I’d dropped into one of the local bike shops a couple of days before the holidays while they were in the throes of servicing an old Schwinn mixte; we realized, at approximately the same time, that the fork had been percussively reraked from low trail to terrifyingly high trail, and when they yanked it off the frame and tossed it into the recycle bin I asked if I could take it for parts.
So. A formerly 27" low-trail fork (65mm offset?) converted into a medium trail (55mm offset) 650b fork with clearance for CdlVs & Nokian A10s (which are nominally 40mm, but in reality are 35mm on the Zac19 wheels I put them on. It’s got a bit of backwards lean to it, but that’s an artifact of not wanting to try and derake the blades (if I find that to be cosmetically annoying I’ll just fire up the torch again, soak the crown, and gently adjust the offset back to 65mm.)
One fun thing about this fork "repair "is that I lopped off the blades below the HAZ/bent area, so they weren’t 28x20 but more like 26x17; I had to cut slots into the lugs and reform them to fit tightly to the blades. Will I die™? Who knows, but there’s one easy way to find out!
The only thing I still have to do is finish flowing the brass into the steerer/crown joint (I was brazing up some rack perimeters & this fork, but ran out of firegas around the time I finished brazing in the blades – I managed to coax enough btus out of the bottle so I could tack-braze the steerer into position, but it’s obviously not usable until I can properly glue it.)
This is my warrantied 55cm LeMond Poprad. It’s dead, right? Do any of y’all see a use for it or any way to salvage it? Just want to be sure before I cut the dropouts off and make them into bottle openers.
the tubes could make a cool wind chime — if you cut the TT and DT out at the far ends, you could force the cracks to completion so that it’s a “live edge” wind chime
Made a couple frames for a #designerbro last year and the year before. Didn’t post about them at the time since he hadn’t shown the design yet but I think you guys would be interested. Folding full size road bike with a pivot at the BB. IIRC it fits in a travel case folded with just the wheels, pedals and bars off. I don’t have any pics of V2 but it just had some refinements to the bend radius on the TT and some other components were slimmed down for weight savings and a cleaner look.
