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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