After countless hours of editing, we are finally done with our first two stories, which explore urban homesteading and the bicycle cooperative where we built our bikes. To celebrate and show them to the communities featured, we're having a party in downtown Asheville at Bobo Gallery. Moses Atwood, who is featured in one of the films, will be playing live after the screening. Come one come all...

Bobo Gallery
22 N Lexington Ave.
Asheville, NC

9:00pm - 2:00am

It's been a long 90 days, but we surpassed our fundraising expectations by a long shot. Thanks to everybody who made this possible. We're excited about the coming months on the road, tracking down inspiring stories as we grind through America using nothing but our own bodies.

Everybody will get notification when the website is up and functional. The URL is http://www.americarecycled.org

See you on the other side....

noah and tim

In Asheville, NC ... the cutest workspace ever.

It's been a long start, but we're finally at what feels like a tipping point. People say Asheville's the kind of place that sucks you in, where a week turns into a year and ambitions of global proportions give way to sipping a hot cup of maté while your friend plucks a rusted out banjo to the gentle chorus of a million insects.

This place has sucked us in, with so many amazing stories to tell. We were planning on leaving on our bikes a couple of months ago, but the story has actually kept us mostly in one place. Between building bicycles, developing the concept, raising funds, accumulating (and discarding) equipment, endless research, and documenting some truly inspiring pockets of Asheville, we've had our plates overflowing. We've been staying at a community house, forming perspective-bending friendships with the twenty or so residents and a constant flux of travelers. We're now editing the story about this community, and along with a piece about bicycle culture and the cooperative where we learned how to build and repair our bikes, we'll have two stories to launch the website with.

Thank you to everybody who has been so supportive and patient as we get this project off the ground. It's been unbelievably encouraging to see so much faith in a project still in its nascent stage. Thank you to Tim Klimowitz and Jacky Myint for their time and enthusiasm in giving the project a home on the web. We're ecstatic about the site design. Thanks to our sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Thom, who have been enormously generous and have helped us find a home here. And thanks to 82 generous backers (and counting), we have surpassed our initial fund raising goal, taking some financial pressure off of us and allowing us to focus on story-telling. And our endless gratitude goes out to all our new friends in Asheville who have taken us into their lives and dealt with the constant probing. It's not easy to live in the presence of a camera and microphone, but everybody has been wonderful. You have all done your part to create to what is turning out to be a massive community effort.

We'll be on the road soon, and it will be well worth the wait.

-Noah and Tim

Our bikes are close to complete.

Noah has a 5-Watt solar panel to power our electronics on the road and I built a camera mount for the front of my bike (see video below).

After scratching previous ideas for the mount, I ended up finding metal brackets to attach together to hold a wooden plate with a bolt for a tripod head. After hours of sifting through nuts and bolts at the bike shop, I finally found enough to make it work. The wood plate is attached at five points. Four to the front rack and one to the upper fork. I'll attach some more brackets before I leave for extra security. Right now it is pretty rigid and reacts to bumps noticeably, but I'm working on making some rubber washers to absorb some of the shock.

The 5-Watt panel powers a 10Ah Lithium-Ion battery. We have a solar controller between the two pieces so we know the level of charge.

The panel is 12V, so I got a 12V power cord for my laptop. Works like a charm.

See the bike cam video at the end of this post on Tim's blog: http://thussin.blogspot.com/2010/08/america-recycled-update.html

We're putting the final touches on our bikes, ordering bags and developing a solar panel system to power our electronics. More to come on that once the parts come in. Here is Noah unknowingly looking hip with his bike. Mine is the blue one on the right. Now all we need is someone to join us with a white bike. America on wheels...

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. We're about to move forward with a couple web designers to put together a really awesome site to track the trip. We'll keep you all updated as the project progresses. 77 days and counting...