Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1982: Will the real political donation limit please stand up?

 

 

It has reached the point where half of my incoming emails are spam from the Biden campaign. 

These emails are all solicitations for donations.  Given that this is all coming from the same source, you’d think they could figure out a way to limit it to one-a-day, or some such.  With this volume, they have crossed the line between persistent reminders and simply being annoying.

In any case, today it finally dawned on me that I could unsubscribe.  This is an odd thing to do, given that I never subscribed to anything in the first place.  But, semantics aside, as long as it gets them to stop, that’ll do.

The point of this is that I am baffled by Federal campaign finance limits.  Every time I hear about the latest multi-million-dollar fund raiser by either candidate, I keep coming back to what I thought the law said, regarding contribution limits:  $3,300 per person, per candidate, per election.  Like so:

Source:  FEC.

Normally, I’d just chalk that up to the norm for modern America, which is that there are no binding rules for the rich, only for the little people.  So, of course candidates can hold $100K/plate fund-raising dinners, for their campaigns.  At the same time that hoi polloi are limited, by law, to $3,300, if donated to to a candidate’s campaign.

I would do that, except that among my emails from the Biden campaign is a request to donate $5K. Like so, from my in-box:

How on earth can the Biden campaign solicit a donation for $5K, from a mere commoner like myself, when the legal limit on donations to a political campaign, for an election, is $3,300?

I realize there are no binding limits on what the wealthy can spend to try to influence politics.  But if there are no real limits to what the average Joe or Jane can spend, I sure wish they’d revise the law to make that clear.  The current situation — a $3,300 limit which just about everyone seems to be able to avoid, one way or the other — turns Federal campaign spending limits into more of a joke than they already are.

 

Post G24-017: First Japanese beetle and first red tomato. A first.

 

The Japanese beetle and the squash vine borer both show up somewhere around 1000 growing-degree-days into the year.

Source:  Cornell University.

This year being pretty close to average, temperature-wise, the Japanese beetles are right on time.  I saw my first one this afternoon.  Last year’s version of this post occurred on June 20.  The year before that, June 18.

It’s not so much that the Japanese beetles do a lot of damage in my garden.  It’s that, around here, they are easy to spot, and their appearance means that many other pestiferous bugs will soon be arriving.  Relatively pest-free gardening is over for the year.

While Japanese beetles arrive like clockwork, not so the tomatoes.  Every year, I plant some short-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes, including Burpee’s aptly-named Fourth of July.  And, owing to the warm weather, and maybe an early start indoors, for the first time ever, I have my first red tomato on the same day as my first Japanese beetle.  I believe this year’s winning variety is Glacier.

x

This early ripening is kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  Good news is, it’s been so warm that the early-season tomatoes are extra early.  (E.g., a neighbor of mine has had ripe cherry tomatoes for about two weeks now.)  The bad news is that it’s been so hot, we’re already having nigh-time lows in the 70’s F, which is too warm for tomatoes to begin the ripening process.  So I’m guessing that I may get a few ripe tomatoes soon, but the bulk of what’s growing is going to remain green until temperatures cool off a bit.

 

Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

 

It is not from being too cheap to buy a new belt.  In most cases.

In reality, a guy with a beer gut has no choice.  Belts seek the geodesic, that is, the path of least distance.  In this case, the path is around your midsection at the belt line.  If you have big gut, and buckle your belt at your navel, it’ll sag.  Maybe not immediately, but soon.

 

Left to its own devices, your belt ends up below your gut, at your personal geodesic. Continue reading Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

Post #1979: Catching up with a few things.

 

Day trips:  Great Falls, Maryland and Sky Meadows, VA.

Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks.  The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views.  It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade. 

We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view.  On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.

Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.

My little patch of berries is doing well.  Black raspberries have peaked.  Blackberries (above) are doing OK.  Currants and gooseberries are about done.  Wineberries are still to come.

