A worthy trade?

Tarckives Bikes
1

Hey, should i build up my schwinn with parts I have laying around and trade it for a crazy lookin’ tallbike?

This:

FOR

This:

?

2

no

3
4

even for a tall bike that looks jankey… at best

5
6

no, i don’t think that bikes looks like much fun.

7

no

8

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
An old Schwinn is something to be treasured.

9

check out the steerer tube angle. it’ll steer like a boat.
mine did that too.
that’s not a hard style to build

10

Thanks guys.
I’ll hold onto the Schwinn.
Someday it’ll be the bottom half.

11

You want a tallbike? Send me a couple of junk frames and I’ll tig weld 'em together and ship it back.

12

i imagine shipping a tall bike would be mighty expensive

13

coupled tallbike?

14

I want a tallbike, yes.
I also want to learn how to weld.
Should I just buy/rent some gear and give it a shot?

15

find a place that has the stuff. college, community college, welding co, etc

16

Vocational schools around here offer adult classes. You could go in and do your project and get a certificate?

17

A certificate is usually pointless for hobby welding. Certificate programs are generally constrained to a specific process for a specific application usually pipeline or structural steel which implies stick welding, which is obsolete for anything other than those applications or doing general repairs on farm equipment.

Bicycle tubing, especially hi-ten can be MIG welded, but it’s not the best process for small thin stuff, nor is it ideally suited to higher-alloy steels like 4130. For that, you’ll really want to be TIG welding. There’s a significant body of knowledge required to be able to determine the specific process, which tungsten, how it should be ground, which shielding gas, which filler, which cups or gas lenses, what tungsten size, etc. That body of knowledge is not required to learn the physical aspects, which imho is the most difficult.

Fortunately, steel really doesn’t require anything more than a DC power supply. Square-wave, AC, and pulsing are not required. Also, I don’t know of any materials with wall thickness greater than 1.5mm, so power output is less than 80 amps. Any small DC only constant current TIG welder with an arc start would work. Something like this:

http://www.millerwelds.com/products/tig ... r_150_stl/

Probably, there is used stuff around that could be had more cheaply. If you can get your hands on some junk bike frames, you can cut them up and practice on them. This would probably be the most valuable use of your time. One needs to learn how to see the arc and the pool and how they behave. One also has to gain the physical coordination skills of moving the filler rod and the arc at the same time. There’s no way to gain this skill other than practice.

In short, if you can get the stuff, ask someone qualified to tell you all the details you need to know for your specific application (Which tungsten and size, shielding gas, amp range) and get started practicing and you’ll learn a lot in a very short time. Once that happens, you’ll either be hooked or not. If you are, that’ll drive the passion necessary to acquire the body of knowledge needed to continue.

For anyone in the bay area, I do give welding lessons. They are quite informal and the price of admission is beer.

18

Here’s a decent basic primer on TIG:

http://www.millerwelds.com/education/ar ... les89.html
19

^^ Hey halbritt! thank you :bear: :bear: :bear:

20

[quote=“Rusty Piton”]I want a tallbike, yes.
I also want to learn how to weld.
Should I just buy/rent some gear and give it a shot?[/quote]
Do it. Welding is easy.