Grab your coat

A surprise update!

After the last update I got to pondering the fact that the Pogward was starting to look really quite tatty..... the rust was getting worse but not worse enough that it became awesome, and overall it was looking kind of bland. 'Sod it' I said, it needs some loving, and in extremely short order this happened;

A complete Pogward, Thursday last

One hour later

I then brazed some extra bits onto the rack

So my pannier lower catch had something to catch onto

Some potentially, but not actually, awesome rust

More of the same

So I had decided that powdercoating was the order of the day, as it has worked out very well on my lovely wifes' Mixte, so I took the frame to the same place, Elite Powdercoating. I got the call and picked it up 3 days later, and they have done a fantastic job;

A halogen induced misrepresentation of the frames true colour

Frogmouth MkII is excited with his new protective layer

Nicely masked parts, the boys at Elite obviously cared, which I like

The rack and stem

The modicum of work I put into cleaning up the lug joints has paid off handsomely

Mmmmm nothing like a well defined lug

Our kitchen bench - the boss was out obviously

My favourite part of the frame

Having the finished frame back home was so exciting that at the first available minute after my familial tasks had been completed, I headed straight out to the garage. I pretty much finished putting the bulk of it together that night. Foolishly, with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy with his first stick mag, I decided to go for a test ride without checking everything..... unfortunately I had not tightened the steering so within half a meter I had dumped myself on the driveway, skinned most of my knee and twisted my ankle - what a dick. Fortunately there were no scratches to the bike, but I had to drive to work the next day and have been slightly hobbly for the last few days. Anyway, here is the preliminary results of my travails;

Personally I think that looks fantastic, it has lifted the whole look of it. I am not 100% convinced about the coloured stem, but it's not too distracting, so we will leave it to brew. The colour is a charcoal with a metallic flake, very pretty up close.

I also filled the tubes with this stuff as I figure it will add to the overall longevity.

There is a bit more loving to apply, but this should be done by next weekend.....

Lazy Eyes, Real Work Commences, a New Bike

It has been fourish weeks since the last proper work on the frame, and for good reason; I have just  had my eyes lasered. This involved wearing my glasses instead of contact lenses for two weeks prior to the operation, which made it hard to wear dark glasses for brazing, and then two weeks of being careful about my eyes; ie, not brazing and filing and grinding stuff.

The first two weeks wearing the glasses was actually the hardest to deal with as I am (was!) particularly blind; 7 diopters in one eye and 6.75 in the other, which basically means I was so blind I could not really even read a book without holding it millimetres from my face. My vision was ok with contacts but wearing glasses it meant I had virtually no peripheral vision, and the glasses lenses were so thick that I would get a form of light dopplering at the sides of my vision where lines of contrast would either red shift or blue shift. Disturbing to say the least, but at least in idle times I could imagine I was a spaceship.

Anyway this meant that for two weeks I basically could not trust my vision to tell me that things were the way they actually were, and so I thought it best to leave off work on the frame for the duration.

The actual Lasik procedure was pretty quick and painless, the only stressful bits being; 1. Having your eyes speculumed open. 2. Having the front of your corneas cut off. 3. Smelling the bits of your eye being vaporised by the laser. 4. Watching the nice doctor brush the cutoff bit of your eye back on.

For a day it felt like a little gremlin had dried out your eyes with a blowtorch and then liberally sprinkled finely chopped glass fibers in there just for good measure, but I had drugs to deal with this. Overall it wasn't too bad really, and well worth the blood loss from where my fingernails cut into my palms.

So now I am back on track I have fearlessly dived into the actual frame build. This weekend I brazed the head tube to down tube joint, seat tube to bottom bracket and the chainstays to dropouts;

A bit wayward with the quantity of silver, nothing that endless hours with a riffler won't fix.

A better effort.

Another unnecessary view of a better effort.

After I washed the flux off, clearly the skills have not entirely deserted me...

It was hard to get enough heat into the dropouts without toasting the tubes, I think it went ok though...

Now I just need another fill of oxygen to proceed, those little tanks do not hold many hours worth.

As indicated I have purchased a new bike, which you have probably guessed is a Surly. This is a Disc Trucker, which the disc braked version of the Long Haul Trucker. I bought this because it seemed to be the only steel framed bike in the size and geometry that I wanted.

A Surly Disc Trucker last week.

All I wanted was a decent bike that I would be able to do long rides involving hills, but this thing has far surpassed my expectations. It is so comfortable and responsive that having had it for a day or so I actually braved going up Dyers Pass Road. The first section up to the Sign of the Takehe was frankly rather ugly, it wasn't so much a granny gear I needed but more like a crematorium gear. I made it eventually, with many pitying and slightly worried looks from the walkers passing me, I think because my breathing sounded like someone was felling redwoods with a handsaw.

