FI or bust; FBeyer.

Where are you and where are you going?
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FBeyer
Posts: 1069
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 3:25 am

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

@Jacob
Aaaah.... If only I was interested in photochemistry while working for this group of photochemists/photophysicists, then that would make perfect sense. :)

I've mentioned this before; I was hired specifically because my interests are very different from those of the rest of the group. My project was intended to bridge as much as possible between the Physics department and the Mathematics department. Our technique is only a few years old, I'm becoming a 2nd gen pioneer in this field so most of the work that needs to be done is to figure out what other disciplines have done in similar circumstances and to find out how many of their assumptions are valid in our case as well.
In other words: The rest of the groups attends photochemistry conferences, I'm tasked with statistics, information theory, and optimization, and try to communicate with the mathematics department as much as possible.

We honestly don't know what conferences to send me to right now, because we know everyone else in our field and none of them do anything remotely like what I was hired to do. I'm attached to this group like a trawl on a dinghy in stormy weather[1], the crew is trying to navigate best as they can, and I'm trying to find out if there a nutritious species of fish so we can feed the crew. Sending me off to a star reading conference is counter productive when I need to get better at spearing eels.






[1] Also, I'm practising my metaphors, I hope you found it smile-worthy :)

jacob
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by jacob »

A couple of years ago, I worked with a couple of molecular biologists. I like to refer to it as cancer research because it was somehow linked to cancer growth (and a bunch of other stuff) at the molecular/enzyme level. It started with them sending me some notes for an analytical solution of 3 PDEs. It was 10+ of handwritten notes manually solving for eigenvalues and plugging everything in. They want to know if I could give them a similar solution for for 4 coupled PDEs.

So we all get on a skype conference: professor, asst prof, and retired bum with a quant hobby.

I tell them that in astro we usually solve this stuff numerically and that back in my time, I was dealing with 300-600 variables in up to 2000 PDEs at a time; that doing this by hand would introduce the possibility of countless of errors and that even if an analytical soution was technically possible, what they really wanted was a numerical solution and that I could write such a code for them. (I had done so previously during my year of confusion in phd school ... turned out that the code was practically useless because it was slow as fuck (object oriented fortran :shock: :? ) but I did know everything that went into it).

I was then frustratingly trying to convey to them the idea of mass conversation and numerical leaks. This is highly important in explosive nuclear physics. They didn't get it. Conversely, I didn't get what they were talking about because my bio knowledge is frankly on par with a 9th grader. If was only after a subsequent 1 on 1 with the younger guy doing some handwaving show and tell that I understood how enzyme reactions differ from beta decays and proton captures.

So I made the code for them. Quick and dirty. Showed them how to work it and generalize it. The technology level was astrophysics year 1975 or so. However, for molecular biology, the technology level was out of the future or something. I'm told that they almost had tears in their eyes when they computed concentrations on the screen matched what they intuitively expected but had never seen before.

Doing interdisciplinary work first and foremost requires knowing a lot of _different_ people and also knowing a lot of _different_ 'knowledge' (structured/contextual information). You have to know what the problems are in other fields and equally important, these guys have to know that you might be the one capable of solving them. In the above example, they contacted me. Me knowing how to solve it so quickly was mostly due to the previously wasted time in building a full solver back as a first year student.

In particular, if you're going to build bridges, I think you have to be interested in everything. I especially think that some rudimentary experience is even better than knowing people which again is better than just reading a book.

PS: If you had been the first to apply SVD to financial products around the year 2000, you could have made A LOT of money. That would have required some interest in finance around that time and the connections to financial people. A lot of this is serendipitous, and serendipity is contingent on volatility, i.e. making stuff happen all the time with as many different connections (people, problems, ...) as possible.

FBeyer
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

It's about a year ago I joined the forums so I figured I'd do a run-down of what 2016 has been like (if you want all the details you can go through the last 6 months worth of posts, they're pretty salty, this post will be too as a consequence thereof) I'll post something much more enlightening ASAP, I just need to finish building some stuff around the house you'll have some DIY carpentry to look at then.


MONEY:
Savings rate (first time talking about actual expenses in this journal) is 65.1% for the preceding year. My current pay is slightly below national median wage.
Investments are up more than 10% since middle of May. National index down by a few percent.
Looking to expand the global indexing strategy with hand-picked dividend stocks.
Looking to expand into real estate flipping at some point in the not-too-distant future.


