I’ve been improving my metalworking skills by making a bunch of stuff for the work space. I got a couple more things to build before starting the frame, but it’s slowly getting there.
I brazed together a frame for my portable bandsaw with 4130 tubing that I got for practice. Now it can be used vertically or pivots down as a cut off saw.
brazing a bunch of random brackets and hooks. Sometimes with stainless sheets and silver too. Glad I’m building up experience on non-critical stuff
Got a few more files here and there on ebay and used them a lot. Got a lot more competent at the filing the miters.
Bought a 3/4" 13 x 31 aluminum tooling plate from the scrap pile at the metal supplier. A little small but it’s cheap. It got some dings but it is smooth otherwise. It’s a lot flatter than the granite counter top I got earlier. Finally I have a decent reference surface!
Next up is doing a full-sized drawing and marking the tubing.
What’s a good way to mark a centerline on both sides of a tubing? Single side is easy but I don’t know a good way to mark the other. I don’t like the results when I divide with a piece of paper.
Also, any downsides to add citric acid in the flux soak? It works great to remove mill scale on hot rolled stuff. Everything comes out of the bath rust free and easy to work with. Unlike HCl, there’s not surface etching that I can see.
Curious, why centrelines on both sides? I don’t think I’ve ever found myself having to do that.
Reference surface sounds like a nice find, other than checking the straightness of stuff I like having it to roll tubes on. You can use a dial indicator or just look for daylight to find any bowing in the tubes and put it in the plane of the frame.
[quote=turpencat][quote=rauce]I have two framebuilding plans for 2017 right now.
One is an yolo road disc bike, designed to fit 650x42 or 700x30. Fillet brazed and 44mm headtube, fat main tubes, bendy stays. Plan to source a take-off hydro disc group from work.
The other is an excercise in ridiculoussness that I can’t get out of my head. Lugged and traditional dimensions but the lightest tubing I can possibly source, built up with a mix of the lightest componentry available from the lugged steel-era and parts I make myself.[/quote]
my current bike is that first bike and I also have interest in an ultra light lugged bike. But to use as a townie commuter or something…[/quote]
Yeah I guess when I think about it both these projects are about trying some kind of kool-aid. Fat road tires and discs on one and planing on the other.
Plan for the whippet bike is 7/4/7 ox plat for all three main tubes, 0.6 14mm seat stays and some very light round/oval/round chainstays I have of unknown origin.
Yeah 1" top tube. I though about the S3 but the butt is so short I wasn’t sure if it would work in a lugged shell without over cooking it. Using a 7/4/7 down tube as a seat tube would give longer butts at only 20g more than the S3 seat tube.
Fork will be threaded for reenactment reasons so lightweight steerers are out, I was going to use SL blades and a Cinelli style crown but if I like the frame a lot and want to modernize I can always add a lightweight threadless fork.
I like the sounds of that Reynolds set, Tange ultimate would be cool too, no idea where you can actually buy those tubes though.
I kinda want to stick with steel for the fork, also reenactment seatpost lengths require the frame to be 62x58 and the headtube will be ~200mm so not many threaded forks out there that size anyways.
Yeah I’ve got no idea where to find real Tange superlight or Ishiwata 015
but the steerer on that second Rossin’ fork is 260mm!
Building a light steel fork would open you up to medium-reach brakes though, I’ve got some slick NGC-450 ~55mm centerpulls that I made new padholders for but never built a bike around. CLB Spacelines are really nice and stupidly light vintage short-reach calipers, but I’ve never seen another set besides mine.
Levers are kinda hard too. For non-aero, CLB Sulkys are really light without being weird and are cheap+easy to find
I’ve got some black Modolo Kronos levers sitting around with multiple sets of silver/grey hoods, but placement is kinda difficult
[quote=JUGE FREDD]CLB Spacelines are really nice and stupidly light vintage short-reach calipers, but I’ve never seen another set besides mine.
[/quote]
I had a set of these and gave them away before I realised what I had!
I looked at a bunch of brake stuff. I was thinking weinmann 500 because cheap and light but they are reversed to most calipers and look funky unless you do moto routing.
Just got some CLB Professional levers on ebay, 147gr!
Going to keep my eye out for some brakes, watching some CLB professionals that end in a couple days.
