Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

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:

The next step in building my new bike is making a fork. To make a fork I needed a fork fixture. I built this one using 80/20 extrusion and a few simple machined pieces.

The design was influenced by two sources. Mike Flannigan (ANT Bike) posted this photo of a 80/20 fork fixture on his flickr a few years ago:

Jeff Lyon told me last year that he felt like fork jigs should hold the fork blades curving into the backbone of the jig, rather than away from it. That makes the dummy axle support a little more reasonably sized when building high offset forks.

This is what I’ve built:

You’ll notice that is is pretty similar to Mike Flannigan’s fixture. I consider it a workable prototype. There are a few tweaks that I’d make on the next one, but this is working well for me.

There are two major sub-assemblies here that connect to a piece of 1020 which acts as a backbone. On the left you can see the vertical dummy axle riser and dummy axle mounted to it. The dummy axle can be moved up or down to hit a target amount of offset. A scale should be added to indicate the amount of offset.

On the right there is a sliding assembly which holds the steerer tube and the fork blades just below the crown. This can be moved on the backbone as a single unit to build forks of different heights. It is locked in place using two bolts. That sliding assembly in turn contains a vertical support for the blade support and a steerer clamp. This photo shows the sliding assembly from a different angle:

The steerer clamp is made from 1030 extrusion (that is 1″ wide, 3″ tall). I machined off the top of the extrusion, making a V that can hold the steerer. There are bolts that run down through the extrusion to the T-nuts that lock it into the piece below it. The toggle clamp is attached using a small section of aluminum angle stock and a 1/2″ thick block which acts as a spacer.

The dummy axle is compatible with Anvil ones (so a nicer Anvil dummy axle could replace it in the future). It has a 2.5″ wide 1/2″ diameter center section. I made the dummy axle holder using a 1/2″ ball end mill to cut the grooves. It secures to a piece of 1″ wide 80/20 extrusion using a double T-nut. All of those parts are in the top of the next photo. It is important that the back of the dummy axle holder has grooves which can slide accurately in the 80/20 to keep everything square. They also must be centered to hold the dummy axle in the centerline of the extrusion.

The lower part makes up the fork blade support. This is some 5/8″ round extrusion which I milled slots that can ride in 1″ wide 80/20 stock. This is held in place with a single T-nut.

This photo shows how the dummy axle support fits together:

I have two vertical pieces of 80/20 on the jig and tried two different methods of attaching them. The one for the dummy axle has plates which clamp from the side. These are easy to work with and keep the vertical portion square to the horizontal portion:

80/20 also makes special fasteners which fit into a hole milled into the end of the horizontal piece. They are lower profile, but I found it more difficult to keep everything square when tightening them:

I’ll finish this up with a parts list. The parts list has a few corrections that I’d make to this fixture (like using plates in the photo above instead of the special 80/20 fastener).

All extrusion lengths are rough, being too long doesn’t really hurt anything. There is a drawing at the bottom which I think has the “ideal” lengths. My prototype jig was built using what I had on hand. The easiest source for 80/20 parts is the “80/20 Garage Sale” on eBay.They sell most of the stuff in the catalog and have very reasonable shipping (ignore the shipping quoted for parts, just put together a large order and they’ll email you a quote).

• 24″ long piece 1020 for the backbone.
• 2 pieces of 8″ of 1010 for the dummy axle and fork blade holder risers.
• 1 piece of 10″ long1010 for the sliding assembly.
• 1 piece of 4″ long 1030 extrusion for the steerer holder.
• Economy T-Nuts with 1/4-20 threading (style 3382):
• 2 for holding the sliding assembly to the backbone
• 1 for the fork blade holder
• 2 for the holding the angle stock which supports the toggle clamp to the steerer holder
• Double economy T-nuts with 1/4-20 threading (style 3280):
• 12for the side plates to hold the vertical supports
• 1 for the dummy axle holder
• Economy T-Nuts with #10-32 threading (style 3276):
• 2 for holding the steerer V-block to the sliding assembly. I recut the threads to M5×0.8mm pitch because I have many more M5 bolts than #10 bolts.
• 2 of the4166 joining plates for holding the dummy axle riser to the backbone. These plates have 6 holes and are rectangular. I think they’d work better than the triangular plates that I used (but I already had those on hand).
• 2 of the 3321 joining plates for holding the fork blade support riser to the sliding assembly. These plates are L-shaped with 5 holes. I think one hole could be cut off and they’d still be plenty secure.
• Roughly 1 foot of 6702 double keyed UHME sliding material. I cut this into 3 4″ sections. One goes between the steerer support and the sliding assembly. The other two pads go between the sliding assembly and backbone. This material is useful because it slides nicely and keys the sections together, keeping them in tight alignment.

