Bike From Scratch

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.

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.