Well it’s day 3 and things are really happening now. At this stage of the build I’m doing lots of small things that alone don’t take very long but once grouped take a long time.

First things first – it’s time to chase the threads and face the BB. This is a very important step as all alignment is based on those two faces of the BB being dead parallel. The frame will be held by the BB on the plate and it’s these faces that it holds onto and if they are off it’s like building a house with a level that doesn’t work. I face the BB to a tolerance of .001” and then it’s ready to put on the plate.

With the BB done I put the frame on the plate and set the dropout spacing to be even from centerline but wide at 132 mm. This will allow me to braze the chainstay bridge in and this should shrink the spacing down to 130 mm where we want it. You may wonder why I haven’t put the c-stay bridge in yet. This is left out until the end for two reasons. The first is that I want to be able to set the spacing as I need it to be and once the bridge is in it becomes much more difficult. The second reason is that it makes it much easier for my big hands to get in and do the BB fillet clean up work without the bridge being in the way. So I’ll be putting it in later.

The spacing is set and it’s time to clean up the BB fillets. The method is the same as before with a rough shaping, a rough sanding, a first sanding and then last a polish with the wheel. This part of the fillet work is by far the most time consuming. It will take about an hour to go from raw c-stay fillets to the fully polished and ready to paint fillets here. That may not sound like a long time but stand bent over sanding in a tiny area and it will give you a new appreciation of how long an hour is.

With the BB finish work in the rear view mirror it’s time to move onto 100 different little things. The first of which is mitering and brazing the c-stay bridge. I also install all the braze-ons and head tube rings at this point. Note the fancy tooling holding the braze-ons in place for brazing. High tech stuff here. Once the flux is soaked off it’s time for the final machining operations. I face the head tube and clean out all the threads.

Now it’s time for the final alignment. From here on out the methods are the same as they would be with a lugged or TIG welded frame and not fillet specific. The frame gets put on the plate and checked relative to the plate to be sure that the BB, head tube, seat tube and rear dropouts are all set to the centerline of the BB. This assures that the bike will track straight and true and that you’ll be able to take your vest off while riding no-handed without ending up in the ditch.

Once everything is checked to the centerline I use “H” tools to be sure that the dropouts are concentric and parallel to one another. This is to be sure that the rear axle isn’t loaded up when you tighten the quick release skewer which will let the rear wheel spin as it should and not wear the bearings due to misalignment.

Now it’s a matter of putting a calibrated wheel into the frame and checking that the wheel is vertical and pointed dead straight ahead. With that done the last step in the alignment is to use a dropout hanger tool to check that it is straight relative to the wheel and will place the derailleur properly.

The alignment now done it’s time to do the final bit of finish work. You may have noticed that the seat tube was left long during most of the build. There is a very good reason for this. When you braze the top tube and seat stays to the seat tube the heat can distort the top of the seat tube so that it becomes oval shaped – not good. But by leaving it long the extra tube supports itself and helps keep things round. At this point of the build I cut the extra off and shape it into my style of point.

Next I check the fit of the seat post and ream it out for a good fit to the seat post and then the binder gets slotted. For slotting I make two parallel cuts with the hacksaw and voila! I have a slot. Some final shaping of the top of the seat tube and deburring and the frame is done and ready for paint.

I hope it’s obvious that I have skipped more than a few steps. I did not include everything lest you get bored and I get tired of typing – but this should give you an idea of how I build a fillet frame.

The next and final installment will be the building of the fork and some good photos of the whole deal taken in the studio. Look for that next.

Thanks again for reading.

Dave

P.S. in my last post I used the word ‘ass’ a number of times. I forgot my Mom reads the blog so sorry Mom!

It’s day two working on the fillet road bike for the 2011 NAHBS and it’s going very well. Where yesterday was working with a few large tubes today was all about the fussier and smaller stuff used in the rear end of the bike. Or as my old partner in the lug shop at Serotta “Chief” used to say – “it’s time to add the ass end to this thing.” For what it’s worth, this is my favorite part of framebuilding. In my mind it goes from not being a bike to being one. I like that.

The first thing I need to do to add the ass end is to assemble the chainstays. This involves brazing the Triple F dropouts into the c-stays, doing the clean up work to those joints, mitering the c-stays to length and finally putting the small clearance dents into the stays to make sure we have enough room for a real tire and chainrings.

Brazing the dropout to the c-stays is done using brazing rings. I make these rings by wrapping brazing rod around a dowel of the proper size. The c-stays are prepared by cleaning them out on the inside and using a deburring tool to give the inside edge of the stay a slight chamfer. I then press the rings into the c-stays and they are held in by the spring tension. This set up allows me to invert the whole shooting match, heat the dropout ball and then flow the ring inside the c-stay. This makes for an extremely strong and simple joint with very little heat. Once the inner ring is flowed I add a small external fillet to blend the whole deal together and it’s done. And like the joints on the front end of the bike they are allowed to cool before soaking the flux off and doing the finishing and polishing. The lower end of the seat stays will be brazed to the dropouts in the same exact way when the time comes.