SHIT REEL HIGHLIGHTS:
GF had heart-issues and got hospitalized. She's still being treated for severe stress AND a depression.
We moved house. House is great, construction and circumstances around construction were horrible.
PhD project has been sabotaged/crashed repeatedly. I've mentioned this to my supervisor and he acknowledges the shit I've been through and that the 'help' I've been given in making this project right has been completely insufficient. We're on track to something improved (maybe) so we'll see how it pans out.
Grandmother died.
My daughter hasn't been taking well to mommy being 'indecisive' and daddy being brusque... understandably so.

It's not all shit, but some major things have happened which have stirred me quite a bit. The rest of this rather long post is about dealing with this, and how I need to deal with how I deal with this in the future.


ON COPING STRATEGIES:
There is a joke about a European student and an American student both at a lecture, and neither of them understand the lecture they're attending.
The European thinks to himself: I don't understand a word of this, I wonder what I'm doing wrong?
The American thinks to himself: I don't understand a word of this, I wonder what the professor is doing wrong?

I've taken the European approach too far by now. My basic assumption when something doesn't make sense to me is that I need to learn something new to understand why this thing in front of me seems b0rken. It's not being timid, I don't assume I am wrong per se, it's rather being intensely inquisitive towards myself as well as others and being extremely willing to work with a malleable thought universe.
As a rule, questioning yourself first might not be a good approach but...

I decided to try and make a budget for my brain power; to get an idea about what I'm doing with my brain. You know, just to get an idea of why I'm so low on surplus currently and it seems to relate back to my coping strategy when I'm feeling overwhelmed. In the last year I've read the following books:

>> Investment Literature
The Intelligent Investor
The intelligent asset allocator
All About Asset Allocation
How to Own the World

>> Other Finance
The Four Pillars of Investing
Your Money or Your Life
The Economy Explained - Heilbroner & Thurow
Fail Safe Investing
The Dhando Investor
Real estate investing gone bad
15 pct

>> Work related; Machine Learning, Stats and Math
Multivariate statistics (entire book)
Elements of Statistical Learning (Almost entire book)
Introduction to General and Generalized Linear Models (Madsen & Thyregod, entire book)
countless articles on time resolved XFEL x-ray science, photochemistry, stats, cross correlation analysis, photospectroscopy.


>> Self-help, didactics, and Psychology
Early retirement extreme (several times)
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (several times)
Mindfulness (again)
A Life worth living - essays on Positive Psychology
Nudge
Mindset; the new psychology of success.
Clutterfree with Kids
Simplify your life
transform you life with one powerful question
A Mind For Numbers
Thinking, Fast and Slow
What everyone should know about supper efficient learning
how to study as a mathematics major

>> Fiction
Count of Monte Cristo
Gods of Risk
The Martian
Gone Girl

>> Other
Enter The Kettlebell
Never work again; work less, earn more.
The Idle parent
How to talk so children will listen, and listen to children will talk.
How children learn (John Holt; you self-important know-nothing...)
Work Less, Achieve More.
Job Free
Simplify
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree world
Center of Gravity

>> Other
Almost all of Victor Lavrenkos YouTube channel on Machine Learning and stats
Daily visits and contributions to stats.stackexchange.com

And these are just the books I actually read-read. I have several others where I simply skimmed some chapters...
Add to that any and every topic covered on the ERE forums from: polyamory, to van-dwelling, stock picking, ecology, cooking, bicycle repairs, diets, fasting, social capital, climate change, craftsmanship (I've been watching a lot of youtube videos on carpentry lately. ALMOST makes me miss my old job until I remembered what actual industrial carpentry looks like), gardening, you name it.
Then I came across Dave Brubeck's Time Series albums and I have been binge-listening his music. To those unfamiliar with the Time albums: all songs are played in unfamiliar time signatures. I believe Dave (and Desmond too, if you ask me) pioneered what a lot of people take for granted today, ie jazz is played in time signatures like 7/8, 7/4 and 11/4. So not only am I poring over books, I'm overloading my entire sensory apparatus with music is cooky time signatures[1].


But my continuous search for interesting things to poke a stick at is taking me places where I'm not currently really fit to go.

Jennypenny made an astute observation some time ago: Some people sort information in the order they receive it. If new information doesn't conform to what is already in their heads, they reject this new information immediately. Other people try to find out where new information best fits with their current knowledge and then tries to jiggle their ideas around to adjust to the new piece of information. Naturally the latter approach needs a defragmentation from time to time. The former approach is called being a god damn fucktard; don't be like that.

