Requirements

• Easy to put on and take off
• will spread lubricant evenly on the chain
• cost effective

The basic idea I came up with was to place a rag on the chain with oil flowing onto it at a slow rate, the oil would spread over the rag and onto the chain. This is how I built it.

I had intended to attach it either by using the rear stand thread but I didn’t have any bolts that size, but I found a piece of wood would very happily wedge into the swing-arm very tightly. I took an off cut, drilled a hole through it at 9mm then applied a piece of 10mm threaded rod to it (installed the thread into the wood very happily, the threaded rod was tightly stuck in there.

An ‘arm’ was needed to reach down to the chain, so another off cut was attached with a couple washers and bolts. This also meant I could adjust the angle to suit when on the bike.

Then I built the oiling base itself, I made two because the first one wasn’t large enough to be drilled again for the second rod. Basically its a small off cut with a 5m hole drilled in it for the hose.

Inserting the oil flow tube.

The “oiling system” is a folded up rag. I kept the rag and the block the width of the chain to keep the oil where it should be.

I used electrical tape to keep it on. Electrical tape works here because of its ability to stretch. whilst it doesn’t stick to the wood etc. It’s basically working like a rubber-band in this instance.

Its looking good here, but because I cant really attach it to anything I remade it slightly larger, The threaded rod is the second arm between the first and the base, I used threaded rod again so I could adjust the distance.

This is the full mount set. The small block on the right is the wedge for the swing arm, then there is the arm that goes down to the chain. Then the rod that goes inwards to the right distance to place the oiling block where it should be. Bolts for Africa to keep everything in place.

Installed on the bike:

I was a little surprised at how sturdy it is. you would expect with wood, tape, bolts, threaded rod, and something that’s just wedged into the swing-arm to be quite fragile, but its pretty solid.

At the other end of the tube is an adapter I had made earlier for a standard soft drink bottle. I drilled a hole that was 1m too small and  used a small off cut of another tube to make the base. some hot glue to seal and then inserted the smaller tube. I didn’t have any hose clamps handy so used some 20 gauge wire to make my own clamp sort of thing. works well

So now I have my oil input ready. for testing its just sitting in the pillion foot peg.

Ideally I will have a small, thin, seal-able tube that has a screw thread on both ends that I can use to put the right amount of oil in, and maybe it has a gauge so I can see how fast its draining etc. but for now; the top of a sprite bottle will do.

So I put some oil in the “reservoir” and let it flow through. the tube thickness and oil viscosity control the rate at which oil gets onto the chain. and it was flowing through the tube at about 1cm per second, which was perfect. The oil goes through the rag and onto the chain as expected. I am a bit slow here, I was too busy taking pictures and musing to start rotating the wheel which is why that small drop is on the bottom. the idea is you pour the oil in and go for a ride around the street to drain it. Today I just tilted the bike on the stand and manually rolled the wheel, this worked just as well.

Full system off the bike (excluding reservoir)

Overall, this was a resounding success. It does everything I wanted for very little cost (I had everything already) Its not too fragile, its not too bulky, and it actually works!

Possible improvements

• I would like a better ‘wedge’ system perhaps some sort of clamp that fits on the underside of the swingarm
• I should remake it with a better material than wood
• I need to build a better tube style reservoir

Project considerations

The first thing I needed was a new lens. I picked up a Macro Zoom Ring +10 Diopter from trademe for $15NZD which was pretty similar to this :

My budget point-and-click camera obviously couldn’t mount it so I needed to make some things….

First I needed to make a small extension tube for the lens, and some way of mounting it to the camera. Conveniently, the first thing I laid my hands on, the cap of a bottle of degreaser, just so happened to hold the lens quite snugly. I secured it with black electrical tape, and also wrapped the cap with it several times to block out the light. Then, I cut a hole in the top of the cap, around the size of the existing camera extension tubes so that it could fit snugly on there.

NB: Cutting through the plastic is much easier with the tape applied. It meants it doesn’t crack when cutting it.

To mount it to the camera, I built a small perspex base that attached to the bottom of the camera and extended forward so that I could attach the lens and its extension tube to it. When I attached the camera and placed the macro lens onto the mount, it seemed to hold itself in there quite well. (although I may add another bolt to secure it firmly…)

Now all I need to do is turn the camera on, the lens moves into the hole and I can take macro shots!

Now for some example shots…

I have worked on the Life of Riley comic code for a while and realised its a good base for anyone else to use for their own webcomic. its really simple and should be easy enough to modify to suit your webcomic with some simple HTML stuff.

Here it is on sourceforge

Here it is to download now

I have added on this version to include a basic mysql table to pull the titles out since they were not printed on the images, I recommend you print the comic titles (if you are naming them) on the images but if thats not feasible then here is the additional code to pull from a mysql database. it should be quite straightforward. I feed the request the $titleid which comes from the URL eg /comic.php?strip=1
mysql_connect('localhost or mysql.yourdomain.com','yourusername','yourpassword');
@mysql_select_db('databasename') or die( "err1");

$query="SELECT * FROM titles";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$title=mysql_result($result,$titleid,"title");

mysql_close();

Here is an SQL file of the table to get you started

The only major flaw is currently you need to update the end # of the comics if your comics list is dynamic, mine is static so it doesnt need to change.  a simple way of doing this could be instead of

comic.php

$lastcomic = "100";

create a new file called end.php which you update as you go

comic.php

//$lastcomic = "100"; commented out not useing this anymore
@include end.php;

end.php

$lastcomic = "616";

And now you can edit that end.php as you update. It would be much smarter to use Mysql for this as it would be a really simple call to find out the end but I wanted this comic to be flat and not to require SQL