My boysenberries are now ripening.  Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants.  I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia).  Now, having grown some, I understand why.  Technically, they are cane fruits.  In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes.  But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants.  They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them.  They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.

A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above.   When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me.  But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor.  Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry.  And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.

In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel.  Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it.  And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.

Bike rehab success.

I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier).  This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today.  There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.

My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.

This bike rehab project remains unfinished.  I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced.  My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount.  (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)

This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique.  I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub.  That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.

Poor garlic yield

This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden.  This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do.  Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.

Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized.  In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic.  As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny.  About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so.  Almost but not quite unusable.

At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers.  But I always get the same result.

I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic.  My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day.  Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day.  Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.

Plant propagation:  Snip-and-dip success, air layering fail.

Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods:  Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).

The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above.  Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight.  These cuttings are obviously thriving.

Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above).  The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks.  After four weeks, I had nothing.  After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots.  My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form.  Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.

Sketchy no more.

The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950).  The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now.  Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.

That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year.  This, due to free money from Covid. 

The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street.  The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street.  In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block.  Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.

My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing.  Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.

Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block.  Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block.  (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).

But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.

Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.

I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street.  But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it.  Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.

Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.

To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes.  Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower.  These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.

 

 

Post #1978: Bike E Rehab, part 2

In which I construct a pannier rack for the back of the bike.  Only after which did I find out that this bike is dead.  Or maybe not.

Rear pannier mount for the BikeE

My wife and I own two BikeE’s.  These are semi-recumbent bikes that were popular (ish) about 25 years ago.

As part of this rehab process (Post #1976), I removed the wire baskets from both bikes, along with their under-seat mounts.  They never worked well.  And after a couple of decades, the rust adds nothing to their charm.

To replace those, on my BikeE, I mounted a far easier-to-use (and better-looking) set of cloth panniers across the tail of the bike frame.  As shown above.  (The product can be seen at this link, from Amazon.)

I bought a similar set for my wife’s BikeE.  Sort of a get-out-of-rehab present.  (Her bike is currently at the bike shop, for an overhaul of the 3-speed rear hub and other items.)

To hang those new cloth panniers on her bike, I need a rear rack.  Which basically no longer exists, for the BikeE.  Unobtainium, or close enough to it.

So I made one, like so:

This BikeE rear rack slides onto the aluminum-extrusion frame, behind the seat, to form a 6″ x 13″ shelf.  Tightening the bolts clamps it firmly to the frame.  (For those in-the-know, I may yet have to drill a clearance hole or two for the seat-limit rivet that’s part of the frame.)

This serves as the mount for the cloth panniers.  The panniers attach to this rear rack via Velcro straps fed through the polished metal strap-eyes screwed to the corners.

To keep the panniers off the rear wheel, I wove a 48″ bungee cord (green, above) between the rear arm of the bike and the rack.  This forms an elastic “V” on both sides.  The panniers rest against, and Velcro to, this “V”, instead of rubbing the rear tire.  In addition, the panniers themselves have a stiff back, as if from a thin sheet of plywood, which helps to keep them from the back tire.

Panniers in this position can’t stably hold as much weight as panniers mounted under the front seat.  But rear-mounted panniers on this bike are adequate for (e.g.) a bag of groceries.  And that’s about all I intend to use them for.

Here’s the rack, mounted and strung with a bungee.  And then in final form, with the panniers installed.

Addendum:  Preferred bungee routing shown below left, in torquoise.  In hindsight, the bungee is more effective at keeping the panniers away from the rear wheel when it is routed as shown below.  Just drill a couple of holes in the main plate to stick the metal bungee ends into, and pass the middle of the bungee around the front of the plastic rack.

(As a reminder, in the picture below, a shock absorber allows the gray swing arm and tire to move up-and-down relative to the blue frame/white rack.  That’s why any connection between the two must be flexible, and is among the many reasons why a normal bike rear rack will not work in this situation.)

