Sunday, March 4, 2012

Sunday Early Edition

Tungsten carbide for the win!
First of all, in my first Banana Headed deed for the day, I deleted all my pictures before they loaded up onto the computer.
So what you see before you, are not the actual events, but events that have been re-created for your enjoyment.
Sort of.
I wanted to show you the stack I had on the steerer tube before I cut it, but I can't for reasons stated above.
I also wanted to show you how I removed the expander bung(that's English talk for plug) but I can't also for reasons stated above.
What I can show you is the bung:



That's after I took it out.
It was stuck in there pretty good, but I did what Mr. Scott suggested and got a screwdriver and tapped on the center portion and the whole shebang dropped down into the tube.
I did have a bit of trouble getting the bottom part out, the female threaded part, but after a little shaking and a baking, it fell out into my greedy little palm.
Now the hard part.
I decided to set the stem for 30mm of stack, which ten more than I think I need.
Because of the weather, I haven't been able to get out and put any kind of miles on the Yet To Be Named(YTBN), so I'm not really sure about the final position.
Anyways, I marked it off and taped it up.
More on this later.
This time, instead of Dremelizing it, I decided to use my new Park Tools tungsten carbide hacksaw blade(MNPTTCHB).
So I got out my cheapo mitre jig, which I clamped the tube into, and a hacksawing I went!



I had read that if you taped the tube before cutting you could cut down on the amount of carbon pixie dust created.
Wrong.
For on thing, MNPTTCHB is not really a blade but more like a blade with some grit on the end. The grit, which I suppose is the tungsten carbide part, acts like a file and well, files into the carbon which creates a lot of dust:



One shouldn't breath that carbon pixie dust in lest you want to be like Han Solo and be sealed up in carbonite.
Or something.
Anyways, the cut was clean as can be.
Here is the stem with said 30mm of stack:



Which is not how I'll be riding.
If the weather ever clears.
I'll drop that puppy down and try 20mm of stack for a bit. If I need to go higher, well then I have that extra 10mm.
If I don't, need to go higher I mean, I'll just start at GO and do this all over again.
It's sort of drizzling off and on today, and we got thunder shower and flash flood warnings, so I don't know if I'll be able to take that inaugural ride.
If anything I'll ride down to the photo wall and take some pics as I know you, the reader, are like waiting to see what the YTBN looks like.
For now, I'll be cleaning up the unholy I mess I made putting the YTBN together.
That may take me all day.
If you know what I mean.

5 comments:

John Romeo Alpha said...

WC FTW!!! Bung down, 10 to go!

limom said...

Everytime I see the word bung, I think of the wino dude from the Wizard of Id comics.

WC:
water closet
World champ
wind chimes
workmans comp
??

John Romeo Alpha said...

WC = Tungsten Carbide, chemically.
FTW = For the win!

limom said...

Interesting, wolfram huh?
I'd have never guessed.
The only thing I know about tungsten is that Edison used it for some of his first light bulb filaments.
Shucks and I was hoping it was World Champ.

Tup said...

You know, cause I'm like super fast and all.