Repairing the Mundane, Bike Pedals!

 

If you follow me over on mastodon you might have got wind of one of my current ongoing projects, the restoration of a cheap but excellent recumbent racing bike. I'm collecting video and images of the process so I imagine there'll be a YouTube video and some posts at some point. I do lots of bike tinkering and it's really easy to fall into the trap of just adding better parts rather than restoring parts you have. I'm totally guilty of this but I do try and reuse parts elsewhere if possible. 

The recumbent arrived with a set of flat pedals on it. Painted bright red they were totally serviceable (one needed a little tweak of a nut to take out a tiny bit of play) but the paint was in poor condition. They are absolutely nothing special, they are alloy with cast in pins (the sticky up grippy bits) and as such would have originally been a fairly cheap pair of pedals, not even any branding or name. 

As I kind of progress as a maker type person I start to see more and more how much effort and energy goes into creating these low spec, but not the worst parts in all manner of products and items. If you have ever tried casting metal or machining some kind of curved bearing race cup you'll know too. 

Increasingly I see people repairing and I love it. I also see media starting to promote and push the repair agenda and I love that even more. However I've also noticed that, particularly in the higher end TV/documentary style repair stuff, that increasingly the things that are repaired are either very expensive high quality items (antiques etc) and/or things that people have incredible emotional attachment and investment in. Think Repair Shop and people weeping (quite rightly) over a wartime memento lovingly restored. 

I love it, but it's dangerous, it leads me back to these pedals, they are mundane. We need to repair the mundane too. It's highly likely that I will invest a lot of time into the recumbent bike project, and it might end up warranting technically better pedals than these. I might want different technology, I might want to clip in, but these pedals are serviceable and need to be reused. 

So I stripped them down, I sanded off the remaining paint and oxidisation and then gave them a coat of primer. I then realised that, due to their quick and budget production methods, they still had lots of casting flash from when they were originally made. Not warranting endless effort I ground back the worst bits and re primed them. I then did a poor but functional rattle can respray in a neon yellow. 

As part of the strip down I had to prise out the pedal caps to get to the retaining nuts etc. Of course these plastic items were very snug and to remove them created some damage. A quick measure with the calipers and a little bit of FreeCAD design work and I printed a pair of replacement caps in a pleasing green TPU filament. 

The axles were stripped and then re-greased before reassembly, they aren't pretty, I don't have a shot blasting cabinet or an indoor space for respraying so they are a bit rustic in finish, but, they are once again serviceable and, whilst I say the recumbent might warrant technically better pedals, these will find their way onto a project at some point rather than hitting landfill.

Inkscape Path Effect: Ruler

As a maker I’ve often ended up making rulers and scaled items. If you have access to some kind of laser cutter/CNC router or even just a regular document printer, you can create all manner of measuring and metrology tools! Inkscape can make this process incredibly straightforward with it’s Ruler path effect.

It is a pretty straightforward path effect. In a new project click the Pen tool then hold the control key and left click on the canvas and drag to create a horizontal line. Set the stroke width to something reasonably thin like 0.2mm and set the length of the line to something easily divisible. We opted for 100mm.

With the line selected click “Path – Path Effects” to open the Path Effects dialogue tab on the right hand side. In the path effects drop down menu search for “Ruler” and then select it to open the ruler dialogue. This will apply the ruler effect to our line and you will see some ruler markings appear spread along the line. They probably aren’t spaced correctly so we will edit the ruler dialogue variables to create the effect we want. Let’s aim for a mark every 1mm with a longer major mark every 10 marks so we get a 10cm ruler with mm and cm marked.

First change the “Unit:” drop down selection to mm then set the “Mark distance:” value to 1. You should now see that the ruler markings change to be equally spread at 1mm distances along our original line. Next you can set your “Major length:” and “Minor length:” variable so that you have longer and shorter ruler lines, finally set the “Major steps:” value to 10. You should now see your longer “Major length” lines now appear every 10mm marking every centimetre.

Of course, you aren’t limited to creating rulers that are marked every mm. You can use this versatile path effect to make all manner of scales and rules. In the header image you can see it’s been used to make some “roamer” tools which are used in map reading and navigation. The ruler path effect has been used to make marks where every 4mm represents 100 meters for the 1:25000 scale roamer which is a common hill walkers map scale. Note that the actual ruler marks in the corners of the roamer designs have been edited so they don’t cross over each other. This has been achieved by selecting the entire path effect ruler and clicking “Path – Object to path” this means that then every mark of the ruler can be edited using the “Node Tool” furthering the use of this great path effect!