Material needed for other bits:

• The bottom of the dummy axle support is 2.5″ wide by 2″ tall by 1/2″ thick aluminum.
• The top is 1″ wide by 2″ tall by 1/2″ thick aluminum.
• The angle stock for the toggle clamp is just 1.5″ x 1.5″ aluminum angle that is about 3/16″ to 1/4″ thick.
• The toggle clamp spacer is any stock that is at least 1/2″ thick and 1″ tall.
• The dummy axle is 5/8″ diameter 303 stainless steel.
• The fork blade support is 6″ long of the same 5/8″ diameter 303.

Here is my original drawing for this fixture (click for huge):

Building this does require a milling machine for making the dummy axle holder, fork blade holder, and for modifying the 1030 extrusion. I’d guess that this is about 2 hours of milling time for a moderately experiencedoperator. A lathe is necessary to make the dummy axle, but you could buy a very nice Anvil dummy axle instead of using a lathe.

We had spent the first halfof the day North Fork side of Glacier National Park. Bowman Lake, the North Fork Road, and theareas around them were beautiful. I had a cold, so we decided not to hike that day and just visit the area by car. Our stomachs were full of tasty baked goods from the Polebridge Mercantile store. It was only 2pm and we wanted to explore so more, so we decided to check out Red Meadow Road…shown on some of our maps, but not in the park itself.

This is one of the most remote areas in the lower 48. Polebridge Mercantile is the only store for around 40 miles, and most of those miles are dirt roads. It was the last day of November and we were in northern Montana.

The road started with a just a dusting of snow. The scenery was enjoyable and the road had enough tire tracks through the snow that it appeared to be getting some use. During most of the drive we were slowly climbing and the snow was slowly getting deeper, but it never seemed like more than a few inches. The views seemed like they’d always be better around the next corner.

At the 8 mile mark the road started going downhill and I thought maybewe had hit the high point.Instead we descended to a little creek and the road suddenly started to shoot up and the snow got deeper and softervery quickly. We tried to turn around, but it was too late and the car was stuck. It was around 2:30pm.

We spent about two hours trying to get the car unstuck. We did the normal things of “don’t let the tires spin”, but the wheels seemed like either they wouldn’t move at all, or they’d spin. We tried putting all sorts of objects from inside the car under the tires (digging out under the edges) to gain traction, with no luck. Homegrown potatoes (sorry David),the rack from my cycle truck (sorry me),paper grocery bags, floor matts from the car, broken sign remnantsfrom the road. They all had their turn under the wheels, but we were still stuck. We were 10 miles in on a remote road in a remote part of Montana.

It was going to get dark at 5pm, so we made the decision to stay the night in the car. I wouldn’t say that we were well prepared (if we were well prepared we’d have had chains for our tires, water purification tablets, a flashlight, sleeping bags, and other items), but we were in reasonable shape. We had a lot of food in the car (gifts from friends on our travels), lots of ski clothing, our cross country skis, and almost a full tank of gas.

Getting ready for the night meant putting on every piece of clothing that we had and moving things around the car to make it comfortable. The front seats in our Subaru go back almost to level and make passable beds. I had on three pairs of pants: long johns, then Ibex XC ski pants, then my snowboard pants on top. On my torso I think I had 5 layers of wool and a winter jacket. 3 hats were on my head. 2 pairs of Smartwool socks and ski boots on my feet. Christine’s outfit was similar.

