Phew. Slow to pick this series back up this year for obvious and non-obvious reasons.

When I started this build, the wheels were the most intimidating part of the work. That’s not to say that the rest is trivial, but with the biggest unknown behind me, it’s slightly downhill from here.

In my next working session I managed to install the brake calipers, brake rotors, and the handlebar.

This was a year of substantial subterranean change with minor surface-level manifestations.¹

Trends

I listened to a lot more music in 2025 than I did any year since 2015 (with one exception: 2021).

I listened to fewer podcasts.

The Storygraph tells me that I read the same number of books in 2025 as I did in 2024 (I abandoned a couple in 2024 though, and none in 2025) and the number of pages is about 200 fewer in 2025.

All of this was pretty much as intended, so I call it all a success.

I like my job

It feels so weird to say this. In the world that we live in, in the year 2025 anno Domini, I feel the kind of self-consciousness I’d feel if I was announcing to the world that I won a billion dollars in the lottery. It feels like a huge brag with a not-insignificant amount of guilt for having something so good when so many other people don’t. All of us should be doing jobs we like. All of us should be working for employers who don’t treat us, or make us feel, like disposable wipes. All of us should be working in enterprises whose incentives are not so brutally misaligned with what’s good for human beings. The current situation is so deeply inhumane.

That said — I do like my job, a lot. In 2023 I joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and I will likely stay at the institute for as long as there is a job to stay for. The Allen Institute sometimes seems too good to be true: a well-funded non-profit whose mandate is to do complicated, expensive bioscience research and then share it publicly for free. No profit margins, no ARPU, no ad tech. Just people showing up every day to help the world understand cell science, immunology, and the brain, and cure neurodegenerative diseases without charging anyone for it. I mean damn, I did win the lottery.

Seattle

I still live here, and I still feel like I don’t belong.

Sunny Side Up

I guess I should come clean and admit that as I write this, Sunny Side Up is fully built and operational. The blog posts are lagging behind because they are a lot of work to make. The bike itself rode like a dream for all of 40 km before I tried something stupid and broke my foot. In my defense, I lacked sufficient information to determine that what I was about to attempt was in fact stupid, but in any case 100% my fault 0% Sunny’s fault. It’s already been two months and I need to wait one more before it’s not risky to ride my bike outdoors again.

Bicycles remain the most effective grass-touching tonic for the dark days and weeks of the soul I sometimes go through.

I officiated a wedding

If you think you are immune to the emotional impact of the words “by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you…”, think again.

In September I traveled to Kansas City, MO to officiate the wedding of two close friends. They were smart enough to ask me back in March, which was far enough from September that my anxiety was not greater than my desire to do something meaningful for my friends and I said I would do it. What did I know about officiating a western wedding? Basically nothing. I got ordained sometime in July and started preparing in earnest a month later. Like some things in life, this is the kind of experience that is as rewarding as the amount of forethought and preparation you put into it. In the end I was very happy with what I said to the couple and how the whole ceremony went. Most importantly, I think my friends were very happy too.

Year of Linux on the desktop

If that joke got any more tired it would quite positively be dead.

But. 2025 was the year of Linux on the desktop for me. I haven’t owned a personal laptop in years. Earlier this year I was visiting a professor at my grad school alma mater and saw a strange, tiny laptop connected to a display and peripherals on his desk and decided to get one to try it out for myself. Frankly its origin makes it somewhat suspect and I use it with a certain degree of paranoia, but I did what I could and then installed Arch Linux + Hyprland. Whereas my many prior experiments with Linux over the years were breathtakingly brief, this one stuck. I’ve been using it to do Real Things for a few months now.

Linux always set the gold standard of the “batteries not included” experience in computing, and while more things work out of the box now than they used to, the spirit definitely lives on. Basic things like audio output and brightness control, screen locking, timer-based sleep and suspension, even setting a desktop wallpaper, all need libraries to be installed and configuration to be set.

A couple of weeks ago a story was making the rounds about a person whose Apple account was deactivated after they tried to redeem an Apple gift card that was tampered with (?).

The question mark in the parentheses is the reason why this story is a scary story instead of a nothing story. The scary thing about something like this happening with any of the providers of walled digital gardens is there’s a very good chance that you will be unable to speak to anyone who can do anything about the fact that you can no longer access your passwords and/or cloud storage and/or email and/or messages. That’s if you can speak to anyone at all. The only reason this got resolved five days later is the coverage the story got. If it were you or me, who knows. There is no shortage of stories on the web of people getting locked out of critical accounts from major tech companies and finding nothing but chat bots and dead ends to get help from.

