lol, you said the ups store was right down the street.
Yeah but it’s 55* out so my 5 mile commute became a 15 mile commute lol.
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where are you? is this the corridor west of clybourn and north of north? it looks very open and im gonna ride that home if yes
Yes, Kingsbury N of Cortland. Ends at Webster basically, and is the northern end of the Great River/Clybourn-Adjacent Backstreet Passage that used to begin at Ward A Montgomery Park.
Not sure whether you can still bike through the Chicago Ave bridge house or the gravel parking pit next to the substation at Halsted/Division but that was my sneaky route out of the loop when I did that.
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Yeah, that’s the old Finkle & Sons steel site. Future site of Extremely Expensive Luxury Condominiums!
Here’s the route I rode:
RIP Coyote colonies
Omg the last one 
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he not bulky
he just a little chonk
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Please post that last one in cat chat so I can like it a second time.
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That basket full of La Croix was a wild ride I’ll bet
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I’m still kinda shocked how well low-trail geometry on the VO Polyvalent handles the big loads like these. Also I had @Orc use stouter tubing on the custom rack so its a pretty rock solid ride even when I start approaching CycleTruck level grocery loads. Thinking back to my early experiments with vintage treks and a VO porteur rack with long stays and remembering how it frequently felt like a death trap when I started to approach any substantial weight.
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Long basket stays are so sketchy.
They’ve got to be either pretty stout or well triangulated. I’ve gotten away with 10x10 racks with quarter inch stays down to the dropouts (and by gotten away with I mean I’ve carried 50 pound loads on the rack without it arguing with me about whether or not I really want to turn), but I make the crown stays fairly stout no matter what.
I’m starting to feel sketched out by the m5 bolts holding all the weight. Anyone ever go bigger? M6? M8?!? Or should the rack just be welded/glued to the fork at that point?
real engineers feel free to teach me something if i have this wrong. i love learning about this kind of thing but am merely an armchair engineer who has dealt with a lot of bolts on bikes in a fleet setting where patterns emerge.
at a certain point you make a bolt too big. it’ll be strong in shear but you won’t be able to actually get it tight enough- if it doesn’t stretch, it doesn’t clamp and it wants to loosen. oversized bolts are one of the more common causes of bolted joint failure. you’re trying to hold the thing up with clamping force, not with the bolt itself.
m6 would probably be okay for some stuff but m8 is certainly pushing it. a m8 stainless bolt should be torqued to 20some nm, and any type of alloy steel is going to be more like 30+
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I have a Wald giant basket, and every time I really loaded it up, it would get pretty unruly. I suppose stouter stays and geometry could help but I dunno. I always felt like the basket must have been designed to carry cotton candy or something.
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Definitely had my share of pucker inducing moments with a loaded up Soma eco porteur rack. Scary wiggly. Adding two more mounting points to the fork with Surly rack hardware and p-clamps made a huge difference.
What were y’all doing with long strut racks that aren’t cetma? I put full size humans on that thing!