Sleeping through the night was hard. We ran the car about once an hour to keep it and ourselves warm. We listened to Botany of Desire on my iPhone to pass the time (thanks Apple for building in useful speakers) and got sick of how much the book repeats itself. We both were thinking things that we didn’t want to talk about. What would happen if no one could help us get the car unstuck? When would our B&B in Whitefish notice that we were missing? What other techniques should I try to free the car? The night ticked by very slowly at first…8pm seemed like it took a day, and 10pm was another day later. Midnight was a huge success in my head because I figured that was about halfway to daylight. Between 1am and 5am I slept pretty well (minus the waking up every hour to turn on the car). At 7am I wondered if the sun would ever come up. By 7:30 we started to see a bit of light. We had to battle cold along with the time. At midnight it was just below freezing and snowing, but by 4am it was 17F and clear.

By 8am we were out of the car and ready to go. The ground had about 2″ to 3″ of fresh snow. The snow under the car had been compacted into hard and dense ice. Going to town was the only sensible option. We filled my backpack with the essentials: food, water bottles, spare gloves and hats, my wallet and the car keys. We thought we’d have to go about 8 1/2 miles back to the “main road” to find a car into town.

We started by skiing, but it was slow going.The few inches of fresh powder made breaking trail hard and we were skiing over uneven tire tracks. At the 8 mile mark we ditched the skis and switched to walking. Walking in the snow was easy, the fresh snow added some traction and the tire tracks underneath meant that we weren’t sinking deep into the snow.

The day was much clearer than our previous one and I found the walk to be enjoyable when I didn’t think about our situation. The sky was clear and the views were spectacular. We didn’t have a good idea of progress because the road was missing most of it’s mile markers. After hours we found the 3 mile marker and I felt elated. 3 miles to go didn’t seem like a lot.

We approached the intersection with the North Fork Road (“the main road” in our minds…although it only gets a couple cars an hour up here) at around 1pm. As we approached I saw a car pull out from a house and stop to leave mail in their mailbox. We were a few hundred feet away and jumped up and down and shouted, but they didn’t hear us. That was really disheartening.

We got to the main road and waited about 20 minutes. Just as we decided to walk down to the store (6-8 miles from here) a truck pulled up. It was the border patrol (we were about 10 miles from the Canadian border) and he gave us a ride into town.

Getting to the Polebridge Mercantile was huge.Flannery (one of the owners)quickly fed us and loaned me the phone to call a tow truck. Stewart (the other owner) stoked the huge wood fire stove. The store is the social hub for the surrounding 20 or 30 miles and I enjoyed being there in good company. I came in saying “We’re some of those tourists who go where they shouldn’t go and get their car stuck” and expected everyone to have a laugh at our expense, but everyone was friendly and supportive. Someone even commented on how well prepared we appeared to be (funny because Christine and I had a long conversation about what we wish we’d had). I learned that our B&B had noticed that we were missing at 5am and had called the Park Service and other agencies.

Acouple of hours later thetow truck came. Getting the car unstuck was an adventure and took a little over 3 hours round trip (+2 hours round trip for the tow truck operators…I’ll let you guess at the final bill). The road had about 3″ deeper snow on it at this point and what was reasonable to drive in on a Subaru was now tough on tow truck with twice the ground clearance. On the drive out I checked the odometer and noticed that our hike had been very close to 10 miles, not the little over 8 that I had guessed.

I think Christine had the worst of it by staying behind at Polebridge and waiting. She was nervous the whole time that the tow truck would get stuck and that I’d have to hike out again. When it got dark and we still weren’t back she was really getting worried, but just about that time we showed up.

The drive from Polebridge back to Whitefish was uneventful and by 8pm we were back in Whitefish with a little food and drink and ready for bed.

The End (sorta)

That isn’t really the end of my writing, but it’s the end of the story.

Christine and I debated writing about our adventures. It is pretty embarrassing to be one of those people who gets stuck. I don’t want my family (some of whom will read this) to worry about me next time I go out in the mountains. I feel really bad for the people at our B&B who spent a lot of time being worried and for the search and rescue people who were looking for us. I feel stupid for having gone on such a minor road without good topo maps or local knowledge or adequate supplies in winter and not turning around before we did. It was a human to make the mistakes that got us stuck, but I still feel stupid for having made them.

