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.