Bike From Scratch

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.