Hasta La Ideas

Summer’s nearly upon us, and we here at Core77 will shortly spend a weekend at a cabin rental where we can sit outside and drink nice, frosty beer in between spirited bouts of wrestling. But there’s a design problem: While we can wrestle out in the woods as good as we can in the office, having cold beer outside means hauling up a cooler, keeping that cooler well-stocked with ice, and downing the beer faster than we’d like so it doesn’t go warm—and that accelerated boozing sometimes impacts the wrestling results. There’s gotta be a better way!

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Looks cool…

Move over, Rain Tail—there’s a new ultraminimal rear fender in town. The Plume is a recoiling mudguard that is deployed by unrolling the coiled strip of stainless steel and ‘retracted’ with a simple flick. The hardware slides neatly onto a bicycle seatpost and it looks something like a sideways cupholder when not in use, functioning something like a reverse slap-bracelet.

Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only

Founders Dan McMahon and Patrick Laing met three years ago in London and have been developing the Plume for about as long. Now that they’ve filed a patent on the recoiling design, they’re pleased to present their creation to the public via Kickstarter.

It’s certainly a clever solution to a common problem, and the Kickstarter page duly features a couple examples of what Sparse deemed to be “bike hacks,” i.e. variations on DIY mudguards. The main advantage of these ad hoc fabrications is that they’re inherently disposable; the tradeoff is that they’re ugly as sin.

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Like my train pass wallet, these objects fall into the category of things I touch and use every day. Carabiners are intended for mountain climbing, but their simple design and great utility make them super-useful to city dwellers like me, who only climb subway steps. I use them in the photo studio, during event coverage, and for my dogs, and I now wonder how I ever got by without them.

Leash Splitter

These were initially pet-driven purchases. I own two dogs and was looking for a way to hold both of their leashes in one hand without them becoming entwined. First I bought this thing, which is called a rotor swivel:

I spotted it at a mountain climbing equipment store across the street from Core77 HQ. It’s just two aluminum loops attached by an enclosed bearing that allows them to rotate independently, and it set me back forty bucks. Being designed for climbing, I figured it’s got to be watertight, which I’d need to weather thunderstorms (I’m out with the dogs for up to two hours a day, rain or shine).

Next I sewed a length of webbing through it to serve as a handle. (If any of you are interested in working with canvas webbing but don’t know how to sew, please pipe up in the comments and I’ll prepare a basic tutorial. With a simple trick, someone with no skill can use even a junky sewing machine to sew canvas webbing.)

Then I needed a carabiner to attach the two leashes to the rotor. Mistakenly thinking beefier would be better, I initially bought this Omega Pacific locking carabiner at the same equipment store for ten bucks.

However, I found this carabiner too bulky, and together with the rotor it added too much weight to the leashes for my taste. But at the hardware store I spotted these cheapie “key holder” carabiners for just a few bucks.

They appear to be made from aluminum and one can be used to handily attach the rotor to the two leash handles.

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As we saw in “Creatively Defaced Textbooks,” it’s easy enough to create drawings in a book that you take home with you, or hide behind the back of the student in front of you. It’s a much greater challenge to deface—or upgrade, depending on your point of view—a streetscape, where your artistic talents may draw the unwanted attention of the authorities.

But, you know, nothing stops art.

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So yesterday, what you see above happened in the studio. I guess the photographer really wanted to buzz the model in, and somehow shattered the plastic housing in his eagerness.

The $18 part was easy to replace, and on the backside of the old one you can see a simple four-wire hookup and the speaker:

If I was a little more hacktastic I’d take the still-functioning speaker and try to do something with it, as so many others have. Remember the BoomCases we spotted a few years back?

Or Devin Ward’s handsome hacks on Etsy?

Now we’ve caught wind of a German outfit doing the same thing. But like the BoomCases and Ward’s work, Hamburg’s Soundpauli company has their own quirky aesthetic.

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