So, in a I-never-thought-I-would-consider-this moment, I am rethinking my enmeshment in the remotely lockable fiefdoms of companies like Apple. Really it’s only Apple at this point. It’s really hard to give up the platform benefits: iCloud sync, passwords everywhere, Apple Pay everywhere, Messages everywhere, especially when I still have some trust that the company’s incentives are aligned with mine (mostly… for now). The hoops I jump through to get a file from my photo library to this Linux machine are legion, especially if I’m trying to be careful about what I install and enable. But it might be a situation where my initial investments accrue compounding interest over time. And more importantly — it’s fun!

Next year

Writing non-technical posts is working well for me, and I hope I do more of that next year.

This might change, but one way I will sense how well the year is going by how little screen time I have in my average day or average week. This will of course be difficult, and some activities like writing shouldn’t count towards that timer.

There was a lot of travel-for-others in 2025. My plan is to almost exclusively travel for me in 2026. My hope is all travel involves some kind of bike touring, domestic or international.

Life is short

Months ago I read a quote by Albert Camus in Emergent Strategy and it’s been the best kind of recurring intrusive thought ever since:

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

So really my main wish for you and for me is to stop waiting and let go of some shit in 2026. I wish for us to be free.

Ahhh. It’s been a shake or two of a lamb’s tail. Life. You know? Sometimes you love something and then it breaks your fifth metatarsal. ANYWAY. Wheels!

Okay so you need wheels. You can buy wheels. Many do. I’ve done it. There’s no shame in that. But sometimes you need to put the packet of Nescafé back down and go make yourself a good cup of pour over coffee.

So here I will talk about building your own wheel set. I had never built a wheel set before, but I wanted to try, and it was a lot of fun! Building wheels can get kind of addictive to the right personality type. And, I’m writing a blog post about building a bike and you’re here reading it. Sooo…

Tube, Steerer

The steerer tube is the tube that connects your handlebars to the two bottom blades that hold your wheel.

New forks will come with a steerer tube that is longer than almost anyone will need. Part of prepping your frame for your body and your components is to cut the steerer tube down to a proper size.

You will only need to do this for a new fork. Although I suppose you may want to do this if it’s been cut for someone else who needed more steerer tube up top than you.

I would’ve said that cutting your steerer tube is the ultimate one-way door in your frame prep, but guess what, there exist steerer tube extenders that will let you add on some height if you cut too much. That said… don’t put yourself in the position where you need to use one. There’s a lot of debate on their durability, and this is a part whose failure can be quite catastrophic for your corporeal being. If you will buy one, buy a good one.

Also note that a common recommendation is to not remove every millimeter of steerer tube you think you don’t need. If you think you might sell your bike one day, then the less steerer tube left on your fork, the fewer the number of bodies your frame will fit. Also, your body can change. If you want to keep your bike forever, your body might¹ get less flexible with age or lifestyle changes, and you might want to raise your handlebars to a more comfortable position. Or, you could injure your back and might need a more relaxed posture on the bike for a few weeks or months.

On the opposing side of these very reasonable recommendations is an aesthetic argument (and isn’t it always). Having a bunch of leftover steerer tube over your stem is considered not a nice clean look by many. Unfortunately I am one of those many, so I tend to set my handlebars at a reasonably comfortable and conservative height, then lop off the remaining tube. No steerer over the stem.

The background

The head tube is the part of your frame where you install your headset. Just like a bottom bracket holds or contains your cranksets allowing them to rotate smoothly using bearings and a good fit, a head tube holds your steerer tube (the tube connecting your handlebars to your fork) in place while allowing you to turn the handlebars smoothly and without play.

And just like with bottom brackets, there are many headset standards. At a most basic level you need to know if your frame takes a threaded or threadless headset; the modern standard is mostly threadless, and that’s what my frame takes. Besides that, you need to know:

• The diameter of the steerer tube and whether it tapers. If it does, the diameter of the top headset cup will be different from the diameter of the bottom headset cup.
• The inner diameter of the head tube at the top. This determines the outer diameter of your top headset cup.
• The inner diameter of the head tube at the bottom. This determines the outer diameter of your bottom headset cup.

In my case, yet another reason to love the Crust Evasion frame is its use of a steel fork with a standard steerer tube diameter (1 1/8”) and therefore a very standard headset size: EC34/EC34 in SHIS terminology. I don’t want to mint bike laws that have too many exceptions to be directionally useful but: I think in general you have a higher chance needing components of common standard dimensions if you go with a steel road or gravel frame, and things start to get more rare and proprietary as you move to carbon bikes and mountain bike geometry.

Okay now we know about the head tube. What are we prepping again? You already know about facing. Reaming is the equivalent of chasing from the bottom bracket prep step. Since this is a head tube for a threadless headset, we don’t chase threads, we ream the inside of the tube to make sure it is round enough and has the correct diameter to match the headset meant for it.

