Caroline's new bike

Bike 2 update

Paint finished, getting closer to the road...

We picked up Caroline's new frame from the powder coater today. It's far from perfect and still a couple weeks from being on the road, but here she is, bike #2. The plan is to add some more color, clear coat it and build it up. School is keeping my schedule tight these days so it's going to take too long but I'll post more pics when it's done.

Starting #2

A road bike for Caroline is next. Hopefully this one gets finished faster than the first one.

Changed the build and I still haven't been able to ride it! Still waiting for the right cog...

Bike #001

Here she is. I just patched it together with a bunch of parts I had laying around so I don't think it's going to stay this way and I haven't been able to ride it yet because none of my local bike shops have the size cog I need so I guess officially it's not a bike yet but...

Getting closer

I finally got my fork jig together today. This thing is built to hold the pieces of the fork in alignment while I braze it all together. Having a straight fork is nice so hopefully it does the job.

Starting to look like a bike

Yes the tires are flat, I just threw them on for looks. Also the fork still isn't finished, it's just sort of balanced there. I'm waiting for the postman to bring me some more pieces for my jig so I can finish it. I decided to leave it bare steel. I looked into it awhile ago and everyone says it's a bad idea but I was talking to Bruce Holt a few weeks ago and he mentioned how awesome it would be to leave it bare so I revisited the idea and I'm going for it. It'll be a little more work keeping it oiled but I'll be able to keep a closer eye on my welds (something I'm keenly interested in as this is my first build) and it really does look awesome. We'll see...

Starting work on the forks

I got my new fork bending mandrel in the mail this week. I sent my specifications to Ross Custom Works in Portland and whoever it is running that shop sent me this beauty.

After a couple simple modifications I'm ready to try bending my first fork blade. Everything I've read said that this can be difficult to get the hang of so I don't really expect to get it right the first time.

I put an extra blade inside the one that I'm trying to bend to give myself more leverage, the big thing here is making sure that the bend I'm making is aligned with the oval section of the tube.

It took quite a bit of back and forth between the mandrel and the drawing but I ended up with the curves I wanted in both blades, you can see in the last pic above that they're even and both are lined up almost perfectly with the oval sections of the blades.

And here are the blade ends with the dropouts brazed on.

Bicycle building

I guess this can be my personal bike building blog now. So here are some tubing blocks that Dave made for me. They let me clamp a tube in a vice without marring or crushing it. Pretty sweet right? I'm actually finished building my first frame but haven't finished the fork yet so it's not on the road. I'll post more pics whenever I feel like it since no one's going to see them anyway.

Back in this..

So the pic is old but not as old as the last post on this blog