Details of construction:  I made mine out of a 1/2″ thick piece of HDPE board, only because I had that sitting around.  It’s more-or-less a half-inch thick plastic cutting board.  Plywood would probably have been lighter. 

The top board is 6″ x  13″, sized to match the particular panniers I bought, plus an inch of length for mounting the strap eyes to either end of the board. 

Beneath that to board are two “rails”, each consisting of a “clamp” and a “spacer”.  The larger piece that clamps onto the bike is 1.5″ wide, and is the full 1/2″ thickness of the material I’m using.  The smaller “spacer” piece is about 3/4″ wide, and has been thinned down to about 5/16″ thickness, so that it is exactly as thick as the lip on the aluminum bike frame.   To keep them together, the spacer has been screwed to the clamp piece in a couple of places.

To assemble, mark lines on the top that are 1.25″ away from the center of the bicycle.  Drill them out to accept your hardware (1/4-20 bolts, in my case).  Put the bolts through the top, and place that on top of the bike frame by straddling the frame with those bolts.  Center the plastic top on the bike frame and clamp it down so that it can’t move.

Remove the bolts, hold one rail under the top, tight against the aluminum frame, and clamp that rail assembly to the bike rack top.  Then drill down through the empty bolt holes, into the immobilized rail assembly.  Run the bolts through top and rail on that side, loosely put on the nuts.  Do the same for the other side.

Tighten the bolts/nuts until the bike rack is clamped firmly to the aluminum bike frame.  For final assembly, it’s probably not a bad idea to use lockwashers, Locktite, doubling up the nuts, or similar, to keep the nuts from backing off the bolts.

It works, in the sense that I clamped it to my bike frame, and I couldn’t budge it.  I’m sure it’ll be adequate to handle the stress of 20 pounds of groceries in the panniers.

Not shown:  Cut a couple of slots in the end so you can route the bungee cord efficiently, as discussed above.  Any connection between the frame and the rear swing arm has to be flexible, because the swing arm/shock move relative to the frame, as the bike goes over bumps.  Hence the bungee cord.

I would put the cart before the horse, but the horse is dead.

The irony here is that about 30 minutes after I finished the above, I got an email from my local bike shop.  Said email telling me that the bike is dead.   My wife’s BikeE has a crack in the frame, where the suspension is attached.  And because of that, my local bike shop will not do any repairs on this bike.

And yet, there has been a crack in that location for a couple of decades or so.  The metal of the shock mount failed after just a few years.  When BikeE wouldn’t do anything about it, I made my own repair with a piece of angle iron and a U-bolt.  And continued to use the bike.  This repair transmits the stress from the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mounting.

The upshot is that tomorrow, I need to clarify what the reality of the putative death of my wife’s BikeE is.

Are we talking about the failure that occurred 20 years ago,  and the fix that has held up in the interim?  Or is this some new failure that I did not notice, despite turning the bike every-which-way as I (e.g.) changed tires and brakes, and lubed cables?

Is the bike unsafe for use, in the opinion of the repair guy? 

Or is this just a liability issue, same as you hear from car repair operations on YouTube.  Simply as a matter of corporate policy, do they not work on bikes with frame damage, for fear that something will go wrong down the road, and they would be held liable.

That’s one of those questions that I’m not sure I can get a straight answer to.  If the shop is afraid of the liability of working on a bike with frame damage, then they aren’t going to take on the liability of telling me the bike is OK to use.  So I’m not sure it’s even worth asking.

Oddly, if I’d stuck to the original plan, none of this would have come up.  At first, the plan was just to bring them the rear wheel for rebuild.  (In which case, this issue would never have arisen, because they’d never see the bike frame.)  I wonder if they’ll still rebuild the wheel/hub if I ask them to, as long as I take the rear wheel off the offending frame myself?