Thankfully from that point on things got significantly easier, so much so that I also took in as much of the summit road heading towards Sumner as I could, and I was rather disappointed to realise that the road was closed. That was a good ride and bedded in the squeaky front brakes quite nicely.


Since I took that picture I have bought a Topeak rack and some Phillips panniers and handlebar bag, so it looks pretty industrial. I have been using it for commuting for the last two weeks as well because it makes every other bike I own feel floppy and uncomfortable. This does nothing for my FCN but it is so easy to get the power down I am scalping pretty well regardless. When the frame goes together I will be trying to replicate how I sit on this as it is so nice.

I think I am in love.

A Circumhorizontal arc, Mammatus, and a set of forks

At last the long awaited Himalayan-like pinnacle of frame building has arrived, actual brazing!


Well actually I achieved silver soldering, as I simply could not get what I considered to be a satisfactory joint with brazing, a situation entirely due to a lack of skill on my part no doubt. After the abortive practice joints with the brazing rod I went and purchased some 45% silver rods and some flux (at great expense I will have you know) and after a few significantly more successful practices I set to work with steely determination and not a little cold sweating...

I did the fork crown to steerer tube first, probably the hardest joint to do due to the thickness of the metal parts - and this was extremely stressful as a result. I must have not put enough heat in the flame, or not had the correct joint clearance, or some other obvious bollox up, because it took ages to get the silver to wick through, and I actually thought I had blown it at one stage and pretty much gave up. I then cleaned the joint and saw that in fact the silver had penetrated the joint pretty well - not 100% all the way around, but thoroughly enough so that filling again it from the underside has given what I think will be a strong enough joint. I have already been thinking about the second set of forks with a triplane crown and smaller radius bends, so if it is no good then I will bin them and put it down to experience, but I am pretty confident these will be ok.

I also managed to get silver pretty much everywhere, and spent a fair chunk of time cleaning all that off. This gave me an excuse to buy some more tools, to be exact a set of rifflers.

So all that happened in and around Christmas, so yesterday I decided that having a wee jig for the brake bosses would be a good idea, I threw this together pretty quickly out of random parts that were lying around, and the bosses got attached today;

All through this I spent a lot of time cleaning up the resulting joints, but clearly it is starting to come back to me as the brake bosses required fairly minimal clean up work;

If I didn't know any better, I would say that these look like a fairly convincing set of forks....

One day just before I went on my Xmas break we had a very rare and unusual cloud formation appear in the skies, and I tried to get a decent picture of it with my non existent photography skills;

It is Circumhorizontal Arc, or Fire Rainbow, and was really spectacular. We get a few unusual clouds in this area of the world, I took this photo of Mammatus clouds a few years ago;

 

Next job (apart from my new career as a world famous nephographer) will be actually welding the frame - aaaargh.

I have a few things to get out of the way first, so don't be looking for rapid fire updates, but I promise more progress very soon

In other news I have pretty much decided to sell the copperbike, this comes about because I thought one way to reduce the incredible amount of fat around my belly would be to go up the port hills and therefore use more calories than can be replaced by my regular beer drinking. Needless to say I failed due to me nearly always riding on the flat and the lack of available gears on the bike. There are a few functional issues based around my physical limitations as well, so I will sell it to fund the purchase of a Surly LHT. This has many gears and hopefully a better riding position... we shall see.

The mostly fitted Frogmouth MkII

A short but sweet update today as not much has been occuring - due to me basically falling asleep at every available opportunity and having little motivation to stand in a frigid garage with only the awesome weirdness that is Radio Ferrymead for company.

However, two nights ago I decided that I had better show willing for the sake of my vast internet audience (Hi Jones!), so I dragged myself down the hallway, and a remarkable thing happened....

Somewhere in the weeks of sickness I had totally forgotten about the actual, genuine pleasure that comes from removing little shavings of steel from tubes. There is something about the almost trancelike state and total focus that you achieve (mostly due to the fear of rushing and bolloxing it up admittedly) that makes the process such an incredible pleasure. The wee pile of filings that grow, the tangy curl of smoke you sometimes get during a filing stroke, the careful edging towards the right cut depth, it all contributes to the state.

But as much as anything there is the feeling of rightness that you are crafting something. It is not anything like the short term pleasure of buying a new gadget, you are actually creating the thing the you intend to use, and hopefully building genuine quality into it. If only more of life could be like that.