I feel very lucky that we were in a reasonably stocked car. I know what I want to add to it just in case, but I still feel lucky. We didn’t plan on this, or prepare for it, and the car was only well stocked because we were on a longer road trip. That is why it was luck.

I feel very lucky that the people of Polebridge Montana are so friendly. I can’t imagine a better bunch of strangers to get stuck with.

I am very lucky to have had Christine with me, and I think she is lucky to have me with her. I’ve been in one other similar situation, but I was by myself and it was much much scarier.

The experience has made me think about my other adventures. Even if I’m going for a mid-summer day hike we should have the basics to hike out from any logging road to a major road. Having people know where I’m going is important. There was a lot of comfort in knowing that the B&B knew roughly where we were and that we hadn’t come home. These are all basic rules that everyone hears many times during their lives, but this trip really drove it home.

Getting the car unstuck

The tow truck driver didn’t end up using the tow truck to unstick my car. He was able to drive it out, even though the wheels had been dug in really well. His trick is something that I need to remember.

Our Subaru has a turbo engine, and so the power can come on with a little delay (aka turbo lag). When I was trying to get the car out I felt like I could either get the wheels to spin (digging us in further) or not move at all. It was hard to get just a little traction to rock it out. To work around this the tow truck driver spun the engine up in neutral (getting the turbo going), then dropped it into gear and immediately jumped on the brake. Switching between forward and reverse with those little boosts of power, and with two helpers us pushing and lifting on the bumper, was enough to get it out of the holes and back up onto fresh snow. Then his really good driving skills (especially knowing exactly where every wheel was on the ground) allowed him to drive around the 4 holes made by our wheels and got the heading back down the road.

I had planned on doing this in 2 or 3 blog entries, but I’m running behind. That means you get one mega entry.

The frame is pretty much done. It just needs cable routing brazeons and rear canti posts. This is what it looks like in profile:

A set of photos for making the seatstays (mostly the caps). Ifound this to be more challenging than I expected. Things that I learned for the next time are to cut the seatstay a little shorter than I did, and make the cap longer. I also should have used thicker caps, I used .4mm thick tubing. That didn’t leave me a lot of room for error. At the end of the series you’ll see a pool of brass on top of the cap, that was to thicken it up a bit.

I made an M5 seatpost binder on the lathe and made this cantilever brake cable hanger too. I like the twin wire design, but enhanced it a bit by wrapping the wire around the seatpost binder. It is very strong, but light and delicate looking.

I was a little worried about tire clearance when I wrote my last blog entry. In response I made a tool for denting the chainstays and went at them. The dents aren’t too elegant, but they gave me a couple of extra mm of clearance and that was all that I needed.

I want a good fenderline on this bike, so I carefully measured tire height with three different tires and a test wheel. I set the bridge 18mm above the tread of the tire that I expect to use with fenders. That still left me pretty good clearance with a knobby (for riding without fenders). The fixture holding the bridge in place is called a “bridge jack”. There was a blurry photo of one in the Patarek manual and I couldn’t find one anywhere else, so I just made what I thought would work. I can adjust it’s length then lock it into place. It worked well for getting the chainstay and seatstay bridges equidistant.

This bike is being designed for a Rohloff internal hub. The Rohloff has three different options for a reaction arm to keep the hub from rotating. Lee Williams described how R&E used the OEM2 one (normally designed for disk brakes) with a hidden bolt inside the seatstay. My seatstays are very thin, so I added this bridge instead. I like how it looks, it is a lot more elegant than the normal Rohloff reaction arm (photo from an old bike at the bottom). The boss for the bolt head was made on the lathe. It is like a blind water bottle boss, but sized for an M6 bolt. The boss goes all the way through the bridge for extra strength.

The ugly black arm with holes is the normal alternative. I’d say that mysolution looks nicer.

