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Deep Custom

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Go see the movie about Erik at Peacock Groove!

 

DEEP CUSTOM, the teaser from RoyalAntler on Vimeo.

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Aligning the rear end on a Bringheli jig

Sunday, October 30, 2011

I’ve played with a few different Bringheli frame jigs, and recently purchased one of my own. One thing that has always vexed me while looking at them was to figure out how to align the different bits and pieces. With no markings at all on the jig, setup can be a bit of a challenge. Dave Anderson covered almost all of it in a post he has on his website. I’ve borrowed and stolen his methods to do setup on my jig in much the same way.

One thing that I couldent find anything about was how to make sure the rear end is aligned with the bottom bracket properly. Every Bringheli I’ve played with has used a different mechanism to hold the BB shell, but they all move freely and are infinitely adjustable. With no markings it’s not to hard to infinitely adjust yourself into trouble. Here’s the process I used to align my jig.

First. Measure from the support boom to the middle of your rear axle (213 on mine, but I’d double check yours).

Measure from the backplate to the center of the rear axle.

Then, measure the total width of your bb holding situation, with a shell in it. Remember that not all shells are created equal, so this isn’t a one time thing. Divide this number in half.

Measure the total width of your bottom bracket holding situation.

Set the outside of your innermost cone to the first measurement – 1/2 the second one. So on mine it’s 213 – (125/2). This gives you the distance from the support boom to the outside edge of your inner bb cone.

Measure from the support boom to the outside of your BB shell holder.

As a bonus, you can do the same thing with your seat tube cone now that you know the size of your bb holding assembly. That measurement is what you got above (boom to outside edge) + 1/2 the width of the whole assembly. Remever to account for the thickness of the various supports off the jig (seat tube runner thing and the thing that supports the cone itself.

It took me longer to write the email than to actually do it.

 

 

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Three Stars in the news.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Three Stars is going to get a little bit of press.  Joel at j.woodward design put together this shot for the deal, kinda fun.

Three Stars Single Speed

We also have a facebook page in addition to the main Three Stars page. Check em out!

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It’s a Company

Friday, January 21, 2011

So I’ve been building lots of bikes over the last year. Some I’ve talked about here, some I’ve not.

I’ve decided to throw my hand in and build for other folks. For now it’s part time, and I expect to build about 12 frames a year + wheels and mechanic work and whatnot.

The company’s still in its infancy, but I’ve got a wait list a couple months out of friends who want bikes, and am starting to get interest from folks outside my immediate circle of friends. The sites being built up and hopefully we will have more pictures of the bikes soon. I’m excited for the future!

Check out whats going on at the Three Stars Cycles, or on the Facebook page.

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Bandit Cross #2

Sunday, November 14, 2010

If the stars align I’ll be there, but you should go anyway.

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Dropout shaping

Friday, October 1, 2010

The new bike I’m building is a single speed with an eccentric bottom bracket. I’ve got a pretty bad taste in my mouth from horizontal dropouts, and I’d rather avoid them if possible. I figure I’ll give this eccentric bottom bracket thing a shot and see what all the fuss is.

The advantage of the eccentric is that you can move the crank, and thus the front chain ring around to deal with chain tension. The disadvantage is that the effective bottom bracket drop, and offset changes. Nothing too serious in the grand scheme of things (move the seat post and saddle), but we will see.

So, off I went hunting for vertical dropouts with no derailure hanger and maybe some eyelets for fenders or a rack. Hunt I did, and I found nothing that I really liked. So I decided to make my own. Below I tell the story in pictures, I think I spent about two hours on this.

This is what I started with

After a little hacksaw love

Starting the curve

Starting the curve

Done

Done

I’m pretty happy with how they came out. I’ll mess with the curve perhaps a little more when I take the casting marks off the other dropout, but I think they are as close to perfect as is reasonable.

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Bandit Cross

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Bandit Cross

The first Bandit Cross race is in Minneapolis this weekend. See bike jerks for the details.

