You might’ve noticed I’ve gotten rid of the email form that used to live over there on the right of Cannotervalve.com. As with most things in life, some asshole spoils an otherwise good time, and for me, spam has ruined the direct line of communication I used to offer here, so I had to lose the Submitatron 4000 and replace it with the decidedly less high-tech:
chris at canootervalve dot com
That’s where you can email me from now on, and any psychiatrists out there may see today’s post as a golden opportunity. Here’s my attempt to document the creative process or something. To describe an idea as it occurred to me, at any rate, whatever you want to consider that. So I had this idea today, and here’s how it went.
I’ve had about a beer a day since arriving in Portland and have heard a great deal about Oregon’s bottle recycling centers. One takes one’s beer bottles to a grocery store recycling center–which I’ve heard alternately described as a cross between the DMV and a dentist, or a really swell place, depending on the describer. At any rate, word is twenty bottles will net your lucky ass a voucher for something like one U.S. dollar worth of groceries, so merely setting bottles out for the recycling guy to pick up–it’s been made clear to me–is Mitt Romney behavior. Nevertheless, the Safeway where I shop didn’t seem to have one of these recycle areas, so I waited, figuring one day I’d fine one while slowly accumulating enough beer bottles to build my own bio-dome.
Today was the day.
Today I happened to roll up to a WinCo grocery store, and there it was, a line of people with shopping carts filled with crap to recycle. Finally, the giant bag of empty beer bottles I’d been keeping in my car (driving around for a month with empties was generally frowned upon back in Pennsylvania) was going to pay off. As I was waiting to recycle my bottles and feeling the bottoms of my shoes slowly adhering to the ground just outside the bottle return, I noticed the scene captured at the beginning of this post. It’s a perplexing tableau, so I’ll explain: there’s a very large man in that thing; that thing is a golf cart; he’s using it to retrieve the shopping carts.
OK, so here’s the part where I attempt to explain the carefully synchronized firing of my addled, little synapses. I am watching a woman deposit what I’d conservatively estimate to be $45,000 worth of plastic bottles in a recycling machine, when I turn to see this guy driving the golf cart while towing a row of shopping carts. His golf cart has those overly wide swamp-buggy-style low-impact pneumatic tires like all golf carts.
And I think, “Why do we still have air in our bike tires?”
I remembered having seen a honey-comb airless wheel design somewhere before (think I even posted a picture in an old post)–which turned out to be the Bridgestone version of the more common Michelin “Tweel”.
Tough to say what caused that serious of connections to get me thinking about airless bicycle wheels. Something I’d eaten, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten, maybe. Excitement over the eighty cents I was about to make feeding Rogue and Deschuttes bottles into a machine. There’s a lot going on with my suspension system right now, and bike design is on a kind of tape loop in the back of my mind all the time anyway, but the plastic bottles plus absurdly un-green method of shopping cart retrieval somehow equated to an intense desire to see a bicycle version of this,
That’s Resilent Technologies’ airless tire, and I want some for my Independent Fabrication single-speed.
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