A detail shot of how the eccentric works. I think that this is a little nicer than the normally fully slotted bottom bracket, and much nicer than using set screws:

A couple of blog entries ago I talked about alignment. Brandon Ives saw my photos and suggested making this tool instead of using a square. I call it a vertical dummy axle, and have to agree with him that it works well. The dummy axle just threads into the base. Right now I just have a dummy axle that is 10mm for rear dropouts, but when I make my fork I’ll also make a 9mm dummy axle for front dropouts.

A little backstory. If you don’t care then skip to the end.

About 10 years ago I built this internal gear hubbed commuter bike with a chaincase and generator light (I know the generator light is missing from the photo, but trust me that the bike had one…this is my only photo of it):

I got a lot of help on this project from Val Kleitz and the other people who worked at “The Bikesmith”, a fantastic shop that used to be in Wallingford. This was the first bike that I builtup with their help, but it wouldn’t be the last. During the 6 or 7 years that I shopped there Val spent countless hours chatting with me, letting me hang out and absorb shop talk, and helping me learn about bikes. I know that Val has touched a lot of the Seattle bicycle community in the same way. Hahn Rossman, who also worked at that shop, is the guy who told me about the Internet-BOB mailing list, which I now host. I kind of knew about it already and protested that I didn’t own a Bridgestone bicycle (after all the list is called the Bridgestone Owner’s Bunch). He said that didn’t matter and I should join anyway. He was right.

A few weeks ago I learned that Val has cancer. Last Tuesday night there was a party and fundraising raffle to help Val with his cancer. I bought a lot of the tickets sold that night, but the amount that I spent was barely a drop compared to the flood of learning that I’ve had from Val. It is also probably a tiny drop of what Val needs to get past this illness, but I hope that it is a little bit of help.

I think I bought less than half of the tickets, but I won most of theitems. I gave almost all of them back and asked for them to be reraffled. One item in particular (a pink Brooks Swift saddle) really wanted to go home with me and I won it twice in a row,but on the third time it figured out that it really should go live with someone else.

I did win and keep the big prize of the evening,a Surly Big Dummy frame and fork. This is the backbone of a serious cargo hauler. I’d keep it, but I like building my own cargo haulers and don’t have the room for one this large (it is about the same size as my tandem…we use the tandem a lot, so the Surly won’t fit).

The Details

This is what you get, a 20″ Surly Big Dummy Frame and Fork:

This is what it can turn into (photo linked from http://thebikelane.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/todds-big-dummy/):

I brew beer and those are homebrew kegs that he is carrying. 5 gallons each is 40lbs of beer, plus about 15lbs for the keg. That is a roughly 220lb load. My cargo haulers can’t do that.

I’m selling the Big Dummy for $650. $600 of that is going to Val to help his fight with cancer. $50 of that is going to Kent Peterson who keeps all of us amused (including Val) with great stories from the trail. The frame normally retails for $1050, but they are on sale right now and many places are selling them for $700. The cheapest price online that I can find is $609. I think my price is fair, and the money is going to a good cause. I promissed Val that I’d find a buyer who would use the Big Dummy and I hope to be able to live up to that promise.

I’d strongly prefer to sell this to someone in Seattle. I’ll even deliver it to anyone within 50 miles of Seattle. I know it can be shipped, but it is expensive to do so (about $100-150) due to the size of the box.

If you are interested please email me. alex at phred dot org.

John Speare has my old Cycle Truck now (giving me room in the basement to make a new one). As part of the deal I wanted to make a new rack for that bike. The original rack is long and narrow (20″ long, 16″ wide) and after riding that bike a lot I came to the conclusion that a short and wide rack would be better. This will encourage keeping the loads closer to the head tube, which is the key to carrying heavy loads and having good handling with that bike.

In addition to the size differences the new rack has also gained a U-lock holder behind the backstop and some cleats for holding die down ropes. I copied the cleats from Joseph Ahearne’s lovely cycle truck that was shown at the OBCA show a couple of weeks ago.

