Bike From Scratch

Look what I made

Today was a good day. I’ve got a complete (ish) bike! The main task of the day was getting the seat stays attached. First I had to cut the slot for my seat post binder and take care of all that, and before that I had to ream the seat tube to take a seat post, and before that….. you get the idea. Lots of little steps to get to where I was going. So I started the morning reaming the seat tube and freaking myself out a little bit with the process. I stuck the reamer in a vise pointing up and then spun the bike around on it by its seat tube. Unfortunately I don’t think I have a picture of this, Doug took one though so hopefully I can get it from him.

The next task was to cut a slot for the seat tube binder. Pretty straight forward. Stick two blades in the hack saw, draw a straight line, go to town. Don’t stray off the straight line. When it was all said and done I had a slot in the back of my seat tube. It pointed out how much I really need to do some finish filing on the back of my seat tube as it looks a little goofy right now. That’s work for when I get home though.

Cutting the binder slot

Finally after a few other odds and ends I got to working on getting the seat stays into my bike. The first step is to miter the stay to meet up with wherever its supposed to go. In my case I’m doing a fast back to the binder so I had to cut the shape of the binder in the top of the stay. Doug as usual was a huge help here and showed me a mercifully fast way to do it. It took the other guys the better part of a day to get their stays ready to go for alignment, I think it took me on the order of an hour. Just a couple quick hits with a file (the attachment I chose was much less intricate than what Daniel and Clifford were doing) and cut to length. The real trick for me was to get the seat stays to put equal tension on the chain stays. It took a few adjustments with a file, but nothing major. After the miter was done I was off to alignment. The process involves taking a true wheel and checking for center, making adjustments, taking the measurement again and working it back and forth until you get it right. This feels like it took forever but I think I only really spent a few hours doing it. I was pretty wiped by the time I got here though, its been a long two weeks.

Doug did the braze on the top side because it was a bit much for me (lots of small areas). There really aren’t words to describe his skill. It was unreal to watch him manipulate so much heat and metal in such a small space. After I got the seat stays setup so I could braze the bottom I took off back to the house for a bit. A classmate had ordered pizza and it was a nice pick me up before going back out to the shop. After dinner I brazed up the seat stays. I’m using stainless plug in dropouts from henry james. I love the little silver ring and watching it poor out the bottom in one shot when it flows correctly. Very satisfying. After the stays were brazed I checked alignment and everything was as I’d left it. As close to perfect as my first bike will be I think, and well within the (mostly made up) tolerances that we were told about on the first day of class.

Drop out brazed

The last big task for me was to get my fork converted from a 1 inch steerer to a 1 1/8 inch. I hacked off most of the one inch, beveled the top and brazed on a bigger 1 1/8 inch tube. This was a little nerve-racking as there was a lot of metal to heat up and we were not quite sure if the silver ring I stuck in the top ever really melted the way it was supposed to. I added silver and flowed it up the joint to the best of my ability. After we called it good and the fork cooled down we could peak down the steerer tube and see that the silver had indeed flowed as it was supposed to. So all is good in fork land for me, although with this particular combination the fork weighs a ton. I don’t care much about weight, and as long as handling is not effected I’ll just leave well enough alone. I do have the capacity to throw a carbon fork in this bike and A/B them so if it works out to be terrible I have that as an option I guess. I think the fork looks dope though, and most carbon forks are a bit ugly for my tastes. I’m sure it will all work out.

As far as on a personal level I’m glad we’re nearing the end and I get to head home on Saturday. I’ve been worn down the last few days and I’m ready to get back home to my wife and son. I got to see a really cool sunset on my way back to the shop that was a bit of a pick me up this evening, which really helped me stay positive and get through the rest of the stuff I had to do. I’ve had a ton of fun and made some good friends. I’ve been blessed with my classmates. I’ve been told every class gets along but I’ve really enjoyed the company of Clifford and Daniel. I’ll be posting a postmortem on the class with a full review and such in the coming weeks, as well as updates on where I am with finish filing and painting, but I imagine since tomorrow is just braze ons and reaming I won’t do another update from Michigan.

Sunset on my way back to the shop.