Unlike with chasing the threads on a bottom bracket shell, there’s a good chance you don’t need to ream the head tube on a new frame, but you won’t know for sure until you try to install the headset and run into trouble. And unlike the low risk of gently threading and unthreading the bottom bracket, trying to press fit the headset into a head tube that is somewhat un-round could damage your headset cups. Sooo… I recommend you ream the head tube anyway.

1. Chasing and facing the bottom bracket shell.
2. Reaming and facing the headtube.
3. Cutting your steerer tube to size.

Not all of these are required, depending on the condition of your frame and the specific part being prepped. We’ll address each step in a dedicated post, so here I cover step 1: the bottom bracket.

Beware: There are things that you can try and mess up and try again when it comes to building your bike, the frame prep steps outlined here are not in that category. You can permanently damage your frame or fork doing these things. Do your research well, and ask for help from someone who knows better (like I did with step 1) to avoid sadness.¹

Chasing and facing the bottom bracket shell

“Chasing” is short for chasing the threads. This means using a tool to retrace and clean up the threads that are already cut into the shell.

There are many bottom bracket standards and not all of them use threads. If your frame has a press fit bottom bracket, you got nothing to chase.

You might need to do this if your frame is:

1. Brand new, or
2. Very used

First try to gently thread your bottom bracket into the shell. Please note the emphasis. If the threads of your bottom bracket are not meeting your bottom bracket shell with light/medium-light finger pressure, or if it threads in for a bit but then seems to get stuck, you probably need to chase the threads.

Why might this be needed on a new frame? I think it’s because the ED coating applied to the frame in the finishing stages goes in and over the threads, gunking them up just enough for them to not mate properly with the bottom bracket threads.²

“Facing” is shaving the edge, or face, of the bottom bracket shell to make it as straight and even as possible. This shaving usually removes some paint and a tiny amount of metal in order to achieve this evenness. You want that edge to be as straight and clean as possible for your bottom bracket cup to sit evenly against it, and I suppose if that doesn’t happen your bearings and maybe your spindle might wear out prematurely.

To build your bike, you need the frame, and you need components. There are many components to consider. Here’s a simple list in general order of front to back:

• Handlebars.
• Brake levers.
• Shifters: they might be integrated with the brake levers.
• Cables: brake, shift.
• Cable housing: brake, shift.
• Bar tape, or grips.
• Stem.
• Headset: this will also likely give you the stem cap.
• Spacers (if your headset is threadless).
• Front wheel, and all that makes that up: hub, spokes, rim, rim tape, tube, tire.
• Front brakes (if you’re not doing brake-less fixed gear).
• Bottom bracket.
• Crankset.
• Chainring(s).
• Front derailleur (if not a 1x setup).
• Pedals.
• Chain.
• Seatpost.
• Saddle.
• Rear wheel.
• Rear brakes (if you’re not doing brake-less fixed gear).
• Cassette (or fixed cog/single speed freewheel).
• Rear derailleur (if not a single speed setup).

There are more optional components that are not required for the bike to be ride-able, but you likely want for function or safety:

• Lights, front and back.
• Fenders.
• Racks.
• Bottle cage(s), bottles.
• A good bell (almost want to move this to the list of required parts).
• Bags: handlebar, frame, saddle, panniers, etc.

So how do you start? Do you have to have all your components chosen or in hand before you start, or can you acquire them as you build? The answers depend on a few factors that can make this easier or more difficult.

What kind of build?

This is a different question from “what kind of bike?” For example, you might want to do a parts bin build. If you want to use used or salvaged components then the acquisition can be unpredictable. Of course, in a post-2020 world the availability of new parts for a brand new build or a swanky build can also be unpredictable due to the concussion that 2020 was and the additional bruising caused by the aftereffects on the bike industry, geopolitics, tariffs, and basic common sense.

How standard are the components you have in mind?

Which is partially determined by how standard your frame is. The Evasion I chose is an example of a relatively standard frame: 73mm BSA bottom bracket, 1 1/8” steerer tube and a non-tapered head tube, pretty common hub spacing in the front (12 x 100mm) and rear (12 x 142mm), regular round 27.2mm seat post. All this means that you have a lot of options for components like headsets, handlebars, hubs, bottom brackets, and seat posts that are compatible with those specs.

A frame can be more challenging, and your preferences can add to that challenge. You might have a tapered head tube, or a frame that has a suspension fork or more suspension features. You might need a more-difficult-to-work-with bottom bracket or a proprietary seat post or weird seat post shape. On the preference side of things, you might really have your heart set on Campagnolo parts or certain vintage components that are a world unto themselves.

It helps to understand where your frame and preferred components sit on the standard:niche axis.

How particular are you about this build?

This interacts with the previous two questions. Within the options enabled by your frame and filtered by your preferences, how particular are you about details like color, finish, brand, condition? The more particular you are, the more patient you will have to be.