The little elf that lives inside my head is so vastly overburdened with things he needs to label under 'new' and things that needs to go in the right spot that there is most likely stack overflow. But the JIT compiler(AKA the elf) hasn't noticed that we've run out of working memory and so it all looks like jumbled shit to him. There is no cache coherency any more, every piece of information has to be meticulously retrieved from the hard drive and tagged all over again every time I sit my ignorant ass down and try to learn something new. Mentally I'm trashing(computer science).

By now it's rather obvious that on top of everything else I've done in the preceding year which includes: moving, having a small child in the terrible two/threes, a GF who got put on sick leave and anti-depressant meds, and a PhD that is a total train wreck that only people much smarter than me are able to make something out of, I've decided to go completely crazy on reading as a coping mechanism. It makes sense in some pathological way really. If I truly consider myself the agent of my existence I should be able to manufacture and control my existence and my own happiness; I just left out the part where I use my agency to not give a fuck and let go.

Either way, I think maybe 40 books in a year as stressful as this one is a tad too much.

In any case I'm not really certain all that reading made me smarter measured by the capacity to DO something that I wasn't able to do before, as much as it has made me able to question things and put new perspectives on things I haven't been able to before. The effect of this learning has naturally been an insane amount of introspection based on all these new ideas. But since the elf is still frantically busy trying to tie all this together, none of it makes sense in a manner where it comes naturally, the new knowledge has not been assimilated and made a natural part of my existence yet. It still bounces around inside my skull. That is naturally a recipe for disaster when my coping strategy is to read even more. Thus, life lesson learned: Learn by DOING and evaluating performance, not by assimilating disjoint theoretical knowledge.

My current behaviour is actually scoring very high on a test for adult ADD... I'm that fucked up. That, or I truly have ADD and the PhD just brought out the worst of my character.
One hour's work is enough to fuck me up for the rest of the day, to the point where I'm incapable of following a spoken conversation and reading anything -even simple recipes- takes tremendous effort. The last couple of entries in this journal could then very well serve as an interesting point of study concerning mental instability. What does the world look like to someone who is slowly becoming unable to handle any more requests; Stack Overflow in humans if you will.

One of the few things where I have never cared one iota is about what other people think of me, and neither have I cared about other people's success. So when I suddenly found myself envious, I had to consider it a big red flag. The two things that has NEVER happened in my life unless I was truly, utterly, fucked are: Being inefficient at work, and being envious.
And now I found myself annoyed at people on the ERE forums for their apparent success/capabilities or knowledge. Seriously? Envy? Off to the doctor you go, you silly little man, something's really really wrong with you!


ILLNESS

So I went to see the doctor.

And now: Holy shitting dick-nipples (that's a googable phrase by the way, I don't recommend it though) boy, I've been diagnosed with a rather severe depression!
But... It didn't -and still doesn't- feel like depression to me. Not quite. Actually, it feels absolutely nothing like I've come to expect depression would feel like. As I wrote elsewhere in this journal, the Sharpe ratio of my happiness is off, but I don't feel like I'm incapacitated, there is simply a tremendous variation in my mood and thought-patterns. The whole bed-ridden-drapes-drawn-incapabable-of-getting-dressed kind of depression is no where near how I'm feeling. None the less, it's supposedly quite severe.

Turns out that often depression does not manifest itself as some degree of sadness/inability to function but rather as a rather specific incongruence of thoughts as a consquence of faulty brain chemistry. The chemistry was known to me, but not the actual symptoms. The feeling of going nowhere while I have in fact managed to get an insane amount of shit done in the preceding year is testament to this faulty functioning. I'm thus not crippled but able to function and get some things done, although working on the PhD is not one of them.

I can function in social settings where all I have to do is run my yap and crack jokes. If something requires thinking, even basic thinking, it's taxing. Letters become blurred when reading from a piece of paper unless I actively tell my brain that it needs to read now. It feels almost like pulling on an old farmhouse pump; keep working at it and the text will flow, but I need to actively balance the act.
Luckily depression meds are surprisingly inexpensive (the shrink not so much), but taking the first pill was a major hurdle.
I literally sat on my kitchen table for 15 minutes and stared down into that little innocently looking box of tiny pills. The box itself is only about 10 cms deep but it felt as if I was about to dive into the Mariana trench wearing only a snorkel and I was sitting on the boat railing staring into the abyss. I have always been supremely confident in my own agency (rather than my abilities) and admitting that I probably need chemical help to move on is rather humiliating actually. I can see though that a lot of my usual coping mechanisms are exactly what they should be ie exercise, Information diet, eating healthy, journaling to get shit out of my head, no self-medication with alcohol, taking walks, and meditation. I do know exactly what I want to talk with the psychologist about, so as usual, I have a plan...