The old rack will be going on my next cargo bike, which will look a lot like the Cycle Truck except that the front wheel will be under the rack instead of behind it. It could look something like this:

The new rack is made out of stainless steel (316) and was my first rack made with the material. It is challenging to work with, mostly because brazing it is trickier. The bronze filler that I normally use doesn’t work with stainless. I tried three different fillers (Harris 45% silver, Cycle Design’s Fillet Pro, and Nickel Silver from Gasflux). In the end I used the Harris 45% silver on the joints which wouldn’t see high loads and nickel silver on the ones that would. The Fillet Pro was the nicest of the three to work with, but I have limited quantities of it and wanted to save it for my framebuilding projects. Nickel silver is very strong, but melts at a higher temperature and was harder to use. The fillets also don’t clean up as nicely. 45% silver is the weakest of the three, but easy to work with on stainless steel.

In the photos shown here the rack is just about finished. I have some cleanup work to do around the brazed joints (that will remove the smoky color near some of the joints).

The underside of the rack. You can see the 4 cleats as well as the 4 mounting points that hold the rack to the bike.

A closeup of one of thecleats. The rack has stainless water bottle bosses as mounting points, and the cleats screw into those.

An early photo of the lock holder. The final one has a second loop on the middle rail of the rack:

I’m delivering the rack to John a few days after Thanksgiving and will take some photos of it installed on the bike then.

The next step in building my frame is attaching the seatstays. Before doing that I needed to make sure that the chainstays were properly aligned. It will be much more difficult to correct axle alignment issues once my seatstays are attached to the frame.

Whenever I have the bike on the alignment table I double check the head tube and seat tube alignment. This is how I setup the bike:

The frame is connected to the table at the bottom bracket. The bottom bracket post is machined to be exactly perpendicular to the table, and the table is a flat reference surface. If the frame is aligned then it should all lie in a plane exactly parallel to the alignment table.

The first check that I’m doing here is comparing the plane of the head tube to the plane of the seat tube (I’ve already checked that the seat tube is square to the bottom bracket shell).To do that I’ve rotated the frame so that the head tube is over the alignment table and the bottom of the seat tube is also over it. My head tube is 33mm in diameter, while the seat tube is 28.6mm. To make alignment checks easier I put a dummy steerer inside the head tube (that has a 1″ or 25.4mm diameter) and then put a sleeve over the steerer which makes it 28.6mm in diameter. That looks like this:

The pointy thing coming down from the top is a scratch gauge. I set it’s height so it just barely touches the sleeve. When you draw it across the sleeve you can just hear it make a scratching noise. It is important to check both sides of the steerer to make sure that it isn’t twisted with respect to the seat tube. At this point in the build it would be very difficult to correct that, but when the frame was just tacked (before final brazing) it was easier.

Then I slide the scratch gauge over to the seat tube and compare it. In this case it is perfect, I also get just a very light scratching noise:

Now that we’ve double checked the front triangle alignment it is time to take a look at the chainstays. First I check to make sure that they are centered with respects to the seat tube. To do that I use this alignment gauge that I had made (I copied the design from Martin Tweedy) and a height gauge to hold it. In this photo I’m aligning the height gauge with the seat tube. Notice that the frame has been rotated on the alignment table to put the chainstays over the table.

This is what the chainstays look like when I slide the alignment gauge over. Clearly they aren’t centered:

The alignment gauge has steps for dropout spacings of 100mm, 120mm, 130mm, 135mm, and 145mm. This bike will have a 135mm Rohloff hub, so I cold-set (bend) the stays to make them work with the second largest steps:

Now we know that the stays have the right spacing and are centered on the seat tube. We haven’t checked to see if they are in line with each other. To do that I use a square placed on the table. This is how the setup looks:

This angle doesn’t tell us too much, but looking from above we can see that they aren’t properly aligned:

It just takes a little push to eliminate that gap.

On a final alignment I’d also use the Park dropout alignment tools to make the dropouts square with each other. I don’t need to do that at this point though.

The whole process is iterative. After every change I need to go and double check anything connected to what was changed. In the process of cold setting the rear dropout spacing I could easily bend the chainstay up so that the dropout is a millimeter or two out.

This is obviously only showing a little bit of the alignment process, but it covers the basics of how I use the alignment table. You can also see why a larger table would be nice. I have to rotate my frame many times to compare everything. A 2×3′ table allows you to check the whole front triangle or the whole rear triangle without rotating the frame. A 3×4′ table is enough to check alignment of the whole frame without rotating it. My table is 8″ wide by 32″ long.

