Fork and Canti Bosses

I’m down to the home stretch on this frame and expect to be riding it in a couple of days (unpainted of course…that will come after some shakedown miles).

On Friday I built a fork using my new fork fixture:

It has 60mm of offset, which will give my bike a trail figure of 38mm when running 38mm wide tires. I used Alistair’s bender to bend the blades and think that the resulting curve is very nice:

The crown is a Pacenti Paris-Brest fork crown. I like the twin plate open look and it didn’t require much cleanup work. The brazing went pretty well, I got it a little hot around the tangs (you can see that in the burnt flux), but did well everywhere else:

I like to have a threaded boss under the crown for easier direct mounting of the fender. I made a tab which fit into the bottom of the steerer on the lathe, then drilled and countersunk it for awater bottleboss. This doesn’t stick out much at all from the crown and it provides a very secure connection.

I built a new canti jig using a short piece of 80/20 (1010 extrusion), the dummy axle holder from my fork jig, and stanchion block (part #5860). The big silver piece started as 120mm of 1″ diameter stainless steel. I machined in two grooves that are 7/8″ wide to center it in the stanchion block and milled flats (3/8″ thick) where the canti bosses are held. The holes are 80mm apart (perfect for all modern cantis) and hold the bosses while I braze them.

There isn’t much left to do on the bike. I need to sort out the cable routing to the rear hub and add some brazeons to the fork to hold headlight wiring. I expect to have it on the road by Thursday this week.

Rack building still goes on in my basement too. Rory came over yesterday and made this cool porteur rack that bolts onto his Vanilla’s pannier/handlebar rack. Click the photo for more:

5 Comments

  1. Alistair says:

    Alex, nice canti stud jig. I”ll be following suit on one of those soon myself.
    You nailed the fillets on the canti studs. Nice, well defined edges on the brass.

  2. AlexWetmore says:

    Thanks Alistair. They are some of the best fillets that I”ve made. I don”t know if my luck was just flowing, or maybe my new fuel (switching from propane to Chemtane) has something to do with it.

  3. rory says:

    thanks again for letting me use the facilities. now all i need is the bag!

  4. jimmy livengood says:

    Can”t wait to see the whole thing together and being ridden. I assume a rack will be made that uses those mid-fork bosses? Are those in typical low-rider location, or a bit higher?

  5. AlexWetmore says:

    They are higher Jimmy. To make racks which work with all of my bikes I need eyelets which are a constant distance from the fork crown. Mid-fork eyelets are usually a constant distance from the dropouts. I”ve chosen 140mm as my distance because that is what Rivendell uses.

    The bike will probably get another set of mid-fork eyelets for a low-rider rack as well. Those will be at 165mm. I”m building it up first though.