 

Conclusion:  The second greatest waste of time in the U.S.A. …

… is doing something really well, that doesn’t need to be done at all.

In effect, I may have just made that fancy new saddle for a dead horse.

Or maybe not.  If the issue is the decades-old damage, I think we’ll keep using the bike.  If the issue is something new, then I’m not sure what happens next.

Addendum, the next day:  It’s only temporary, unless it works.  The bike mechanic did, indeed, point to the nearly-20-year-old shock mount failure as the reason the bike was un-rideable.  He either missed (or dismissed) my 20-year-old expedient repair, using a U-bolt and a chunk of angle iron to transfer force from the bottom of the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mount.  Near as I can tell, a U-bolt of that size should have a breaking load somewhere around a ton, and so is adequate to support a rider.  

In any case, my temporary repair held up through years of riding, and nothing about it has changed.  I guess I proceed by going elsewhere to get the rear hub rebuilt.  

Post #1977: Updated: Twenty bags, and done. What I have learned about QPR asphalt cold patch.

With the final patches in place:

Edit 10/6/2024:  Below is the final surface, after using some tar-based crack filler and Latex-ite 10-year seal coating.  See Post #2029.  The seal coat did more-or-less nothing to hide the patch.  That said, while it ain’t pretty, it’s a lot better than it was.

This post summarizes what I learned using QPR cold patch (from Lowe’s) on a badly deteriorated section of asphalt driveway.   A prior post (Post #1974) explains the situation, and go back to Post #1971 for an assessment of options for patching asphalt.  Edit:  Post #2029 describes the final steps of crack-fill and seal-coating.  One heads up:  A squeegee does not work for spreading seal coating on an uneven surface like this.

Above, that may not look so hot to you, but I guarantee you it looks a lot better than it did.  Once I seal-coat this, in the fall, I think it’ll be … acceptable.  Given how torn up the driveway is.  I have no idea yet whether these surface-laid patches will survive the winter, but will update this next spring.

First, it took between 3 and 7 weeks for this to cure fully, in the heat of early summer in Virginia.  The reason I’m a little vague is that the patches seemed to be cured after one week.  At three weeks, a heat wave (near 100F temperatures) re-activated them, and the surfaces were once again sticky in spots, shedding little tarry bits.  At seven weeks, another heat wave (several days at 100F) did nothing.  By seven weeks, they were as solid and tar-free as the asphalt they were laid on, despite the heat.

Second, this stuff varies from batch-to-batch.  As you can see above, I laid mine down as a series of separate patches.  I bought and laid the bags of QPR a few at a time, because that’s all I could handle.  From one batch to the next, the QPR material differed in how “liquid-y/tarry” it was, in the final color once set, and to some degree, in the surface finish once set.  I’m going to seal-coat this in the fall, so the color variations don’t much matter.  But if you doing a big area, and are particular about how this looks, you might want to buy all you need, all at once, from a single batch or lot number. 

But arguing against buying a whole lot at once, see the note below on how hard it may be to estimate what you need, if your driveway surface is as un-level and messed-up as this one was.

Big batch-to-batch variation could also explain part of the strong differences of opinion among on-line reviewers of QPR.  In my case, if I’d stopped with my first first batch, I’d have said “QPR is a dandy product”, period.  With the later batches, that has a huge qualification, that the “walk on it anywhere, any time” cure time is unknown.  And all the hassle that can bring, during a hot spell.

Third, foot traffic across these patches makes a mess, due to the tiny little tarry stones that get tracked everywhere.  It’s tough to state just how much of a pain those are.  The get everywhere.  The surface sheds those rocks for the first few days (again, Virginia, early summer), and then starts shedding again if it gets hot, for some weeks thereafter.   So if this is going to be laid in place where people walk, either lay it in patches so that people can walk around the newest patches, or maybe lay plastic over it.

Fourth, the manufacturer says you can drive across these patches immediately.  And … yeah, technically that’s true.  If this were out in the middle of the street, and looks didn’t matter, I’d have no problem with that statement.