None the less, I can't stop thinking although I really should.


SO NATURALLY:
I've been thinking even MORE!

I'm getting a sick leave from the job and the knowledge alone has already freed up working memory.
Now I need to learn to direct and conserve my energy.

The last three/four days introspection have been rather interesting and I have a gut feeling that being treated for depression could be an insanely rewarding experience in the long run.
I've been given a leave from work and now I think I should find out who I am, find back to who I were, and who I am going to be in the future. I'm actually rather excited about the prospect, although the depression stigma still feels incredibly weird to me.

This is not at all what I imagined depression feels like. I guess I still have much to learn...


Quote of the Day:
We do not rise to the level of our hopes but fall to the level of our training.
[1] In case you'd like to skip directly to the good stuff:

Eleven Four (11/4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60WB6Aepxmc
(in case you need help counting try counting 123 12 123 123) You'll only ever hear Desmond improvising over this, because he's the only one who could figure out who to do it in 11/4.

Waltz Limp (3/4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3jWS_3RNFs

Blue Rondo a la Turk (7/8): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlVasHbipo

Far More Blue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snFKf08ziNE

Shim Wha: https://youtu.be/wlRsvurx3UI?t=8m43s

steveo73
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Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2013 6:52 pm

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by steveo73 »

FBeyer - that was an extremely interesting post with a tonne of different information in it. It sounds like you've had some tough times.

halfmoon
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Joined: Mon Nov 07, 2016 10:19 pm

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by halfmoon »

FBeyer wrote: I have always been supremely confident in my own agency (rather than my abilities) and admitting that I probably need chemical help to move on is rather humiliating actually. I can see though that a lot of my usual coping mechanisms are exactly what they should be ie exercise, Information diet, eating healthy, journaling to get shit out of my head, no self-medication with alcohol, taking walks, and meditation.
I completely understand your struggle. There's such a stigma around depression and the medications to treat it, and it's doubly difficult for someone who takes pride in powering through every difficulty. It's a medical condition and not a weakness of character. Our brains are full of chemicals produced and processed by our bodies; sometimes this goes haywire due to age or genetics or medical factors. Intelligent, informed supplementation of the missing or malfunctioning chemicals isn't inherently "unnatural" any more than other medical interventions, vitamins or herbal supplements.

I went through a period of serious depression, and it didn't take the form of shades-drawn lying in bed either. It was more like frantically running on a treadmill that just kept speeding up. The appropriate SSRI made all the difference. It didn't change the stressors in my life, but it allowed me to assess and address them without the panic undertone. One caution: after your panic dissipates, you'll start thinking that you don't need the meds. Maybe this works for some, but in my case it was not good.

This was a very moving post. Thank you for sharing it.

George the original one
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Location: Wettest corner of Orygun

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by George the original one »

+++ Blue Rondo a la Turk is most favored!

Isabel
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by Isabel »

FB-eyer, I would advise you to read some books on nutrition-lifestyle. There is a lot of research that depression is actually an outcome of dysfunctional gut microbiome.

best book on general nutrition and lifestyle is Art de Vany´s "Evolutionary Fitness".

Google microbiome and gut microbiome to learn something about it. For example there are studies that people with some psychiatric conditions have more often an infection with toxoplasma gondii. Previously there was opinion that toxoplasma gondii altered brain only in mice (mice infected with toxoplasma "want" to be eaten by cat) but apparently it has effects also on humans.

Jason

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by Jason »

You seem like one of those Beautiful Mind guys. Which is a complimentary way of saying you're crazy, but you seem to know that so at least you are on top of it. It appears a lot of you are overly smart and crazy. At least you're helping each other out.

I don't think I'm smart enough to be crazy, but I have OCD and I also over read. My office looks like the stock room of Barnes and Noble. I vowed not to buy another book until I read everyone even though I'm eyeing one on the Holocaust and the Pastor's role in The Revolutionary War which is a whole other story.