Anyway, enough misty eyed reflection, I am starting to sound like Mr Pirsig;

Clearly some more shaping and fettling of the dropouts is needed, and there are multitude of bits still to make, but goodness me that is looking very framelike.

The Frogmouth MkII

The dropouts took quite a long time to get made, this is probably because I paid very little actual money to get them done, so this restrained me from ringing on a daily basis and chivvying things along... And this did not matter as it happens, because I have not been in anything like good enough form to do anything about it even if I had them to mess about with. The reason is that I had a serious bout of man flu. Usually in these circumstances I get about as much sympathy as one of the cats does when it has puked on the floor, but as my temperature peaked at 39.5 degrees I could point out that it probably wasn't psychosomatic, and that a wet flannel applied to the forehead just might help alleviate the hallucinations...

It took a full week before my consciousness felt like my body was something that it might think about inhabiting again, and today was the first day in a week and a half that I actually felt well enough to spend some time in the garage...

But to start, before I fell ill I did actually finish the fork jig;

And today I found myself contemplating this;

I had the basic shape machined out, but I still needed to drill and tap the axle adjustment and rack/guard threads. The trusty Grayson and it's plethora of attachments came to my aid;

I had to take all that very carefully as the steel was pretty hard and I was totally paranoid about breaking off a drill or a tap, fortunately things went swimmingly if a little slowly.

Once all that was done I gave the seat and chainstay tabs a bit of a tweak to align them to the tubes;

By which time I was pretty much shattered and had to come in for some tea and a drop of some very fine local beer...

Next job is to make the seat stays and chain stays fit the frogmouths. I have been wondering what to do with the top of the seat stays, I am deeply in love with the stays on this Sizemore;

But a straight copy of this would not exactly be stamping my mark of originality would it? I have a nebulous plan forming in the back of my mind as to what this could be, but we shall see in the fullness of time.

Die MIFA fahrrad, und mehr Fahrradgabel jig

It has been 3 weeks since my last post, amazing how time gets out of hand. I have not been completely idle, but there has been sickness, drunkenness, coldness and laziness to distract from the main event..

One of the more useful distractions has been this thing, which I got as a freebie along with the Gazelle. It has been languishing in bits in my garage, but I thought I had better put it together and see what the story was, and was pleasantly surprised with what resulted;

It is German and probably from the late 40's/early 50's. Hard to tell as there is not much info out there. Actually there probably is and I should clarify my position here; after 4 minutes of googling, not much info turned up. I imagine speaking German might help in this search though. It has some interesting features - square taper cranks for a start, and a sweet clampless attachment for the coaster brake arm. The tyres say 28 x 1.75, but english 28" tyres do not fit, so I assume it has 28"/700c or some deeply strange European variation thereof. The original German made tyres were still in basically functional condition, so I left them on. It also required a 24mm seatpost, so I had to make one to suit as this was missing. Making this has taught me no end of interesting stuff about my lathe and the auto feed....mostly that engaging the fast and slow feeds at the same time is a bad idea, and how to replace shear pins in the drive for the auto feed..... oops.

The Mifa was way too small for me so I have since sold it to one of the tweed boys, hopefully it will give good service.

And onto the framebuilding. A very nice man called Shaun lent me the Paterek DVD's, which made for some hours of fascinating watching. The main result of this was half a day spent die grinding all the lugs to give the correct clearance to the tubes, and a much clearer idea of what to do and when to do it during the brazing process.

Now, a couple of weeks ago the fork jig fairy visited me in my sleep and pointed out that quite a few weeks had passed since I had received the fork jig, and that there was little sign of me actually using it to braze forks with, and (very nicely) asked for it back so he could use it to sort out the backlog of forks he had to build. He made some quite valid points, so I obligingly handed it back. I then got to thinking how nice it would be to have a fork jig of my very own, and then I got to thinking about how sweet it would be if it were part of the frame jig itself.

So today I spent some quality time with the Grayson and ended up with this;

Now I just need to spend a few more hours sorting out the axle attachment, which I will try to make adjustable so that other fork geometries can be built as well...

One of the reasons for slow progress has been the new dropouts. I decided to make these out of 4130 chromoly, and after a wee bit of investigation I found that P20 tool steel is a subtype type of 4130. This is a good thing because P20 is a very common material used in injection moulding tools, and in the course of my work I have quite a lot to do with this sort of thing, and indeed I know many toolrooms that have stacks of it lying round. After some discussions with my favourite machine shop I decided that it would be best to get them to CNC the dropouts for me, because they would then be exactly right first time... and these should be ready on Monday, I can make then make final prep for brazing. I am probably going to hire a gas plant over the weekend, so I would like to get everything ready and do it in one big hit.

Actually building this thing is getting scarily close...