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how to build yourself useful (or unuseful) things on your bicycle.

An amateur-proof guide to inspecting a bicycle’s technical condition

A relatively short-ish guide focused on what can be easily checked by a layperson, with a handful of simple advice; harder shit omitted. With POST SCRIPTUM: IF YOU’RE JUST LOOKING FOR A BIKE FOR EBT  (vocabulary in pictures: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bicycle_diagram.svg https://www.rei.com/dam/ea_graphic_parts_of_a_bike.pdf https://aaronkuehn.com/media/pages/art/bicycle-typogram/3730732664-1764741835/BicycleTypogram-AaronKuehn.png https://thebestbikelock.com/parts-of-a-bike/ https://www.labelthediagram.com/parts-of-a-bike-wheel/ https://www.labelthediagram.com/parts-of-a-bike-frame/ ) Introduction Tour is much more challenging for bikes than usual riding. A lot of bikes have malfunctions during the journey. A lot of people neglect to check the bike well before touring. Some don’t try, unsure of their capabilites. EBT is generally open to join with a shitty bike. We also know that it can…

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A Small Review On Bike Stands

The last day of leaving Estonia was when my two year old Ortlieb paniers broke apart and I had to tape them. I hope to get a refund but WTF they claim to be so reliable… This is not the first of my technical material to be broken on this biketour, and here we enter the main point of this blogpost: the bike stands. There are two schools of biketourers: One which bikes lay against trees, and the other where, after a fancy backwards move of the cyclist’s leg, the bike stands elegantly in the middle of the field, like…

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Bicycle Flea Market

Bicycle Flea Market! Wanna get rid of your old bike? You got a fancy two-wheeled gift but you already have three? Do you want to be charitable and help some bikepunks? Where? In the park Alppipuisto next to the bridge When? 28th of June Starting 6pm, open end Why? This year the Ecotopia Biketour starts in Helsinki! Since the trip to get there is long, many of us come without a bike or full equip(ment). So we need you and cheap fleamarket prices! What? You can bring anything Bike-related. Fully functioning bicycles are of course the most welcome. You can…

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The brand new ✨Ecotopia Orga Month✨

dear everyone! —- we have some good news! some of us will meet next month for several weeks to do orga work like contacting projects, making a more concrete route, gathering equipment, creating tour info material, discussing topics like conflict resolution, awareness, the whiteness of ecotopia biketour and much more. we will meet where last year’s tour started, in austria with some sweet friends of ecotopia. <3 —- wanna join us? anyone can come! but we ask you to tell us beforehand when and for how long you’d like to join us because the place has limited capacities. we’ll then…

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Tall Bike Tour

At the end of August 2018 I built a Tall Bike and cycled it 250km from Copenhagen to Växjö, to start my studies. Here’s a spoken word-esque account.     Bike touring by yourself on a tall bike (with no spare parts and minimal tools) is two things: 1. Astoundingly beautiful. 2. Existentially terrifying. I saw the tops of trees flickering copper, gold and crimson silver in the sun and happened upon a goth’s picnic on some forest roadside. They looked embarrassed for me, having heard me singing moments before. There was tarmac melted into long cracks in the road…

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Quest For Rocket Stoves

With the skies above our camping place threatening rain and thunder and with two days left before we were to leave Edinburgh, the heart of the bike tour was missing. The heart of the bike tour is an ugly-mangled thing. We crouch beside it at night, offering up endless twigs and sticks, blowing on it our hopes for hot food. The heart of the bike tour is a rocket stove. It is made from a large oil drum, piping and insulation. We had two vegetable oil drums, found at the back of a restraunt. We still needed to find some…

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DIY Panniers

When you travel with your bicycle it is useful to be able, to carry your stuff on your bike instead of your back. Therefore you can get some expensive bags, that are made for that purpose, or you build something yourself!! In general, there is 2 options: Either you make something that hooks on your rack. Or you have a construction that allows you to easily attatch your backpack or whatever other things you have to transport. For the first option, you can either look for exisiting bags and add some hooks that they can hang on your rack: It…

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DIY Front Rack

It’s often useful to have plenty of loading options on your bike. So when you find loads of food in the dumpsters for example, you can easily take some and be a bit independent from trailers. It is actually pretty easy to attach a rear rack to the front of your bike. Rear racks can be very easily found in any bike kitchen. You just have to figure out the right size, that it doesn’t touch the wheel. If it messes with your mudguard, you can also just remove it. The front mudguard anyways doesn’t do much. You need to…

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