You need to pray. One minute at a time. I don't know what time is, but you can break it down which helps. I had a shrink who used to remind me to ask myself is it so awful/terrible/horrible. And I would say yes. And then he would say, on a scale of 1 to 10. Then I realized everything is not necessarily a 10. Which is good. So I did my own version of 1-10.

10- Losing a loved one (has happened to me)
9 - Losing a limb (not happened)
8 - A loved one losing a limb (my uncle had the decision of having his foot amputed or dying and he chose dying, butI never understood what he was saying and I hated my aunt so he really doesn't count).
7 - Losing a job (has happened)
6- Losing a lot of money (has happened)
5 - Car being hit (seems to happen every year, as a matter of fact);
4 - Being around my brother in law's douchebag best friend (Not recently)
3 - Not finding something on Netflix (all the time);
2 - Rain (all the time)
1 - Loud noises (not so frequent)

You can obviously do your own. Prioritize your misery. It works.

FBeyer
Posts: 1069
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 3:25 am

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

Recieved my first dividend ever on Feb. 10th.[1]
1130$ post tax. (edit: POST tax, not pre tax)
It's a very satisfying feeling to get money for doing 'nothing'. As in: Very very satisfying! I didn't even have to sell anything to get the money. From now on, consider me the kind of person who likes receiving dividends and interest.

[1] I don't know why dividends are only paid out once per year. Psychologically I think it would feel better to receive dividends every month, on the other hand I'm looking at a much larger pile of money when it all arrives at once.
Last edited by FBeyer on Sat Feb 18, 2017 10:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

jacob
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by jacob »

@FBeyer - It's a Danish (European) tradition to pay dividends only once per year and pay an amount that management decides on a discretionary basis based on some hand-waving arguments about profit. A few companies pay twice and a rare few pay four times a year---generally only if they have strong connections to the US (like ADRs). In the US dividend payers almost always pay 4 times per year; almost always the same very predictable amount or one that's slightly higher, but NEVER lower. If a US company fails to pay a dividend "on time" or reduces its dividend the market reaction is immediate, adverse, and strong. There are a few companies in the US that pay monthly. There are many funds (especially income based funds) that pay monthly.

FBeyer
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

Bullet point journal update; trying to spend less time in front of the computer at the moment.




I built a three-legged table for our very uneven patios.

Repaired the water butt.

Fixed the outdoor spigot.

Fixed up closet under the stairs.

Finished building the closet in the bedroom.

Tore out two rose bushes from the garden to make room for a square meter garden and to make it easier to mow the lawn.

Built shelves for the patio.

Made a small shelf that hides all the wires from the computer/monitor/stereo

Hosted a meetup on rennasisance ideals and systems thinking

started researching how to make a square meter garden (land is not plotted and I've found a way to acquire totally free construction materials for the three beds)

Stopped buying anything but a very few handpicked stocks and I'm saving money in cash until I have three to four years expenses. Not only as FU money but also in case I want to get in on investing in an apartment-flip somewhere. I have friends who flip apartments and they know I want in on the deal so hopefully there will be a phone call sometime soon.

I built a small cupboard for my desk to hide the stereo books, paper and stuff.

My daughter found a piece of rope and gave it to me as a gift, so taking that as a sign I'm now learning knots, latches and hitches.

Doing presses for reps with the 24kg kettlebell. Got bored yet again and started a pullup/pushup program to help my pitiful pullups and my non-existent pecs grow. Doing pullups from a soccer goal post.

I still can't read anything marginally complex due to the illness so I'm all about doing rather than reading at the moment.

We're eating almost exclusively vegetarian now and I'm experimenting with all sorts of textures and flavours so we're eating a lot of 'Buddha Bowls' at the moment where we're basically eating five kinds of veggies with five kinds of taste and texture. Then we pile on cheese and/or parsley and it's all good. Basically it's a vegetable playground that looks very Instagram-like when it's done. I'm buying new oils and vinegars every week and our food budget has never been this small...

I can't read new things, but I can relate to things I already fundamentally understand so I've started writing one of the two books I wanted to publish (see this topic's OP). So far it's about 120 A5 pages long and I might only be halfway through. The book, as opposed to 90 percent of my posts here, actually gets edited and proofread.

I built a prowler from excess construction crap we had laying around after we moved in. Last time I took it for a run I sat my daughter on the prowler, gave a her a bun to eat while I pushed it, and told her to tell me to always go faster. I had to lie on the couch for 10 minutes before I was no longer dizzy. Wooden prowler skids on rough asphalt makes for a lot of friction it seems...

