I managed to get some work done around the house as well as some riding this weekend in spite of the nasty weather on friday and saturday.

One of my big projects for saturday since I wasn’t out on the dirty century was to try and bring some semblance of order to our mounting pile of bikes in the bike room. I’ve been talking about getting a nice floor rack for a while (since the 7 ceiling hooks are full), but when I started looking into buying one, I almost crapped myself at the prices.

So, I did what any reasonable do-it-yourselfer would at that point in time: I wandered around home depot for an hour or so until inspiration hit.

When I finally walked out, I had two 10-foot sections of 3/8” all-thread, several sets of 3/8” nuts and washers, and two 10-foot 2” diameter PVC pipe. After some hacksawing, bending, drilling and assembling, I had two custom racks. One is a single rack for the big dummy, and one will eventually have a 6-bike capacity (I ran out of hardware and all-thread, so it’s a 2-bike capacity right now). Here’s a picture of what I came up with.

It works pretty well, the only modification I think I’m gonna make is to pick up some tubing to thread over the all-thread so it doesn’t scratch up the spokes. Other than that, it was a success.

Of course, right after I finished building it, I was sitting at my computer eating some lunch and came across this alternative DIY rack design. I may have to try and piece one of these together as well and see how it works. I really want another rack for the front porch for visitor parking, so it may be worth some experimenting with the PVC-only approach as well.

I also got another batch of beer in the fermenter today. This one is a pale ale made with some hops my sister gave me for my birthday. They’re called “Sorachi Ace” and have a lemony aroma to them, so I built a (hopefully) nice summer beer around them. I’m calling it (appropriately) Summer Ace Pale Ale, and it should be a pretty standard pale ale. Mmmmm. . . .