I’ve almost gotten to the point where I can do fillets without my traditional huge honking globs of brass (the DS seatstay had a bit of a globby shoreline, but everything else just needed wirebrushing and sanding to clean off the flux debris and shine up the brass):
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Wire brush is awesome.
Hey framebuilders, are any of you building frames out of aluminum? I’m probably going to need a new road bike in the next year or so, and I want something sporty and disc braked. If you’re interested in talking about what it might look like, hit my dms
Path racer coming together with a bunch of vintage parts. I ended up heavily modding or making some fun parts in addition to the ollllllld stuff.
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Decorative stars for a frame I’m building. Using cutoff wheels to lop scrap tubing into headbadges, boss reinforcements, and decorative things works really well, if you discount it being a race against the cutoff wheel eroding down to a nub.
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dude. don’t care about weight, put a ton of them on one frame cuz it would look cool
I put 6 of the small stars on the chairtube, one on the DT, and the big one on the HT. They don’t weigh very much at all – 40 grams at most – so I could put a WHOLE BUNCH MORE on before the frame was as heavy as a crosscheck, but it’s going to be painted and decalled after I hand it over so I don’t want to take all the fun away.
Checking the fit before I scrape/soak all of the flux off, slap a coat of primer on (okay, there’s maybe a teeny bit of brazing that needs to be done before this step), cable & wire it, then hand it over.
(the Lensbaby effect is because I’m using a video lens on an E-mount adapter, not because there’s some sort of localized gravity anomoly that’s distorting the light at the edges of the photo.)
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Curious, what are the differences between your last couple of frames?
Bigstar Emma?
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Well, this one isn’t for me, so it doesn’t count (it’s for a friend who has arms and legs approximately the same length as me, but a ~4 inch shorter torso; thus a more conventionally long ETT) but the last 3 (emergency randonneuse, traditional randonneuse, disco travel bike) differ in
- tubing thickness; the traditional randonneuse is a mix of 7/4/7 & 8/5/8, the emergency randonneuse is 8/5/8 throughout, the disco travel bike is O/S 7/4/7.
- Pencil stays on the traditional randonneuse & disco travel bike, regular stays on the emergency randonneuse.
- the emergency randonneuse is 74.5 HTA/73 STA, the traditional randonneuse and disco travel bike are both ~73/73.
- The traditional randonneuse has somewhere between 75-80mm of BB drop, the other two are 65-70.
- The disco travel bike has disc brakes
- The disco travel bike has S&S couplers
- I painted the disco travel bike before doing 500 miles of break-in riding.
- SON SL dynamo dropouts on the traditional randonneuse & disco travel bike.
- Dropped stays on the disco travel bike.
- The traditional randonneuse & the disco travel bike are di2 only.
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Looks like witcomb lugs ive seen before
Lots of very British detailing.
Will i be seeing this one in person in a couple weeks?
No promises, but I hope so.
Another frame done and being painted:
The randonerd I’m building this for is into detailing their own frames, so I may not go past this boring grey primer (but if I do, I have a vivid green that is just the thing for a machine like this.) It’s going to be set up initially as a di2 1×11 machine (so no external cables except for the full-length cable housing running to the rear brake), and I’m donating a used shimano 11-42 pieplate for the ×11 half of the transmission (because it will get it out of my bike mess and into theirs.)
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The advantage of building a frame for someone in town is that we can meet up to check the frame fit before officially handing it over. As a bonus, in this case their arms & legs are basically the same length as mine, so I can ride the frame out to their apartment, we can check the fit, then I can ride it home to do the final adjustments before loading it up on a cargobike for the actual delivery.
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