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The next one cometh.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

First an update. The cross frame has been riding great. It’s been raced and practiced on a bunch, quite happy with how it performs. The steeper than usual head angle creates a pretty nice advantage for me on twisty routes. On the other hand I feel a bit more of the dirt than others. I’m thinking of making a stem from steel to see if it is a little softer than the aluminum one I have on the bike now. I’m also running a carbon fork due to a tragic re raking accident with the original steel fork on the cross bike. Erik’s (the bike shop that sponsors our club) was kind enough to hook me up with a loaner Easton until I can get a replacement fork built. I have the necessary tubing in hand, and will hopefully get to it in the next week or two. Riding a steel fork I expect will soften the ride over the carbon loaner, but most likely at the expense of stiffens in the corners. As a slight aside, Challenge Grifo’s are darn near the nicest tire on the planet. Get some.

I’m getting started on the next frame I’m going to build. I’ve had the tubing and associated bits for awhile now, and I’ve been hemming and hawing over exactly what I want to build. I know I want a single speed. Jim of Hiawatha Cyclery fame convinced me that I want an eccentric bottom bracket. I want vertical drop outs because, well, horizontals are for the birds and they are the only thing I don’t like about my road bike. I know I want to be able to build my own racks, it needs to accommodate the kid seat, and it would be neat to have a backup bike for cross, or just a single speed cross bike to ride when I was feeling ornery.

For whatever reason I kept going back and forth on the head angle, and what kind of bars I wanted etc. I kept putting off the drawing. Tonight I decided to sit down and play with bike cad (as its much easier to make changes there for simple things like head tube angle). I think I’ve come up with a design I’m happy with. Now to go make the drawing, and maybe muck with the seat tube and top tube lengths a bit.

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Cross bike done, lets start another

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

I’ve got the cross bike done, rides nice. Minimal hiccups along the way.

Completed

Building the bike all alone in my basement led to different challenges than I had when I built with Doug. Most of those revolved around not having access to all the nice jigs and tooling. In some areas I made my own jigs (I made a fork blade bender and a T tool), sometimes I switched methods ( I used a full size drawing of the front triangle instead of a Doug’s frame jig) and other times I blazed my own trail / did stuff freehand (mitering, building the fork and chain stay procedure). I learned a lot in the process and for the most part enjoyed it. Checking the frame dimensions on the drawing proved to be the biggest pain in the butt of the whole process. The next time around (which starts soon) I’ll pickup some vee blocks to make that easier.

The first step of the process this time around was to miter all the tubes. I did this by hand, with a file and a hack saw. I used the template tool (tube miter) at nova to print paper guides that I could file to. This combined with a center line and a measuring tape made a everything simple in theory. In practice getting things exactly right with a file takes a bit of experience, and I ended up purchasing an extra down tube to gain this experience. I’m starting to get a nice stash of extra tubes for a smaller (than I ride) bike when Aleisha requests one. After doing it a few times the hand mitering comes pretty quick and it takes me ten to twenty min to get an accurate miter. Keeping things in proper phase is a matter of paying attention and not trying to do things to quickly.

I went off on my own when doing the chain stays and found a method that worked pretty well for me. I’ll try it again on the next bike to see if the method leads to repeatable results. The method Doug taught us in class involved doing one stay at a time with the T tool. I changed it up and did both at the same time, with lots of tacking and checking in between. I documented the process over here for some of the guys in my class.

Now that the bikes done I’ve put a few hundred miles on it. I’m quite happy with how it came out, and it will be difficult to saw it all apart come winter. I plan to do this to make sure I got proper penetration on all of my joints. I think they are fine, but why not check.

I’m ready to move on to the next bike now. I’ve got a Trek 720 single speed currently that I haul my kid around on. I’d like to replace this bike with a bike that will handle the kid seat and allow for a front porter rack for trips to the grocery store and some commuting duty to work when I want a change from the Rivendell. I’m going to build it with Henry James tubing and an eccentric bottom bracket. The bike will be fillet brazed, including the bottom bracket shell. This, at least theoretically ups the level of difficulty because I’m building without a jig. I think I’ve got it all worked out how to build a lugless BB shell without any filtering or jigging. In theory if I can keep things in place for tacking I should be golden. I’m also planning on trying my hand at building racks. This bike will feature two. The front rack will be a porter rack and will be big enough to hold my current Rivendell Saddle Sack (it will be mounted on the front of the bike). I’d also like to build a rear rack. I’m still noodling on this one. On the one hand I want something to fit under the kid seat, on the other hand wouldent it be cool to get rid of the kid seat and have a large platform + grocery store panniers al la an xtracycle. Then I could put a tandem stem and some kind of bar on there and he could ride on the back.

