The inspiration can be slow sometimes…

… but my battery weighs a good 20-25kg and seems weighty enough to keep the back-end of the pallet from jumping so much.  Which is great in that the impact vibrations are practically nil on the alternator now.

But now there’s a new problem: I’M NOT HEAVY ENOUGH-!!

I thought my weight would be sufficient to hold the bike stand (& bike) down onto the pallet. That there would be no need to clamp the turbo trainer down onto the pallet.

But last night there were plenty of small lift-offs during a 23-min pedal. Which put me in mind of cycling along a bumpy Irish road (although the bumps in this instance were regular and predictable!).

Hard to tell while pedalling and looking over my shoulder, but the bike jumping up might be due to a combination of

• the chain between bike and alternator being too taut so the bike now wants to move back toward the alternator (seeing as the alternator can’t move forward now, the bike moves backward toward it);
• the pallet wood being too soft and so starts to bend up under the tension.

So it looks like a better pallet is definitely on for starters. A ‘euro’ pallet would do nicely. Hopefully that, combined with a less taut chain,* will resolve things. If not then I’ll have to invent a brace from alternator to bike stand.

More tweaking-fun ahead-!!

 * Should just be a matter of moving the chocks holding the turbo trainer in place. Simple job of unscrewing and moving them back slightly.