I will be bringing 3 bikes with me to the Bespoked show in April. I am building two new frames, one is going to be very similar to the original Element and one is going to be a 29er+.
These new frames will be accompanied by the now rather bedraggled looking original Element frame - which by now has done over 1000 off-road miles.
A 29er+ is a "FAT" 29er which is able to fit 3.0" tires. The main design challenges with any 29er frame is fitting everything into the rear triangle, a 29er+ just exacerbates this issue whilst tyring to keep the wheelbase sensible.
The image below shows a 29er+ tire on a carbon Niner fork - there is just about an 1/8th of an inch clearance - definitely time for some helitape here!
In order to minimise the wheelbase you need to tuck the rear wheel in as close as possible to the seat-tube. However you also need to have sufficient clearance to the front sprocket. To help with this I have designed a custom steel chainstay yoke - see below:
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| Custom yoke, waterjet cut by Blade Engineering in Chippenham |
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| Here's hoping the finished frame looks something like this! |
The version of the Element 3 I'll be taking to the show will be TiG welded, however the new Element frame I'm building will be fillet brazed - here is the BB shell to seat-tube braze.
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| Here is the Element Number 2 frame - the first for a real customer!! |
So that's where we are up to at the moment, there has been some significant brazing learning over the last couple of weeks but I'll up-date you on this in the next post.
Until then, thanks for reading!!
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