I ordered all the tubing, dropouts and other bits for the bike  today. I plan to build it up with some parts I’ve got on hand, and some new parts. In theory the parts list will look something like this.

  • Fillet brazed frame, 1 1/8th steerer, OS tubing with eccentric (Bushnell) bottom bracket.
  • Chris King headset and BB
  • Sugino crank 46t Origin chain ring
  • Surly Flip Flop (135) with 16t freewheel and 18t fixed cog mated to a Salsa Delgado Cross rim
  • Dove bars
  • Ritchey Stem
  • Some kind of front wheel
  • Tabbed Drop Outs
  • Integrated Front porter rack
  • Integrated small rear rack
  • Some kind of fenders, possibly integrated (TBD)

With any luck I’ll be done with construction in early October. By then maybe I’ll have figured out what I want to do for paint. I’m interested in trying out one of the local painters (Kvale and Anderson) and powder coat. I expect this bike will see a fair amount utility use, so I’m gun shy to spend a lot on paint.

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Update on the cross bike

Thursday, August 5, 2010

I’ve been plugging away at my cross bike on and off since my last post. Summer is in full swing in Minnesota and to be honest I’d rather be riding my bike than building them. My goal had been to be done before I left for RAGBRAI. I didn’t come anywhere near that. Since I’ve gotten back I’ve had new motivation (namely: cross season, I need to get the balance gravel team going and Hurl invited me for a ride). I’ve gotten more done in the last two days than I have in the last two months on the bike.

So, as it stands I have a completed front triangle with a tiny bit of twist in the head tube. Half a mm or so. I screwed up my brazing sequence a bit when I was building the bike, and now I’m suffering for it a bit. It turns out that I’m running into difficulty cold setting the bike with my current table setup. I need to bold the table to something heavy. Unfortunately I don’t have a whole lot in my basement that would qualify as heavy… so this is a bit of work in progress. I’ll figure something out before two long, perhaps pester a strong friend to come by and help me hold things down.

Finished front triangle, checking the rear wheel clearance.

Finished front triangle, checking the rear wheel clearance.

Brazing came back to me pretty quick. I had not brazed any luged joints in Doug’s class besides the BB shell, so there was a bit of a learning curve for pulling silver from one tube to another. For the most part I figured it out. Heat control is still present, but I’m not scorching anything too bad and I don’t see any red lugs or anything like that… so far so good. As far as the finished product, the lugs are sloppier than I’d like, but the BB looked fine. Seems like the more times you do something the better it gets, and thats like the fifth BB I’ve done, and the first set of lugs.

I’ve also brazed the rear dropouts to the chain stays. I’m using some socket type dropouts that I found from nova, they look like little lugs. Kinda neat, but it was a pain to get inside and clean them. I miss the sand blaster in Doug’s shop.

Tomorrow night, if all goes well I’ll put together my T tool for the rear triangle, and hopefully get the chain stays brazed into the BB shell. After that I need to get the seat stays done, then the fork (need to borrow a blade bender, anyone in Mpls wanna help a brother out?) then the braze ons. Thats totally doable in a week. Hopefully by saturday the 14th I’ll be rolling on the new bike.

Some updated pictures can be found at flickr.

I’ve decided that I’ll ride this bike on my remanning gravel rides this season (one organized, I’m sure more than a few thrown together) and cross. Then I think I’ll take a page from’s Craig Ryan’s playbook and tear it apart and make sure my joints are solid. I suspect that means rattle can clear coat to prevent it from rusting too much, maybe I’ll try to find a sign builder or someone and get some Three Stars decals made up and put them under the clear.

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