean a little less wear and tear on norky bike during the winter months and while commuting.
My bicycles
Retreating back further and further into the mists of time, the bikes I have owned are:
When What 2014— Specialized AWOL 29er offroad tourer 2011— Mallet singlespeed 2010— Cannondale R800 roadie 2003— Trek T50 tandem 1996— Thing, Spotty II MTB frame, not yet built up 1996— Norky Bike MTB, retired 2014 1991—1996 Spotty Bike MTB, destroyed 1991—2009 Peugeot Aspin roadie, damaged, unrideable 2009-Oct-28 1983—1990 Apollo III roadie, stolen. 1979—1983 Apollo II roadie, stolen.
Norky Bike
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
What is it? A Norco Java mountain bike that doesn’t spend much of it’s life off road. Instead it gets used most days for commuting, touring, or just having fun. As befits the successor to Spotty Bike it is covered in spots, originally applied by a group of my friends one night on tour when they decided that it just didn’t look right without them.
Oxford 3 Speed
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
1976-1982. Over my high school years this gradually decomposed into what now would be called a mountain bike. Flat handlebars, 26"x1.5" tyres, 3-speed Sturmey-Archer hub gears, it started life a shiny blue colour, but at some stage was resprayed a virulent orange by myself and a friend.
Peugeot Aspin
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
A 14spd 700c road bike, Reynolds 501 frame, Shimano 105 equipment.
1990-2009. A road bike that got very little use for many years, since 6 months after buying it I bought a mountain bike and spent all my time on that.
Riding home from work one day in January 2009 I crashed when another rider turned into me, I didn’t realise at the time but it bent the frame.
Spotty Bike
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
What Was It? More than a mountain bike, Spotty was a legend.
Fundamentally a Technicomps Bigfoot, it’s birth was a long and laborious process starting with the purchase of a fluorescent orange Bigfoot frame at a bike show and a verbal promise to transfer all the components from a 17" model to the 20" frame. During the following two months, the person it was purchased from left the shop and the two new lads wanted nothing to do with it, consequently a lot of the components mysteriously changed down in spec.
Spotty II (Son of Spotty thing)
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
Aaaaaarrrrrgggggg!!!!!
The above was said with great feeling. After spending a few weeks chasing up the “lifetime warranty” – in vain – of my Technicomps mountain bike after it failed and eventually giving up, shortly after purchasing Norky Bike (tm), one of the ex-partners of Technicomps Australia offered me an exchage frame at cost price. I took him up on the deal with the intention of rebuilding Spotty on the new frame – precisely what I’ll do with two mountain bikes I don’t know.
Trek T50
One of the bicycles I’ve owned over the years.
A tandem at last – No collection of bicycles is complete without at least one tandem.
The tandem at Noojee hotel After several years of thought, and several months of searching, Jo and I finally bought ourselves a tandem. Second-hand, a trifle scratched and worn, but mechanically magnificent.
40 hole Shimano XT hubs Velocity Dyad rims Shimano Ultegra shifters Shimano Deore DX 9-speed rear derailleur Shimano 105 triple front derailleur 1750mm long, with the wheels removed, so very cumbersome to carry up and down the stairs or to put in the car!
About
ajft looking stylish and black
…The Owner
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
…The Site
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
…The ISP
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