Inter-component compatibility

This is not a question, it’s a gentle warning. In addition to figuring out what you want out of each component, you will have to research compatibility between/among components, especially if you’re going for a parts bin build or mixing and matching between brands and types.

You want to use a specific crankset? What is the BCD? Is it compatible with the chainring you have in mind? What is the Q factor, is it compatible with the frame, the frame’s chainline, and your body? Is the chainring compatible with the chain that you have to choose to work with your cassette? Is the cassette compatible with your rear hub? Is the derailleur compatible with the cassette? Are your integrated levers compatible with the derailleur and cassette you want? Oh also are your levers compatible with the calipers you have in mind? And are the latter compatible with the frame mounts?

I’m not trying to scare you. If I figured this out, you can definitely figure this out. I’m just saying that you will want to do research as you collect your parts and get a sense for what your options are.

In fact, inter-component compatibility can be turned to your advantage! One of the things that can really help you with indecision is limiting your degrees of freedom. Narrowing down options makes choice easier (most of the time?) As you start connecting the dots between your components and eliminating options that just won’t work, your degrees of freedom will narrow and consequent choices will be easier.

Resources

Good news, the web is still alive as I write this, and bike enthusiasm and maintenance are topics that are not yet overrun with generative model slop. There are a lot of great resources out there.

Top recommendation has to be Park Tool Company YouTube channel. The videos are insanely excellent and almost every topic is either covered in a dedicated video or a Tech Tuesday video. I learned so much from that channel.

If you learn better from reading than watching, Sheldon Brown’s Home Page is the de facto bible of bike maintenance. It still looks like it’s from the 90s, and that’s a good thing.

Finally, I learned a lot from the component maker websites. If you’re working with relatively modern parts, chances are the specifications and compatibilities are documented somewhere, and those numbers are important to know and match between your parts.

Try to have more fun than tedium sourcing your parts, and find comfort in knowing that if you do this step well, this will be the most annoying part of the entire process. Next stop: frame prep.

Achtung! Achtung! This internet site will be about bikes for the next while.

I haven’t felt like writing about much lately.¹ I used to be excited by tech and technical projects, but that hit a wall around late 2022 / early 2023. Politics and civil society are… yeah. Yeah. A handful of my other interests were hit by the same wall that flattened my interest in tech. Much of it is coming back, slowly, but it’s been a struggle to connect with a lot of things that used to make me happy.

You know what never stopped making me happy though? Bikes. The simple bicycle. You go outside, you spin the legs, turn left, turn right, feel the wind on your face, stop for a coffee and a danish, and it feels like things just might be okay. At least they are okay right now.

n+1

An overdone joke in cycling circles is that the ideal number of bikes to have is n+1 where n is the number of bikes you own right now. Ha ha. It’s overdone, but it’s not a bad joke, because like a lot of good humor it’s based in truth.

Long story short: the other two built and operational bikes I have are both comfortable on paved road and light trails, but not on anything rowdier than that. With a maximum tire clearance of 35mm, the majority of bikepacking routes around where I live are simply not an option. Even when I rode the Olympic Discovery Trail the somewhat rocky segment near Lake Crescent (which I think belongs to the Olympic Adventure Trail) left me white-knuckling the steering of my loaded bike for what felt like hours but was probably just 20 minutes or something.² Not fun.

Given that bikepacking and touring are what I want most of my cycling in the foreseeable future to be about, the tire problem needed a solution. I explored the option of modifying one of my current bikes to take wider tires, but when the framemaker I consulted said that 40mm would be optimistic and 38mm likely, I didn’t even bother asking for a quote. The simplest mathematical solution then becomes: n+1.

Sunny Side Up

So I’m building a new bike around the Crust Evasion frame. It’s steel, which introduces the second law of bikes in today’s post after n+1: steel is real. It has the mother of all tire clearances, which I will exploit with a monstrous 27.5”/650B 2.6” wheel set, still leaving .2” of clearance I could’ve used. It has braze-ons everywhere you can imagine, so it will accommodate all the cargo and accouterments a cyclotouriste would want. And it’s set up for disc brakes with rocker dropouts that support geared or single-speed drivetrains. It’s perfect.

I like naming things. My other two bikes are Bowie and Dozer, the former because it’s a raw titanium finish with purple color streaks: strong Aladdin Sane vibes, and the latter because it’s a black Surly Steamroller and the thing does feel like a bulldozer in all the right ways. The Evasion is meant to be something different, something playful, colorful, dare I say something happy. And so it’s Sunny Side Up :)

Finally, I’m building the bike myself. It’s not the first time I’ve assembled a bike, but there are some things that I’ve had a bike shop do for me before that I’m learning how to do this time around.

And since a blog is obviously the first place someone would check when they want to research building a bike in 2025, the posts in this series will document the process in detail likely considered excruciating by the average reader. Have fun! I know I will.