I'm a college "Drop Out" !!

This title is for Rachel who told me she loves puns on blog title entries. The last couple of days I've been spending time working on my drop outs. I love drop outs and I think some major style points can be gained in this department. I love it when the braze between the drop and chain stays/ seat stays look super crisp. Ive been trying to get mine looking legit but have had marginal success. They turned out much better then previous attempts but I have a long, long way to go.

I first started by cutting slots with a coping saw. If your good you can cut the slots at a slight angle so that your drops fit more parallel with the frame without having to bend them. Im not that adroit just yet and feel that I would be risking getting things out of whack by attempting that manuever so I just cut them straight.

The next step is to file the slots to fit the drop outs correctly. You want your drops to fit nice and snug so they're not moving all over the place when you braze. I used a file that closely matched the width of the drop outs to make them fit nice.

The next trick is to make sure that drops fit in the slots the same. I think I got it pretty close this time.
 Sorry about the shadow in the pic. I've got to improve my photography as well as my frame building.

Here's a drop out right after brazing it with brass. Working with brass is so much easier for me for some reason and I am much more confident with it then silver. I feel like I can really get in there with the torch and move things around where I want them. I tried to pull as much brass down into the seat stay as possible to get a solid braze.

After both drop outs were brazed and had soaked I began the clean up process. It's a little less scary then cleaning up the braze on the chain stays but I always expect to be one file stroke from finding a big gap or porosity in the braze. Luckily I ended up with some decent brazing and  not much excess brass had to be filed off.

In a perfect world I would have been able to braze the drops without getting any brass right above the top ends of the chainstays. But it happened and I felt like I would rather try to incorporate this mistake into the transition between drop out and chainstay instead of filling it out (since it happened on both dropouts). I think it will look fine after its painted but I really aspire to getting better transitions because they are aesthetically important to me.

The sharpie marks on the drop outs are indicating where my wheel will sit when the chain stays are in place in the bottom bracket. Hopefully by the next post I'll be brazing these guys into place and getting the wheel aligned nice and straight.

Seat Stay Caps

I think seat stay caps are a really important detail in making a bike look good. I personally like the caps nice and long and I really like it when they're made with inverted tubing.  Making the caps with inverted tubing is a little tricky but I think its well worth it in the end. You can get caps that plug into the ends of the seat stays and they're way easier and faster but I think making your own caps adds more of a personal touch to the frame. 

To make the caps I used a bench grinder to make an angle on the seat stays that was about 4.5cm long. Then I took a half round file that matched the circumference of the tubing I was going to use for the caps and filed a concave along the angle I cut.  I used left over head tube for the concave caps and made sure I filed the seat stays to except them as close as possible. I like using head tubing because its a little thicker and the extra material helps with shaping the cap. I brazed the caps on with brass and made sure I got plenty of fill along the edges. It looks like I went overboard with the brass but I just wanted to make sure I wouldn't have to come back and fill any holes or gaps.

The part I like best about making seat stay caps is watching them take form after you start filing them down. This is the third time I've made these type of caps and its been sort of nerve racking each time you go hacking away at these guys. But the more material I remove the less anxiety I have about screwing them up and they begin to work themselves out.

In the end they always look really sweet to me and I am glad that I put in the extra time and effort. On the next frame I would like to change it up and either try to have the caps wrap around the top of the top tube or maybe do some sort of fast back arrangement.

Head Tube Clean up & Frame #2

Today I spent some time cleaning up the head tube lugs. Before I started this I went back in and filled some little gaps with silver. I hate going back and having to do this and it always gets the lugs even messier so that there is even more to clean up. I really want to get better at brazing so that I can bang it out perfect first time.

To get the lugs clean I use a couple different files, emery cloth and sometimes a dremel. It takes me way longer then I would like get it clean because there is a lot of excess silver on and around the lug. I'll work on these some more later on to get them exactly how I want but for now I'll move on to cleaning the seat lug and bottom bracket.

This is a pic of the second frame I built when it was almost finished. If you look close you can see some excess silver under the seat lug and on the seat stay cap I still needed to take care of. You can  also see very clearly my disorganized ghetto work bench.

I set this frame up with a bunch of random components I had laying around so its not to cohesive in that department. I wanted to see how well it rode before I invested in any parts or a paint job so I just put it together with what I had. It ended up feeling really good and I have been riding it pretty hard for the last couple weeks.

 After I took it on a couple decent rides (10-20 miles) I was confident that it wasn't going to explode under me or anything crazy. I even ended up taking it to NYC last weekend and doing like 60 + miles  around the city and over the G.W. bridge to Jersey.  I think I'm going to ride it around a bit more and then hook it up with a paint job if she still treating me right. Maybe I'll even invest in a matching wheel set and brakes.

Brazing the Front Triangle

I did a really bad job documenting the brazing of the front triangle but hopefully next time I'll take more time and take pictures of the whole process. This is a picture of the frame after I had tacked the HT and ST lugs and was checking the alignment before I tacked the bottom bracket. I don't have a real alignment table right now so I've been using this big ass piece of granite counter top. I figured it was level enough to get a decent measurement off since they shave these things pretty flat.  I use a digital height gauge and 1-2-3 blocks in conjunction with the flat surface to check how my alignment looks after each tack.

The basic process I went through to braze up the front triangle this time was:

1. Drilled and pinned all the lugs in multiple places with 4d finishing nails.
2. Fluxed up the lugs really good with white Stay-Silv
3. Made sure the alignment on the HT and DT were as good as I could get them and then I tacked them with sliver
4. Checked the alignment after the braze then moved on to the HT/TT connection and checked alignment and brazed
5. Same process was done with ST lug connections
6. Final alignment check was done and then I tacked the bottom bracket in place.
7. After everything had been tacked I checked alignment again then re-fluxed the lugs and brazed them completely.
8. I let the frame cool down then soaked all the joints in warm water.

The process to align and braze the frame was my attempt to follow Richard Sachs method which he so graciously posted online recently. It seemed to really work well for me and I was able to get the frame pretty straight this time. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement on my part and so here is a list of the things that didn't go so well for me.

1. I definitely need to work on my brazing technique. The tacks I made were really difficult for me and ended up pretty messy in some places.  The final brazes went much better but I still need to work on getting the shorelines properly worked out. After I soaked the joints there were a couple of gaps in the shorelines that I'm going to have to go back in and refill.

2. Even though multiple alignment checks were made at each phase of brazing the frame did not come out as aligned as I would like.

3. I need to be more careful when shaping the lugs to fit my set of angles. There were some gappy spots from reshaping the lug that I thought would fill in fine but when it came down to it I had trouble filling them and pulling the silver to the shore line. Next time I need to make sure everything fits perfect before I braze.

The next step will be to clean up all the lugs with files and 40 grit emery cloth, go back in and fill the little gaps with silver and think a lot more about how I can improve on building up the front triangle.