Bikes For Humanity

 Monday, May 22      This week went pretty well. We got a shipment out to Africa which I was very happy about and I did many other things. The shipment going to Africa was a lot of hard work to put together, but when we were done, the feeling was amazing. I felt like we accomplished something amazing for a town in Africa. Many people will get bikes and be able to use them for transportation and all sorts of things. I am happy that I was able to take part in helping pack the shipment to Africa. It was an amazing experience meeting the guy from Sierra Leone.  What I accomplished and the team accomplished over the last week was amazing. We worked on bikes from 7 - 8 hours a day and unloaded many bikes as well as packing a shipment to Africa. I had fifty bikes get picked up for donation. I was amazed at how we could fit all the bikes into the trailer. The feeling of accomplishing those things is amazing. I was super happy to be able to work on bikes, because usually I just ride them and ne

 Monday, May 22 The bike shipment to Africa went really well, I think we were all happy about this and then the bike up that happened Friday went well. I think everything that happened at Working Bikes went well. To recap the two weeks, I worked on bikes, stripped bikes for parts, worked a couple days on a shipment to Africa and donated around fifty bikes to Working Bikes. Working Bikes is a cool organization and what they are doing is amazing. I am glad I was able to work with an organization like them. Sending bikes to South America and Africa is really cool.  Hours: 2 Total hours: 76

 Saturday May 20th I spent the whole day working on my  paper, presentation and blogs. Since I was a slow writer, It takes me a while to write anything. I did procrastinate these blogs pretty badly. I wrote more of them today. I also started my presentation. I did a little bit of what my presentation was going to say. I wrote a lot of my paper. I spent some time thinking how I was going to present my project and how it was going to look. I really went deep to try to remember all the things I did in the two week, so that I could add them to my blogs. This was a lot of time spent on just writing things.  Hours: 6 Total Hours: 74

Friday, May 19th Today I went to the location of my bikes and spent about 5 - 10 minutes looking at each one of them. I was looking at the chain, frame, handlebars, basically everything on the bike to make sure it was ok to get picked up. Most of the bikes we were donating were either at some point were going to go to South America or Africa. I mostly had mountain bikes. Which was weird because why would you need a mountain bike for a very flat city. Most of the bikes had pretty old derailleurs. After checking them out. I texted Gabe to see where he was and he was only a couple minutes away so, I propped the doors open and got ready to bring bikes outside. As we loaded bikes, we kept count of them.                                                                       This was the first bike to be loaded After loading many bikes, my arms started to get a little tired, which reminded me I needed to workout more. Here is a picture of me loading more bikes and being halfway done.  We were

Thursday, May 18th, 2023  Today I went to Working Bikes and finished working on the shipment to Africa. Since the guy from Africa was here he helped us out carry the bikes up the ramp way. My main job for today was to hand the bikes up to the people putting them in the shipping container. After a couple of  hours, Alex, the guy I was helping had to leave, so I was the only one putting the bikes in the shipping container. I needed help stacking the bikes, so I got Colette and Jerry to help. I helped with stacking bikes and carrying the bikes and after many hours of sweat and backbreaking lifting, we were done. We added some bike rims, helmets and we also added more tubes. At the end of putting all the bikes in, we had a problem. We had to cut some of the plywood so it would fit inside of the container and we also added some straps to make sure the bikes didn’t come crashing down when they opened up the container. After finishing the container, I talked to Gabe the delivery guy about the

Wednesday May 17th   Today I went to Working bikes and packed up the shipment out to Africa. We sent mountain bikes to Africa because they don’t have paved roads. We added some hybrid bikes for good measure. We stuffed bikes into a massive shipping containers like the kind you see on cargo ships. We first put in a layer of bikes that stood upright and each one was opposite. one bike went in handlebars first and then the next bike went in rear wheel first. I also twisted the handlebars sideways so the bikes took up less room and we could fit more. One by one we fit 35 bikes into one part of the container. On top of the stacked bikes we added more bikes on the sides. We also put bags of cassettes, cranks, pedals, chains, brakes and more. We started by putting hundreds of tubes over the bikes and then added two or three pieces of plywood. Then we started the same process over for about sixty to eighty more bikes. It was an amazing day, I would have never thought that, that many bikes coul

 Monday the 15th of May Today I am going to talk about what my senior project is actually trying to achieve and what the organization I am working with does. So firstly I love mountain biking and just bikes in general, so when I  thought of doing my senior project, i was definitely going to do something with bikes. Bikes are another way of transportation and they are also a lot of fun. So I came upon the idea I am pursuing now for senior project which is collecting bikes, repairing them and donating to Working Bikes. Working Bikes Collective collects bikes, repairs them and then sends out the mountain bikes to Africa. I love to bike, so being able to send bikes out to Africa is amazing and I hope that they will have fun riding bikes like I do.  Hours: 7 Total Hours: 33