But I’d say that’s mistake, if you can avoid it, if you are picky about how the final product looks.  In my experience, there’s a risk of marking the pavement surface slightly for the first couple of days, no matter how carefully you drive (i.e., don’t turn the wheels when stopped).  And there’s a near-surety of picking up some of the tarry surface stones on your tires for the first few days.  Better to stay off these patches as much as possible until they’ve had a few days to cure.

That said, laying down plastic, then thin ply, and driving over that, did seem to compact the surface finish better than I could do with just a tamper.  So, drive over the plastic-and-ply protected surface to get the best flat-level surface on the patch.  But don’t drive over the unprotected patch for a few days, if you can help it.  If you have to, the patch will survive, but you’ll likely ding up the very top surface a bit.

QPR asphalt cold patch.

1:  Why QPR.

QPR was a relatively cheap patching material that could be applied overtop the existing asphalt surface.  I cannot over-emphasize how much labor that saves, relative to digging up all the alligatored asphalt that was deeply embedded in the clay soil of my driveway.  And then applying a much thicker patch of some alternative material.  If those patches will just stay stuck down, and don’t get popped up by freeze-thaw this winter, that labor savings alone will make it worthwhile to use QPR over other locally-available materials.

Of the cheap, asphalt-based patching compounds I could buy locally, one (Sackrete, at Home Depot) was for filling deep holes only.  It should not be laid atop existing asphalt, per manufacturer’s directions.  Using that would have meant digging up all that alligatored asphalt.  All of which is firmly embedded in the underlying clay soil, because this broken-up section of driveway had originally been laid directly onto the dirt.

But QPR (Lowes), by contrast, can be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  At least, that’s my takeaway from the manufacturer’s minimal instructions, and comments on the Lowes website and elsewhere.  Obviously, that won’t work if the underlying asphalt itself is subject to movement.   But as long as it’s firmly stuck in place, it should fine.

A completely different product, Aquaphalt, is a competitor to QPR that can also be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  That’s a water-cured patching material that looks like asphalt, but isn’t.  And while Aquaphalt appears to be a superior product in almost every way — particularly with a 15-minute cure time — it’s also between three and four times as expensive as QPR, per cubic foot.  It also comes in plastic buckets, which then must be disposed of.   (I used one bucket of Aquaphalt, on one particularly ugly stretch of pavement.  I explain that below.)

2:  I used a half-ton of material for this ~105 square foot patch.

Each bag of QPR weighs 50 pounds and costs about $20.  Therefore, my 20 bags of QPR weighed half a ton, and cost a little under $400. 

On net, for the area I patched, I got about five square feet of surface covered, per bag.  But that’s clearly a function of how deep my patch is, on average.

I brought the 50-pound bags of QPR home six to eight at a time, in my hatchback, after lining the back with a plastic sheet.

And it’s a good thing I bought just a few at a time, because I waaaaay over-estimated the amount needed, when I first looked over this section of driveway.  Raising the entire sunken driveway surface back to its original level would have taken about 60 bags of the stuff.  So instead of raising it to be fully level, I just filled in the low spots (the puddles), and raised it as little as I could, beyond that.

I’d have had a mess on my hands if I’d stockpiled the full 60 bags that I thought I’d need, before I started.

3:  Applied in manageable pieces

I put this down over several sessions, over the course of a week and a half.

Each session being maybe three or four bags’ worth of material, applied to one defined section of the driveway.

From start to finish, you:

  • sweep the area to be patched,
  • haul in a bag of QPR patch,
  • Slit the bag bottom, dump the QPR.
  • Rake it out/shape it at the edges.
  • Haul/slit additional bags as needed.
  • Tamp it.
  • Tamp it some more.
  • Run over it with your car, after covering in plastic and thin plywood.

