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Category Archives: Building Bikes

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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It is here, and it’s rad.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

The bike I built in Doug Fattic’s class has arrived, and I’m riding it. It is absolutely fantastic. I’ve only got about 40 miles on it, so will write more when I’ve spent some more time in the saddle, but so far I absolutely love it! The picture links to the flickr gallery, and my wife tells me she [...]

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Work begins on a cross bike.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

I’ve alluded to it in other posts, but I’ve officially begun work on a cyclocross bike for myself. I want to try racing cross this season, and I’ll ride it in the gravel races next year. My big challenge I think is going to be time. First can I come up with the time to [...]

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Current Activities, Mostly Waiting.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

So the bike and the stem are off at paint. They have been there since February and hopefully they will return sometime in May. The first bit of the paint process involved a bit of back and forth with my classmate Clifford. Clifford graciously put together the design for the down tube (and for this I’m forever grateful). [...]

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Doug Fattic’s Class: Final Thoughts.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

I’ve been home a few weeks now and more time to reflect on Doug’s class and frame building. In the first post in the series I said I was not sure if I’d build more than one bike. I’ve answered that question with a resounding yes. While at times frustrating and certainly difficult I really enjoyed the [...]

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On Weights and Measures

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Weight isn’t something I get really worked up about, but I thought it would be fun to see how much the frame I built weighs, along with some other frames and bikes I have at the house. So I borrowed a scale from my buddy Dan and then dorked out New Frame: 4lbs 2 oz. [...]

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Doug Fattic’s Class: Day 12

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

And we’re done (and I realized I never published this post). I said earlier I wasn’t going to blog today, but we had a good day even if it did run long. Today was all about braze ons, bridges and reaming / tapping things. I didn’t get much of the latter done. I did get [...]

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