Leitra Adventures

Broken pedal

Sat, 6 Feb 2010 16:52:17 -0500

It’s been a snowy few weeks in the mid-west and there has not been as many days with open enough roads for me to get rides in. I hope the weather breaks soon...

Last time I rode, I found my right foot felt funny on the way home. It seemed loose on the pedal. I had been having some trouble with snow clogging up the BeBop pedals I use, so I suspected that was the problem. Besides, it wasn’t that loose. Or so I thought...

I got to the northern most part of usual loop home and headed east. The traffic is very light on this road so I looked down at my feet to see if I could see anything. I noticed that the distance between my right foot and the crank arm seemed to be more that the distance between my left foot and the crank arm. I pulled outward with the right foot and the foot popped free along with the right pedal!

I carefully pushed my foot back against the crank arm and managed to get the pedal back on the shaft that was sticking out from the crank arm while coasting. It was about 25F out and I carefully road home thankful that I was not walking home pulling the leitra behind me...

I took this picture when I got home. Swapping on the identical right pedal from my V-Rex and wrote a note to myself to fix or replace this pedal.

Fixed in the nick of time

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:12:14 -0400

Last weekend was a “free Saturday” in my MBA program so I devoted some of my time to fixing the things I needed to fix on the Leitra to make it road-worthy for the winter. I re-wired both of the turn signals mounted at the top of the wheel pants, fixed the turn signal controller, replaced the hub standoff in the left wheel pant and lubed and adjusted both chains. It took a couple of hours, but it was well worth it.

Tomorrow is forecast to have a high of 39F and rain. With the Leitra, I’m planning to ride to work in comfort.

What’s it like to ride along?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:42:54 -0400

I’ve yet to try shooting video while riding in my Leitra, but I found a pretty good video shot by someone in europe that gives you a pretty good idea of what the ride is like. The video is a bit unsteady, but gives you a good idea of the view out the cockpit and you get some glimpses of the riders feet pumping away on the pedals. Check it out here.

While it is finally getting cooler here Indiana, I’m still riding my V-Rex at the moment. I broke the wiring to both turn signals that are mounted on the Leitra’s wheel pants and need to re-wire those. With luck I’ll get that done in the next two weeks and be ready for the first really cool morning and switch over the to Leitra as my “daily driver” for the run into work on the Purdue campus.

It’s not a ‘bent, but it sure is neat...

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:30:33 -0400

This past Tuesday, my team, with the help of 200 volunteers, assembled Purdue’s newest community cluster, Coates. I’m really proud of their efforts and grateful for all the help we had from our volunteers. You can see a set of pictures from the event here.

Pictured above is the first layer aggregation switches that tie together the cluster nodes.

No ‘bents to be seen in Rome

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:24:48 -0400

We were in Italy on vacation this past week. While walking about I saw no recumbents and no velomobiles. Perhaps they are not big in cities and having seen the traffic in Rome, I can understand that.

What I did see was a few cute, single person, electric cars like the yellow one pictured above. They even had a few parking lots with outlets for them. Nice...