The Element MK1 frame is finished................almost!!!!

So after a relatively intensive fettling and brazing session the frame is finished.......almost!

I say almost because there is one task remaining - to re-shape the headtube which distorted during brazing - but more on this later!

So the first task was to add the "braze ons" to the frame, this includes the bottle mount bosses and cable guides.

Clearly in order to add the bottle bosses I would need to drill holes in the tubes - I'm not sure how established frame builders do this - whether they do it before brazing the frame together or not I guess is the question. I decided that I didn't know to a sufficient degree of accuracy where I wanted the bottle bosses before brazing the front triangle together - as such I ended up having to drill the holes after brazing.

This wasn't too much of an issue but I did need to purchase a special 90 degree attachment for my cordless drill to enable me to get in to the tight spaces - see pic below:

As it happens this worked a treat with my trusty stepper drill, after centre punching and centre drilling pilot holes first.

In order to position the holes I just taped bottle cages onto the frame where I wanted them and marked the rough centre with a permanent pen - job done!

So with the holes in the frame (and in the correct positions) it was time to braze them in - I think this was possibly the easiest and most satisfying job I have done yet on the frame build - they essentially brazed themselves on - all it takes is a bit of heat and the rod just capillaries into the gap - job done.

Next up was to fettle and hand finish each brazed joint and fill any pitts with new braze and re-fettle etc etc.

The finished (except for one final final polish scheduled for this weekend coming) brazed joints can be seen below.

And finally for a full shot of the frame.....

 
As described earlier, next up is to straighten the head tube and then carryout one final joint fettle and polish and then she will be going off to Brian Rourke cycles to be painted.

Bespoked News.....

This is a quick up-date on the Bespoked bike show in Bristol on the 13th, 14th and 15th of April this year.

Early bird tickets at a discounted rate are available now at the following link -

http://www.bespokedbristol.co.uk/bespokedvenuetic.html

Also this week I was sent a link to another website mentioning the new builders at Bespoked this year....

"Last year Bespoked showed off new framebuilders just starting out. This year some of the future talents include DMO Frameworks, Era Cycles, Ironworks, Libertine Bicycles, Oyster Bikes, Renwick Bicycles, Straits Dispatch, Sven Cycles, Teague Bicycles and Woodelo."

The full article can be found at the following link...

http://road.cc/content/news/72393-bespoked-bristol-2013-lineup-revealed

More details on the frame progress to follow very shortly.

Olly

DMO Frameworks is Official(ish).....

Hello there - I hope everyone had splendid Christmas and New Years celebrations - I know I did!

As a result of the festivities frame production slowed somewhat, however one cool thing to occur just before Christmas was the launch of the 2013 Bespoked Bristol website - on which DMO frameworks features!!!

Please check out the following link to find out more....

http://www.bespokedbristol.co.uk/bespoked-newbuil.html

This weekend I have been shaping the final two tubes - namely the seat and chainstay bridges.

I had thought this would be a relatively simple process however, as with so many aspects of making my first frame, this turned into a day of highs a lows.

The frame was all tacked up on the jig and then free air brazed using my bike work stand. Having made various steel monocoque chassis for cars (admittedly not out of tube so thin) I was aware of the capacity for structures to 'move' during joining however I had not expected the rear triangle to distort as much as it apparently had.

Looking back at the jig it turns out that the dropouts, although aligned well to one another, might not have been perfectly aligned to the front triangle. I think this error has crept in through me using wood for the main structure of the jig - which simply wasn't stiff enough to resist the loads applied to it during.

Anyway, enough of all that - please see the images below for today's progress - this week I will be adding the bottle bosses, the cable guides and doing any final fettling ready to send the frame off to paint next Monday.

BB thread tapped, final fit check done, frame fully brazed and logo released.....

Hello there,

well today saw me mainly trying to stay warm in the shed - what more of an excuse does anyone need to bust out the oxyacetylene and braze up a bike frame!!