I disassembled the headset on one of my bikes. Bearing we're terrible rusted so I need to figure out how to get new, and correct, bearings so I can get my old wonderful summer bike up and running again.

I switched out the main chainring on one of my single speed cycles. The teeth were so worm that the chain skipped completely when my right foot was in front. The new chainring is getting worn incredibly fast. I can't tell whether the chainring a P.O.S. or if my chain is somehow worn or misaligned with regards to a new chainring.

Playing Overwatch (somewhat good at it) and Offworld Trading Company (very bad at it. Amazing econmic RTS game though. I think a lot of ERE's would like it).

I've set up a very effective gratitude anchor in the form of a posh tea cup, a wooden saucer and a spoon (yes, srsly like what like m'kay) that helps me focus on what I need to be doing rather than what I tend to think I should be doing. Some day when I'm more in the mood for posting I might elaborate on how that's supposed to work.

I take cold showers now.

A lot of walks in 'nature' means that I am now slowly learning the names of most of the spring plants around me. I might have learned to recognize some 10-20 plants I didn't know the names of before.

Next up: vermicomposting, compost piles, square meter gardening, sourdough bread and actual bike repair. My Pashley Guv'nor (it's a bicycle too) has screeching and inefficient braking at the moment. I need to figure out how to disassemble and maintain drum brakes.

Eureka
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by Eureka »

Your list of bullet points looks just like the life one can/will/should live after early (or later) retirement. So much activity and so much diversity. Good you were given the opportunity and that you take advantage of it.

And already half way through writing a book? That is something! Maybe you could illuminate a little more about it? I just skimmed your OP for details but wo success.

PS I hope for another meetup on renaissance ideals and systems thinking and am rather curious how the discussion went.

jacob
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by jacob »

Bring the old bearing (bearing race) down to the bike shop. They're pretty standard, so they should have a replacement in the repair shop.

If the chain ring dies that quickly, it's almost surely the chain which has stretched beyond repair. You can measure it easily with a fancy tool or not so easily with a ruler. Or just bring the chain down to the shop too and they can measure it. http://www.parktool.com/product/chain-w ... tor-cc-3-2

Earlybath
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by Earlybath »

I think singlespeeds wear from the freewheel -> chain -> chainring, so measure your chain and check your freewheel. I replace the freewheel and chain together and haven't worn out the chainring in 20 years.
OTH I've had chainrings on an mtb that wore like tin foil, until I swapped it for a stainless steel one.

FBeyer
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Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 3:25 am

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

So there are actually a little bit of pictures that go with the checklist above.

I forgot about the image size restrictions, so of course I uploaded a shit ton of images to Photobucket (which is a POS site) only to realize that none of them would load here.



This following link should point to an album with some associated images. If the images aren't sorted properly, sort them so they show the oldest first and you can click on the first image and read/browse your way through. Some of the images are kind of linked so the text makes a bit more sense that way.

Enjoy.
Background music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snFKf08ziNE
Images:
http://s377.photobucket.com/user/fbeyer ... t=2&page=1

cmonkey
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by cmonkey »

Imgur lets you resize as you upload and is much quicker/reliable.

FBeyer
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

Imgur it is then... Thanks.

halfmoon
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by halfmoon »

I looked at the images on photobucket...though without the background music :P. The under-stair cabinets are so beautiful and functional that they make me wish we had space under our stairs to do this (instead of another stairway). I think you have a potential new career.

FBeyer
Posts: 1069
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 3:25 am

Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by FBeyer »

halfmoon wrote:
Tue May 16, 2017 6:56 pm
... I think you have a potential new career.
Thank you, I guess working for five years as a carpenter actually paid off then :P

Also: Who wouldn't listen to Dave Brubeck while browsing feel-good images? What kind of person ARE you?????

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fiby41
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Re: FI or bust; FBeyer.

Post by fiby41 »

jacob wrote:
Sat May 06, 2017 9:18 am
If the chain ring dies that quickly, it's almost surely the chain which has stretched beyond repair. You can measure it easily with a fancy tool or not so easily with a ruler. Or just bring the chain down to the shop too and they can measure it.
Run a string over it, mark or tie a knot where it comes through, remove the string & lay out straight along a ruler and measure the length of string instead. Or you could cut the string when it starts to overlap and then measure it.

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