Today was a good day I think. I started out the morning with a few more practice brazes in an old bottom bracket. My brazing is still not as good as I’d like but I do seem to be improving. Doug and I were talking this evening and he said he thinks I’ll have the hang of it before I leave. The practice brazes went okay, I’m improving, just not as fast as I’d like. We then brazed my seat tube into the bottom bracket. I did about 1/2 of it and Doug jumped in and demonstrated / saved me for the other half. We have discovered that the Henry James bottom brackets are a little more difficult to braze together than we would like (Doug says shells with windows are easier).
I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon getting ready to put my fork crown together. I have kind of a goofy situation as some of my parts have yet to arrive from Ceeway. I don’t have a fork crown or lugs yet. Doug had a fork crown I really liked, so I am going to use that. The trick is that its a one inch steerer and I have a 1 1/8 stem and a head tube to accommodate it. Doug came up with a clever way to braze a 1 inch small tube and use it as a sleeve in a 1 1/8 steerer tube. So with that all done I filed and cleaned up the 1 inch portion and brazed it into the crown. This braze went much better, but is also a much easier braze. I’m learning a lot about filing technique and really enjoying that as well. Doug has been showing me the right way to file around a tube and then how to remove file marks (small movements forward, progressively smaller files). I started out the morning taking forever to do this but was moving pretty quickly by the afternoon.
The next task of the day was raking fork blades. Doug has several jigs, but I think settled on the Anvil jig to do all of our fork blades. Clifford and Daniel used an 8 inch radius and I used a 10 inch. This is for looks more than anything else as 10 inch radius looks a little more raceish. Raking the blades is done by brute force. We clamp the blade in the jig, level it and then press down to a line on the jig that gives us x amount of rake (there are lines that correspond to mm of rake). Sometimes we had to bend so far that it took two of us to push the bar all the way down.
While this process seems brutal and error prone it was not difficult at all to get the proper amount of rake. Mine came out of the jig correct so there was no futzing. The other guys had to do a little compensating to bring their blades back a mm or two, but all in all this was a very simple process.The jig makes things crazy easy.
My last task of the day was to get my down tube miters done so the main triangle was all mitered up. This was a matter of simply finding the correct angle to meet the head tube and stick it in the jig. After one dumb mistake (make sure things are tight before turning the machine on) I was done and things matched up perfectly. I then put the jig flat and cut the miter that goes into the bottom bracket. After all this my main triangle is all mitered up and ready to be brazed together!
Front Triangle Mitered Up
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