However the first job to do was to tap the BB shell. The shell actually came threaded but during brazing various things get into the thread, such as hardened flux and bits of braze so its necessary to "chase" the thread out.

In actual fact it took more than a bit of chasing -  I ended up removing quite a bit of material. This was a bit worrying at first but regular checks during the process showed that all was good. So now, thanks to Mr Smith, I have a nice smooth BB thread - cheers buddy!

So I then installed the BB and cranks to check that everything fitted, ran smoothly and most importantly cleared all of the tubes - see pics below:

BB Installed - Mmmmm fillet brazed goodness

Crank to right hand chainstay clearance

Finally I have completed the DMO logo (see below) this is currently with Blade Engineering in Chippenham being water jet cut out for me in various thickness of stainless. This will then be affixed (brazed, glued, magic'd) onto the headtube.

So tomorrow should see the frame fully fettled, the chainstay stiffening tube added and the various braze ons, er brazed on.

She's alive!!!

So, all in all, quite an exciting day today....

My aim was to finish the fit of the seat and chain stay tubes, check the lengths and alignment and then tack it all up and fit a rear wheel to make sure everything clears.

Before tacking the rear end up I needed to fabricate brass ring inserts to go into the stays at the drop-out ends. The reason frame builders do this is to ensure sufficient brass is present in the joint. Normal 'tube to tube' joints don't require this because they have a close fit all the way around whereas the dropout joint has a big gap in it where the flat plate dropout slides into the round tube - see pic below:

To make these little brass rings I just used the bits of brazing rod which had become too short to use for normal joints and wrapped them around a round file which just happened to the about the correct diameter!
 

 

Now when you slide the dropout into the cutout in the tube there is already brass present behind the joint.

Once I had finished fitting the brass inserts into the stays I could then tack up the rear end - and at last I can really start to see the frame taking shape.

Next up it was time to take the plunge and fit a rear wheel to make sure it cleared and sat in the middle of the frame. As you can see below the wheel fitted ok and cleared easily. I think a bit of 'tweaking' will be required to get the wheel to sit in the middle of the frame - but as far as I can gather this is par for the course with handmade frames!

When desinging the frame I accounted for anything up to a 2.4" tyre, in hindsight its unlikely that I will use such a large carcass tyre and so I could have got away with being a bit racier on the chainstay length and generally tucked the wheel in closer to the seatube - a development for frame number two perhaps?

The original aim was to get the frame to be sub 2kg, however when I guesstimated the frame weight during the design phase I found it hard to get an idea of exactly how much the fillet brazed joints would add to the overall frame weight. The answer is a lot!! I have intentionally ensured that each braze has nice large radii and so they are possibly a little over engineered for the application.

Including the sliding aluminium drop-outs the frame currently weighs 2.3kg, however I am yet to fettle the headtube joint so this might come down a bit. This is a bit disappointing but looking at competitor frames (Niner Sir 9, Singular Swift etc etc) its about par for the course.

Next up I need to tweak the left rear seatstay and then fully braze up the rear end. Following that I need to get a seatstay bridge bent up and get that fitted then its just the odds and ends of cable and bottle mounts and it should be ready for painting!!

 

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!!

Day 3 - it's starting to feel a bit like ground hog day....

The plan for today was to braze up the main triangle and bend the seat and chainstays.

If there is nothing I've learnt since building my own frame its that there is a heck of lot of learning to be done!! I've lost count of the amount of situations where I've had to think about 5 steps ahead tyring to not make a mistake or the amount of things I've done, got wrong, done again and possibly even got wrong a second time!

Anyway I digress, today I continued to braze up the front triangle but I ran out of brazing rod - so I bent the stays - see pic below.

Shaping the stays really has made the frame feel like its getting there - tomorrow will hopefully see me finish off the front triangle and pop into Johns Bikes Bath to get the BB shell thread cleaned up. 

Once I have got the BB shell thread cleaned up I can install the BB and cranks and make sure everything lines up (and clears) before I get too carried away with brazing up the whole frame.