Some days I went through that two or three times.  Most days on which I worked on the driveway, I only did that once.

One full cycle, from sweeping to running it over, seemed to take me about two hours.  But that includes some time pondering the situation, wondering what I should do next.  Mostly, pondering whether I was maintaining enough slope for water to flow, with the help of a 4-foot level.

In my “puddles first” strategy, the goal was to cover the entire area and not end up with standing water anywhere, after a rain.  With that as the goal, it was helpful to have some rain halfway through the patching, so that I could see what puddles remained after I’d filled in the biggest ones.

4: It makes a mess if there’s foot traffic.

At least it did, in my climate (Virginia, typical day in the mid-70s, sunny).

The freshly-laid patch has a tarry surface.  It will be stickier or less sticky depending on temperature and age.  Fresher and hotter mean tarrier.  As long as the patch is still tarry — either because it’s fresh, or it’s a few days old and in the hot sunshine — if you walk on it, you will pick up and track around tiny little tar-covered rock chips.  Which then stick to everything.

And that’s a pain in the ass.

5:  The tarry top surface of my patches temporarily went away over the course of a week. 

(I have now rewritten the intro to reflect what actually happened over the course of seven weeks.)

After a week, in my climate, I could walk cleanly across the patch and not pick up anything.

Before that point, though, in addition to shedding rock chips, the surface of the patch tends to pick up any stray organic matter (e.g., leaves, pine needles, wood chips) that will stick to the tar.  I believe this stuff will mostly move along once the surface is no longer tarry.  At any rate, the week-old patches were mostly clear of debris.

In principal, these were “ready for car traffic” almost immediately after they’d been fully tamped.  But only in the sense that the car tire would not squish the patch, much.  But you’d still be well-advised to wait until the next day before driving over these.  I think my car treads lifted some surface stones off the patch, when I drove over the patch on the first day.

The upshot is that, as the manufacturer advertises, you can drive right over the patches on Day 1.  Don’t stop and turn your wheels.   But my take on it is that you shouldn’t drive on the fresh patches if you can avoid it.  Your tire treads are going to pull some tarry stones off the top of the patch when you do that.  Better to minimize that until the top surface of the patch has had a few days to cure.

The other interesting aspect of aging of the patch is the surface gets smoother over time.  I guess it continues to flow a bit.  But, for sure, the fresh patch (dark) has a much rougher surface texture than the week-old patch, despite being laid and tamped the same.

6:  Pros and cons of doing this piecemeal.

Doing this piecemeal, as I did, has several advantages.  First, I don’t think I could have done 20 bags of QPR in one day.  Second, I would walk on the older (cured) patches, as I put in the newer (fresh) patches.  And I could walk on them as a way to walk around that freshly-laid patching material. Third, the only way I could figure to end up with a reasonably level final product was to fill in the low spots — the puddles — first.

Arguing against this approach are the looks and the time.  I believe that the entire patches surface will cure to roughly the same dry and densely-packed finish.  But the joins between the individual “batches” of patching will probably remain visible no matter what.  But in addition, each fresh patch extends the time during which you’re at risk for tracking tarred stone chips around.  For example, I started this more than a week ago, and it’ll be a week from now before the most recent patching material will have a cured, non-tarry surface.

Conclusion

I’m not sure I’d do this again.  And I’m not sure I wouldn’t, either.

For me, it boiled down to QPR being the easy and cheap solution.  You can drive down to your local hardware store, pick it up by the bag, and (after some significant surface prep) spread over a badly damaged asphalt surface.

This, as opposed to (say) trying to get three bids from pros, to come out, tear that up, and re-lay that section of the driveway correctly.  If I could get a pro around here interested in something that small.

The physical labor wasn’t that big a deal as long as you can lift the 50-pound bags.  I worked up a sweat tamping it, but I’m not even sore from doing that.  (OTOH, I lift weights regularly.)

