Hand built bespoke bicycle frames in the heart of the Wiltshire countryside - dmoframeworks@gmail.com.
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Friday 23 November 2012

Day 4, more learning, a couple of mistakes, but the frame is together.....

So today started with the relatively simple job of shaping the chainstay ends (the tubes for which were bent yesterday).

The right hand stay went pretty straightforwardly - and then I got distracted...

At the top of the seatstays the bend radius is quite tight, as such the tubes "crimped" and buckled a little bit. I had been wondering what I could do to remove these unsightly dents when I realised that I could potentially use the seat-stay bridge to hide them. 

Well that was it, full steam ahead on trying to bend a tube to an internal diameter of 75mm - so a test was in order.

I picked up what I thought was a scrap piece of tubing and merrily went to heating it up with the oxyacetylene and trying to get a nice bend - little did I realise that this was the pukka left hand chainstay!!!

After some shouting and looking at things to make sure I had just dropped a clanger I came around to the fact that this was the first set back I had had while making the frame - which wasn't too bad considering. And, when I thought about it, I wasn't overly happy with the chainstay as it was - so I set to remaking it - while doing which I learnt a valuable lesson.

I remade the stay and it lined up really well with the drawing, but then when I overlaid it with the existing stay (the one I didn't take a torch to) it didn't match that well - it was at this point that I realised, it would be much easier to make one tube and then just make the second one to match the existing tube - and not necessarily to the drawing. This way you end up with two perfectly matching tubes.

Anywho - enough of all of that - I then shaped and fitted both sets of stays and set to finishing the fillet brazes on the front triangle - see pic below:


Tomorrows plan is to add the lightweight pockets to the left hand drop-out and then tack up the rear end - if all goes according to plan I should be able to fit a rear wheel and tyre tomorrow to check for clearances etc - cheers Neil for the loan of a wheel equiped with a mud tyre!!

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