Administravia first: A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Ibex Vim jacket. I actually raved mostly about the Dash Hybrid, which is an awesome jacket. I thought that the Vim would be very similar, but I’ve been using one for a couple of weeks (thanks to John Speare for loaning it to me) and I can report that it isn’t. The Vim is a much lighter jacket and nice in 50ish degree weather, but I don’t think I could wear it all winter long as I do with the Dash Hybrid. It also isn’t cut for cycling (the back doesn’t extend as far) and has no rear pocket.

Now onto the real news. I didn’t do much work on my bike frame this summer, deciding to spend weekends outside instead. I’m finally back at it, and got past what I expect is the most challenging part of the build. That was putting on the chainstays.

One minor note is that I fully rebuilt the front triangle for this bike early in the summer. I had some issues with the first one, but this new one has better brazing (thanks to a few key members of the framebuilders list who gave me good advice) and the geometry is right on.

This is what it looks like today:

I’d say it is starting to look a lot like a bicycle.

What follows is a photo essay of the chainstay work.

Checking the bends against BG101 to mark where I needed to cut the stays:

Using a slot cutting wheel on the milling machine to make slots for the rear dropouts:

Rear dropouts brazed:

Mitering the chainstay on the milling machine. This doesn’t look that sturdy, but the setup worked pretty well:

Testing the fit. It was critical that both chainstays were exactly the same length.

All brazed up. I used Fillet Pro from Freddy Parr to braze this. It is silver based (instead of brass), so the brazing took place at a lower temperature. This made it easier to use Alistair’s heat sink and resulted in less bottom bracket distortion.

A 50mm wide Pacenti Quasi-Moto tire fits with 6mm of clearance. I was hoping for a little more, but this is still pretty good. Most of the time this bike will run with ~40mm wide slick tires and fenders, but I wanted the option to fit 50mm knobbies for offroad riding.

I’ll do one thing differently with my next fillet brazed bottom bracket. Instead of fully brazing the dropouts into the chainstays first I’ll just tack them. Then I don’t need to worry about the chainstay length quite as much, because I could move one of the dropouts a little bit to tweak the alignment.

Remaining items before I have a bike:

• Fillet cleanup
• Seatstays
• Brazeons (canti bosses,cable routing,water bottle bosses, etc)
• Fork
• Rack

I’m hoping to push through in the next couple of months and wrap this one up by the holidays.

Jeff Lyon brought up the idea of making these a few months back, and now I’ve gone and done it. They are “mass produced” tabs for racks where the rack attaches to the bicycle frame. Everyone makes these one at a time and it is time consuming to make ones that look good.

They started with some basic sketching in CAD software that produced this:

I sent that off to Vashon Image Works and made a few tweaks here and there and then they turned into real pieces of metal.

I had 160 made in size small (designed for M5 bolts), 64 in size large (designed for M6 bolts, but with an M5 sized hole). Many already have homes to go to, but I have extras (mostly in M5) for sale. Both are made of 4130, the M6 ones are .125″ thick, the M5 ones are .100″ thick. If you are interested send me an email. The tabs are .400 wide to work well for 3/8″ tubing, but can easily be filed down to work with 5/16″ or 1/4″ tubing.

Winter is coming faster than I’d like to admit.

http://www.ibexwear.com/shop/product/1319/2866/mens-vim-hybrid-jacket

What’s awesome about it? The front is water and wind resistant and works well with the normal light showers that we get. The back is open wool which breathes well and vents really well. The weight is good for most of the winter in Seattle (I find it comfy from about 35 up to 55 depending on what I wear under it). It’s also great for cross country skiing.

I have two of these from previous years (the first was sold as the Breakaway, the second was sold as the Dash Hybrid). Then they stopped making them for a couple of years. This one looks similar to the ones that I have, but isn’t exactly the same. On the old jackets the inner lining of the front of the jacket is wool, while on this one it appears to be synthetic. I’m not sure if this means it will stink up more easily. The older designs also had a back pocket, this one has side pockets instead.