A friend at work had his bicycle seat stolen this week. It isn’t a trivial loss either: a $25 seat post, a $40 saddle, a $17 taillight, and an $18 fender. While shopping for replacement parts, he’s riding on a junk seat that the thief left behind. Anyway I thought about my bike (and added up the respective cost of those components – a few notches up the ladder from his ride) and decided to hire a sniper to watch the bike racks around campus.
Unfortunately that solution turned out to be impractical for various reasons having to do with the interference of a large Government bureaucracy, so I decided to secure the seat a little better instead. This I did by pinning the seat tube in the frame. And what does that have to do with this picture? This is a view of sparks on the grinding wheel as the carbon-steel pin is shortened to the correct length for the seat tube of the frame.
In common shop practice, if you want to know (approximately) what alloy a piece of ferrous metal is made of, you touch it to a grinding wheel and observe the sparks. Some of the patterns are very pretty as well as informative.
(Picture Pentax W60 in macro mode.)
Darn those Feds! Getting in the way of perfectly good plans to deter thieves. I wonder if they’d overlook a gentleman in the bushes with a cattle prod.
The sparks are lovely. You’ve got a talent for photography and an eye for remarkable beauty in ordinary things that I envy!
How did you secure the pin? Just drill through both the frame and seat and put in the pin? I think that is a great idea for helping to secure a bike seat.
And that is a lovely picture Diane!!
D’oh, wrong post for that last part. That is what I get for late night posting.
It’s a slotted spring pin – a hollow tube with a slot on one side. It is slightly larger than the hole, resulting in an interference fit under spring tension. Isn’t going anywhere.
Here’s how it looks in the seat post.