On the Street – Subaru XT

Posted on 2013-03-05 by Ken

Ever since I saw my first, the Subaru XT it has had a place on my automotive bucket list. 80s starfighter styling, all wheel drive, pop up headlights, and crammed full of failure prone but endearing gadgets that are a product of their time in every way. What’s not to love? A little under 100000 were produced over its six year run, so it might just be attainable.

This one lives in NW Portland, displaying a surprisingly nice paint job for its age in that one shade of blue that somehow works only on Subarus of a certain vintage.

The bumper stickers give away the owner as a local.

Ride on

Posted on 2013-02-04 by Ken

My handsome steed is shod in some brand new rubber! Thanks to the fine folks at Western Bikeworks on NW 17th and 21st Avenue Bicycles (I hope you can guess where they are) are due for the help in getting everything I needed. Got Panaracers with a sweet tan sidewall (over new rim tape and tubes) and Continental Kool Stop brake pads to replace the disintegrating Specialized Touring II tires and what might be the original (and now rock hard) Dia Compe brake pads.

The Western folks actually guided me to 21st when they didn’t have the brake pads I needed in stock, after giving me a great deal on the rest of the stuff. I balked at the price of the pads at 21st initially, but it turns out they’d actually have set me back way more online with shipping, so score two for the local bike shops!

I managed to use up half of my patch kit mounting the new tires. It took me a few tries to discover the trick to getting the bead over the rim without prodigal tire lever usage. Gotta make sure the rest of the bead is in the ‘valley’ of the rim to give you as much slack as possible! On the plus side I’m an ace at applying patches now, and the practice was cheap.

Highways past, highways yet to be

Posted on 2012-06-27 by Ken

I found myself in Depoe Bay last week. As one does in sleepy coastal towns, I spent hours in the antique shops that seem to make up half of the local businesses. Most of the treasures were out of my ranges of price or interest, but there was a shelf littered with old gas station maps in one of the antique malls and I picked out a half dozen old maps of Portland and Seattle for a buck each.

The Portland maps in particular are neat, because they predate the freeway removal efforts that came to dramatically affect how Portland’s downtown developed. In the maps Harbor drive still consumes the west bank waterfront. They also date to a transitional period when many of the highways that seem to have been there forever were only beginning to carve their destructive path through the city’s fabric. The 405 and 26 are dotted double lines that end halfway and the Fremont bridge is nameless, denoted only as “proposed”.

Below are excerpts from the maps detailing the downtown area. They are in order from oldest (1968) to most recent (1970). There’s a lot of detail there, let me know in a comment what else you see that has changed in the intervening forty years!

Union 76, 1968: