Two weeks ago, a gentle ride around Derwent Water in the Peek District almost never happened as one of my Clipless Pedals By the infamous Crank Brothers exploded.

The bike ride was saved by a £1 pedal from the bike shop there. The blokie there said that I would notice the difference, but luckily I had no plans on clipping in that weekend and rode with my trusty Converse All Stars.

Back to the Mallet rebuild.

I bought a rebuild kit from Chain Reaction cycles. I chose them over Wiggle as they had a mallet specific rebuild kit rather than a ‘Egg Beater’ kit. Who knows.

First hurdle was to remove the dust cap. As these were second hand pedals, the dustcap had already been attacked and I couldn’t get any purchase with a a large flat head screwdriver. I decided to drill most of it out and cut the remainder of the dustcap wall with a scalpel.

Note to self, Dustcap, 14mm with 0.5mm pitch thread.

Now the dustcap was gone, I could undo the 5mm Nyloc holding the shaft on the pedal to release the shaft. From here, I could see that the problem was that the bearing had disintegrated. The inner race was stuck fast on the shaft and the outer race was stuck fast in the pedal.

The inner race came out broke apart with a set of mole grips.

To remove the outer race, I was going to Dremel the hardened steel outer race, but instead had a moment of clarity. The outer shaft which the clipless mechanism is attached, is perfect to knock the outer race out from the opposite direction.

It just happens that two M6 Cap Head Screws are perfect for this job, as the head is 10mm in diameter. Just right to get passed the 11mm housing and 9mm through shaft! Just make sure you don’t go too far, otherwise you’ll have to rebuild the whol clipless mechanism, but if you just go far enough to push the bearing out pass the dustcap threads, all you need to do is turn the pedal back over and gently tap until shaft is back in position.

The rebuild kit comes with new bearings, bushes, seals, nylocs and dustcaps for two pedals. for £12, not as good as a £1 pedal, but better than throwing away £80 pedals.

I suppose with the quick byte size micro blogging of twitter, regular blogging suffers.

I could always integrate my/our tweets with the blog, but there are places for tweets and there are places to blog and every so often they should cross over.

Just seeing if the SQL server is working

I just update wordpress to the latest and greatest.

trouble is some of the pages are broken and I don’t have the enthusiasm to fix it.

Maybe a reinstall tomorrow.

As we are doing the kitchen at the moment, I reponded to an request for kitchen units.

After a couple of photos, dimensions and the expaination of them being wobberly and held together with tape, the taker was still interested.

We spent a long time NOT destroying these units to have them put out and covered for collection.

A quick email saying that he had been around and thought they were too old for his shed had me a bit knarked.

As I saw the cupboards more or less where we left them, I went into knarked mode and proceeded to move the cupboards back into the back garden and just to prove this guy wrong, I single handed put the cupboards into my shed, where I now have a decent storage system.

Sureley micro blogging isn’t where it’s at, so I’ve installed Drivel to see if I can rekindle the blog.

If you read this, it’s a start!

Bad reception on DAB in car.

Reason, when peeling back aerial from old car window and storing in a scrunched mess, aerial snapped.

How do people get by without an x-ray machine?

As JaffaCam has been down for awhile, due to hibernation. The camera is up and running again.

It looks as if I either have to move the camera into the pen again, or move the UV light to one side.

At the moment the camera is mounted on the digial radio. It was either that or the homebrew keg.

Oh btw, the flickr photos are all out of date as Jaffa has forgotten his password.

We retired the old Honda just before Christmas and replaced it with a 130BHP Passat.

All is well, except for the analogue radio. So out with the standard and in with the old DAB.

It seemed to go all too well as the connectors in the Passat are ISO standard ones so the only mod required is the powered arial for the DAB.

Once connected it looked as if it was working, however, the clock would remember the time I switched off the engine and forget the position of the CD. It turns out the pins are reversed and the perminent live and ignition are in reverse.

This explains why Bluespot sell ISO harnesses for Passats. I decided to get one fromn Motorworld and hack it myself.

I tried all components before pushing in the unit. Realising that I needed a screwdriver, I left the car, but as I went to lock it, the remote stopped working. It turns out that the new harness has the perminant and ignition wired into one, which must make the car think the keys are still in the ignition and stops the remote from working!

The harness from motorworld is missing a couple of wires one of which being the Auto Sound wire, which makes the radio go louder to coupe with the tractor engine roaring. I proceeded to hack saw off the speaker ISO connector as I could use it direct from the Passat and use the spare wires to fill the gaps in the adaptor I needed. I also cut the ignition wire in the adaptor which was stopping the car from remopte locking and used it for the powered DAB arial.

All that is left to do is to 3D print a tray for an MP3 player/phone, create a AUX cable and decide whether to have a female 3.5mm jack into one of the spare button position, or a flying lead with a male 3.5mm jack (which would make more sense, but not as tidy), or ExtUSB cable to charge and listen to my G1.

I’ve done the deed and decided linux and open source is the future. I’m the proud owner of the htc’s G1 and as you can see, it is wordpress compatable.