Tuesday, May 16th   Today I went back and worked at Working Bikes. So i was going to to just work on bikes, but instead we worked on a shipment out to Africa. I worked on collecting stuff from this list. Shown Below. So I worked on collecting lots of these parts. I had to work fast, but I wasn’t super familiar with the whole layout. I collected pedals, chains, cranks, derailleurs, front derailleurs, forks, seats and seat posts. There were more things on that list, but I could get through everything.  Kareem was from Sierra Leon which is a town or village in Africa. He came there to check on how the shipment was coming along.  Hours; 7 Total hours: 47

 Monday May 15th, 2023 Today I came to the office with Mr. Haney and worked on my senior project. I gathered the emails I sent out and printed them and got a binder to put them in. I also started preparing and getting organized for the express night. I used Onenote to organize everything into different folders and pages. For the last week of senior project, I have a couple things I want o accomplish other than finishing the project. My first thing is that I will be going to work at the organization on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I think. This will be experience for me and I will know how to fix bikes and be able to mostly do it by myself. My next thing is  cleaning up all the blogs i have worked on in the first and last week of the project. Then donating the bikes to the organization and maybe doing the ride that have set up.  Hours: 7 Total hours: 40

 The first week of senior project was fun and also hard work. To recap the week, I collected bikes from properties, put the bikes into one big bike room, and went to the organization and worked on some bikes. Now for the next week I will obviously be going back to work at the organization for more days, then the donation happens and I am pretty sure there is a ride I might be doing. Working at the organization was interesting, every Tuesday through Friday from 11-5 there are spots to volunteer and work on bikes for donation. Working Bikes mission is to give out bikes to peopel in need of them. So mountain bikes will mostly go to Africa and some to South America and the road bikes will stay in Chicago. My mission was to repair bikes and donate them to the organization and then give them out to peopel in need of them. I love to ride bikes if it’s mountain biking and road biking and I would like to share that experience with others as well.  I thought that one of the hardest parts was goi

 So today we are going to the Belmont Flats. When I went to Working Bikes Collective two days ago, I deduced it would be good to probably volunteer there. Trevor also said it would be good to bring a couple of kids bikes to work on. The organization was going to giveaway around 200 bikes to kids. Here are some pictures of me handling the bikes  These are some of the kids bikes, I brought in to work on. There were not many other people in the shop at this time in the morning. I first worked on the mongoose (not shown in the picture). To start fixing bikes, the shop uses this checklist found below. This checklist is used to go through everything on the bike before it is donated. After running through this checklist on both bikes, we had to replace some tires and stuff. I took a test run of both of these bikes. Now my age says i am officially an adult and I am certainly as tall as one, but do I act like one certainly not. So as any teenager would think is fun I rode the tiny kid bike. It

 Wednesday, May 10th  2023                                                                                                        Today I went to the new employee breakfast at Newcastle Limited. The breakfast started at nine. There was an introduction and a meeting. I thought it was pretty interesting. Mr. Haney talked about how to connect people with each other and how the company is trying to feel like a well rounded community. A lot of businesses will try to do this, but Newcastle Limited has team events every year and tries to get all the employees together to have some fun.  It was interesting hearing what he had to say and what the new employees said. Some of their questions were really interesting. We talked about the couple of different sides of the company. After this breakfast and talking to some people I got to work, I signed up for a date to come in and help out a little bit.  Hours: 6 Total Hours: 20

 Tuesday May 9th 2023 Today and for the next two weeks I will be shadowing Mr. Haney at Newcastle Limited as well as working on my senior project. Today I went to the office with him and worked on my senior project. I called the representative from Newcastle Limited again to talk about being able to go to the property and checking out the bikes. I called Trevor from Working Bikes Collective, to figure out some logistics with the bike pick up. I started to think about how I would collect the bikes and where I would store them. Then also how they were either going to pick them up or we were going to have to drop them off.  Hours: 7 Weekly hours: 14

 Bikes For Humanity Monday, May 8th I started my day by emailing someone who works at Newcastle Limited to figure out how I can collect all the bikes for my project.  I also had to look for some organizations that I could donate the bikes I collected. I narrowed the organizations down to two.  The one I called was Working Bikes Collective.  Trevor the lead guy from Working Bikes answered the phone, while on the phone we discussed about donating bikes and what I can do to help. He  said something about a bike maintenance class going on at night.  After calling Trevor, I realized I needed to call him again.  I decided I was going to call him tomorrow.  I needed to call him about the dat elf the bike drop off or pickup and also what times the bike maintenance classes were.  I had to call the person from Newcastle Limited again.  I had to talk about when I could collect the bikes and from which properties.  I decided that I was going to look at the bikes on Thursday. I also think I will be