Riding on the needles

I was asked in the youtube comments if all the leaves had fallen yet. Not quite all, but most of them. And a lot of needles by these weird spruces.

Here's a clip I put together from my rides yesterday and today. As you can see, it is very much like autumn: ice on the ground and falling leaves and so on. It gets below freezing during the night but usually thaws during the day, so there isn't any snow or ice. Except I did find some for the video yesterday because the day was so cold it hadn't all melted away.

And today was windy, and the Oulu River had waves on it. Usually the river is almost as smooth as glass but today I certainly wouldn't want to go out there in a row boat!

Oh, I haven't heard by old bike so I got a single speed bike for cheap. Seems that Oulu isn't quite that flat as I thought when I had gears in my bike. Maybe I should get hub gears for it.

It's a sit-up bike, with a rack which I like. On the other hand it had flat tyres, the rear axle needed tightening (the ball bearings were about to fall off, typical of some discount stores which don't know how to assemble the bikes properly) and it has no lights which are needed this time of the year. And mandatory, too. So it's taken me a few days of fixing and tuning to get it up.

For the lights I've had to hold a lamp in my hand but I got the 'see me' led light system ready, now I've just got to install it. I took an old bike light, sawed it a bit and put a bunch of leds inside. With a bulb it took 250 mA, with leds I can run it less than 20mA and it's still visible. As it has a reflector in the middle of the lens and light goes everywhere it's not really good light for seeing in the dark.

The other light project, modifying a head lamp with a 3w led to work as a 'see far' bike light is still in the works. At least now I got the solder and other gear on the table so I might actually work on it a bit.

I was going to take some photos of the rear axle while I was cleaning it and stuff, but after I took the first photo and did some work on the bike my hands got dirty and I couldn't take more photos. You'd' have to  see the bike as it was to see what I mean. Even the chain was so gunky it was doubled in size. And I didn't have any bensin or diesel to soak the chain so I had to scrub it by hand. Any soaps I had didn't work on the gunk and I didn't have the mechanics hand scrub soap like some other blogger used recently (who was it?). So in the end I used veggie oil and it seemed to work almost fine. And it's environmentally friendly. :-P

Now I just have to get these black grease stains out of tables, door handles, floors...