Sure, it sticks to your tools.  And to your shoes.  And anything else it comes in contact with.  And it stinks faintly of asphalt, for some days afterward.  All depending on the temperature.  But, given that it basically is asphalt, none of that should be a huge surprise.

I have no idea how well it will last.  For now, it all appears to be physically solid and well-attached.  This, despite doing my best to apply it as thinly as I could, in some areas.  And without the best surface prep in the world.

The individual pieces of the patch give it a little bit of a redneck look.  But that should mostly go away as all the patches cure to the same shade and surface finish.

In any case, I have to leave it alone for a couple of months as it cures fully.  So I get to look at that patch until August or so.  At which point I’ll apply some modern miracle crack filler to any remaining cracks, then top coat the entire pavement.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Addendum:  Plus one bucket of Aquaphalt.

I actually started by purchasing a bucket of Aquaphalt 4.0 (smaller stones).  That, before I realized how much of this stuff I needed.  And how much Aquaphalt would cost to do the entire job.

I ended up using the Aquaphalt on one section of pavement that had been heavily colonized by grasses.  Unlike QPR and similar products, Aquaphalt cures by addition of water, and it cures fast (15 minutes) and hard.  No tarry mess.  I figured that if the grass should try to grow back (despite my heavily salting the area per Post #1973), Aquaphalt would stand a much better chance of keeping the buried grass roots from growing through the pavement than would the slow-to-cure QPR.

Edit 7/19/2024;  And, so far, so good.  Going on eight weeks later, and nothing is poking up through my asphalt patches.  I’m guessing that spraying the alligatored asphalt with a strong salt-water solution, prior to patching, killed the roots of all the vegetation that was there, as intended (Post #1973).

As far as I can tell, other than the high price and the waste stream of plastic buckets, Aquaphalt is a superior product.  It spreads and shapes almost as easily as QPR, and seems to stick to the pavement just as well.  It cures in 15 minutes, as advertised.  The surface finish of the Aquaphalt 4.0 is much finer than that of the QPR, owing mostly to the smaller average gravel size in the Aquaphalt 4.0.  The sole downside I noted to Aquaphalt is that it didn’t flow/rake to the edges of the patch as easily as QPR, and I don’t think I was able to lay quite as thin a patch with Aquaphalt as I was with QPR.

Edit 6/5/2024:  That’s not quite right.  Aquaphalt’s main downside is that it “flows” less well than QPR, at least once you’re at the water-and-compact stage.  I ended up leaving marks in the Aquaphalt in areas where the tamper did not hit squarely onto the surface of the Aquaphalt.  At the time, I thought I had fixed that by tamping these areas flat.  But, in fact, the Aquaphalt’s surface had so little “flow” at that point that it didn’t fill in the little low spots my mis-tamping had created.

But worse, the finer surface finish of Aquaphalt is much less forgiving than the coarser surface finish of QPR.  Little imperfections that are lost in the background roughness of the QPR surface finish stand out in the Aquaphalt surface finish. 

The moral of the story being that if you are not the best at leaving a smooth surface finish on materials like this, Aquaphalt may not be the better choice, relative to a tarry patch such as QPR.  For the reasons described just above.

That’s a lesson that my driveway and I learned the hard way. 

Looking on the bright side, the little dings in the Aquaphalt section get lost in the overall unevenness of the patch. 

I guess that’s a bright side.

We’ll see how it looks with a seal coat.

Otherwise, if I didn’t care about the expense or the waste stream of big plastic buckets, think I’d do the whole thing in Aquaphalt.  It’s as versatile as QPR (in that you can lay it over existing pavement), but lacking all the factors that make QPR a bit of a mess.  You also avoid QPR’s months-long wait prior to seal-coating over the patch and roadway.

