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Category Archives: Building Bikes

Frame building class & a new road bike

I’m taking a frame building class in February! I’m pretty excited and it should be a good time. I’m taking the class from Doug Fattic. My plan is to build a road go fast / all day rider kind of bike. Something with road angles, and maybe slightly longer than normal chain stays. The bike [...]

New Project Bike

Now that I have my Hillborne all built up its time for a new project. I picked up a Trek 720 frame and parts from a guy at work. I’m going to turn this into a camping and kid hauler bike. Maybe an xtracycle some time in the future.

It’s Here!

I’ve had my Rivendell Sam Hillborne for a little over two weeks now.I built it all up in about two days. So far I’ve put a few hundred miles on it running around town, commuting to work and one camping trip. I’m quite pleased with the whole build so far. I’m starting to do more [...]

Sam Hillborne Update

I emailed back and forth with Jay at Rivendell last Friday about my new bike. Unfortunately I’m looking at at least another two weeks until I get it, probably more as my experience so far has been that Rivendell has trouble with estimating how long things are going to take (Note I doubt this is [...]

Pictures from Daves Big Dummy Build

The bike is mostly finished now. We (Dave really) need to put the fenders on and order the rest of the xtracycle stuff. All and all I expect this to be a pretty cool bike and it was a lot of fun to build. The albatross bars are a touch I really really like. I’m [...]

Dave’s Big Dummy

I posted some pictures of the Surly Big Dummy I’m putting together for my buddy Dave on flickr.  I’ll do a real post soon, but they are fun to flip through. So far, aside from some cable routing questions and a derailleur ordering mishap its going quite well. Should be a fun bike when we [...]

Bummer

I just got the word that my bike is going to be a month late. Best of luck to the guys at Rivendell, I’m sure that cant do anything to make life less stressful / easier given the current economy and whatnot. Now I’ve got to come up with a new plan for spring riding… [...]

How to build a bike wheel (Part 2, tensioning the wheel)

This post is a continuation of my last post on how to build a bike wheel. In this post we will cover bringing the spokes up to tension and truing the wheel. To complete the instructions in this post you will need a truing stand and a spoke wrench, a flat head screw driver may [...]

Last of the parts ordered

An update because I’m excited. Yesterday I spent about an hour on the phone with Jay at Rivendell. I got all of the remaining parts ordered for my bike and the Surly Big Dummy I’m putting together for my friend Dave. The Big Dummy stuff should arrive  sometime this week and my bike should get [...]

How to build a bike wheel (Part 1, lacing spokes to a wheel)

The parts for my wheels (and a few other things) have arrived! I picked up all my wheel components that I detailed out in this post. My plan was to build the front wheel one evening and then the rear sometime later (turned out to be the next night). In addition to the parts there [...]