Edit 6/5/2024:  But on a raggedy, roller-coaster asphalt surface such as my driveway, you aren’t going to end up with a beautiful finished surface of Aquaphalt as-seen-on-TV.  If nothing else, there’s no flat reference surface to screed to.  Unsurprisingly, the finished surface of my driveway — after QPR top coating — is not flat.  Plus, making it flat (level) with the remaining sound driveway surface would have required laying down three times as much material as I actually used with a “puddles first” patch-application strategy.  I’m pretty sure I’d have done Aquaphalt the same way — in a series of discrete patches — if only because it’s 50 pounds a bucket, and don’t think I could move 1.5 tons of that material in a day.  Let alone get it laid, watered, and tamped.

Post #1976: Bike E Rehab

As best my wife can recall, the last time she used that bike, my young daughter rode on the back.

Said daughter is turning 24 this year.

So it’s been sitting quite a while, unused, on our screen porch.

But with a little cleanup, new rubber all around, brake pads, a little WD-40, and chucking the moldy backpacks and rusty baskets, voilà:

Not bad for a bicycle that’s more than a quarter-century old.

Still funky after all these years.

While we’re at it.

The four most expensive words in repairs.

I knew that all the rubber items on the bike had to be replaced, just to get it back on the road.

Only after I got that done did all the other problems begin to surface. Problems that I’m going to have my local bike shop (Bikes@Vienna) fix.

Why don’t I fix the rest of the problems myself?  Here’s my answer:

Source:  BikeE riders’ group on Facebook.

Among the maintenance this bike needs is to have the three-speed axle pictured above taken apart, cleaned, lubed.  And then, most importantly, not merely put back together, but put back together correctly. 

I’m not up for rebuilding that.  Among other things, that particular three-speed rear hub is more-or-less a priceless family heirloom.  The manufacturer stopped making those hubs about 20 years ago.  New parts have been unavailable for a decade and a half now.  And it’s the only hub that will work with this bicycle without significant modification to the bike’s current setup.

This bike is so old …

… that it predates e-bikes, that is, bikes powered by electricity.  Which makes the brand name — BikeE — a real handicap when it comes to looking for parts on the internet.  But circa 1998 or so, when this was sold, a) internet use by the general public was just a few years old, and b) nobody could possibly have guessed that they would ever make batteries energy-dense enough to be used to power bicycles.  Let alone cars.

…  that it came with an incandescent bike headlight powered by “C” cells.  Among the stuff that got packed away with the bike was a (then) top-of-the-line CatEye bike headlight.  Back in the day, they dealt with the inefficiency of incandescent light bulbs by using big batteries.  I can’t recall the last device I bought that used anything but AA or AAA (or even smaller) cells.

… that the company that made it went bankrupt more than 20 years ago.  Once upon a time, BikeE was the largest U.S. seller of recumbent bikes (per this reference).  But they went out of business abruptly in 2002, after some product recalls.

And yet, this bike remains a good design.  The big advantage of this bike is comfort.  It’s a semi-recumbent bike.  Sitting on it is about like sitting in a well-padded office chair.  Your butt is further cushioned by an air-shock suspension.  It is about as easy on your body as bicycling gets.

And most of the wear-and-tear parts remain available.   One of the joys of working on bicycles, as opposed to appliances, is that most of the parts are standardized and still available.  Everything on the bike frame was made to be replaced.  And everything can be replaced by anyone with an average aptitude for mechanical repairs, and a few simple hand tools.

Conclusion

My wife and I have owned a pair of BikeEs for a quarter-century now.

They seemed expensive at the time, but in hindsight, they were a good investment.  Cheaper than a heart attack, for sure.  I’ve used mine regularly, barring injuries, and it’s really the only consistent source of exercise I’ve had for the past quarter-century.

My wife’s BikeE, by contrast, got mothballed somewhere around 15 years ago.  Now she has decided to start riding again, and bringing that elderly bike back to road-worthy condition wasn’t that hard at all.

Now all I have to do is (have my bike shop) catch up on 25 year’s worth of deferred maintenance.