With the dropouts and stays happily married it’s time to cut the c-stays to length and miter them to fit the BB shell. I set these up in the jig with just a dummy BB shell to make it easier to see what is going on. After the c-stays are mitered it’s time to give them some shallow dents for clearance. These dents allow for fairly short c-stays while still having room for a 27 mm tire.

Then it’s time to clean them inside and out in preparation for being brazed to the BB shell. The cleaned and fluxed parts are assembled in the jig and then same tinning process that was used up front is done here.

Now I need to close the triangle by adding the seat stays. The lower ends are prepped just like the c-stays were and the upper ends are done mitered by hand to fit to the pinch barrel I brazed onto the seat tube yesterday. You may notice that I miter the s-stays so they hang off the back of the pinch barrel just a bit. It makes for a cool looking edge left there but that is not why I do it. It’s done because it makes for a nice acute angle inside the upper s-stay where is meets the pinch barrel which makes it easy to flow lots of brass inside to make a super strong, lifetime joint. I in effect fill the upper 2 mm or so of the s-stay with brass and it makes for a solid plug where is meets the barrel.

This all sounds easy as I type it out but it is very fussy to do. The stays need to be the same exact length as one another and have a perfect fit between the dropouts at one end and the barrel at the other. One file stroke too many and the tube is too short – not good I must say. Couple that with the fact that it’s a compound, offset miter and I can say it’s a challenge. Once to the right length I shape up the little points on top and clean up both ends and they are ready to braze in place.

Next up is cleaning and brazing/tacking the s-stays in place. I tack the upper end of the s-stay to the barrel with a small amount of braze just to hold it in place but I braze the lower ends to the dropouts completely.

Once this is cool the bike gets pulled from the jig for the last time. I do a quick check of the alignment and then fit the ‘brake bridge T’ to the frame. It is a T shaped tool that holds the rear dropouts at the right spacing and it has a hole at the end that will locate the brake bridge. With the T in place I miter the brake bridge to fit and do the whole cleaning/fluxing/brazing deal you’ve seen on the other joints. Having the brake bridge brazed in before moving on is super important. The brake bridge closes the triangle formed by the s-stays and makes the whole thing stable and rigid so I’m sure things won’t move around when I go to braze the upper end of the s-stays to the barrel.

Lastly for today – I flux up the rest of the ass end and lay the rest of the fillets. These fillets, at the BB and pinch barrel, are tougher to do with the limited space I have to work in. Not so much hard as fussy. Combine this with the fact that the flame from the torch will sometimes get caught in a cupped blob of flux, like when you rinse a spoon in the sink, and turn around and come back at you to try to burn your hair off and it can be interesting.

Tomorrow I soak off the flux, do some finish work and machining and add some more stuff to it and we should be close to having the frame ready for paint.

More then.

Dave

I think it was about 1985 or so when I got my first fillet brazed frame. I’d been racing BMX for years and was moving into mountain bike racing and ordered a custom Fisher. I didn’t know at the time that Fisher had contracted with the great Albert Eisentraut to build their custom bikes. I drew up the design (my first ever) and sent it off and some time much later the bike arrived. I’d never seen fillets like them before – so smooth and organic – and I fell for them. I knew little about how this kind of thing was done but I knew I wanted to be able to do it.

Flash forward a bunch of years and I now build my own fillet bikes and I’m proud to say that I’ve won the ‘Best Fillet’ prize twice now at the annual NAHBS event. I’ll be bringing a fillet frame to NAHBS again this year and once again it will be shown in the raw – sans paint – so people can see what they are really like in the flesh.

I thought it might be fun to document the building of the frame in this space and this is the first installment.

Before the actual construction of the frame starts all the tubes need to be laid out and inspected. I check to be sure that all the tubes are straight and that they weight what they are supposed to weigh (if underweight I know that the wall thickness is off). I also check for simple things like dents or defects at this time.

The building of a fillet frame starts just like the building of most any other frame with the setting of the jig and the mitering of the tubes to fit. I use a software program called BikeCad to produce dimensioned drawings that are used to set the jig as well as giving the lengths and angles the tubes need to be cut to. I feel strongly that it’s very important to get very tight and accurate miters of the tubes if one expects to get a straight frame. If the miters are not tight then it leaves room for the joint to ‘pull’ when the brass is added and cools. If care isn’t taken the frame can end up anything but straight and it can take some serious cold-setting to try to man handle it into alignment. I aim to do no cold setting so the miters need to be tight.

Once the jig is set and the tubes are mitered and set in place I’m ready to start hooking stuff together. Before I can braze anything together I need to clean everything well, both inside and out, and rough it all up using 80 grit emery cloth. This will ensure that the brass will ‘wet out’ as it should and that I get a lifetime bond. With everything cleaned and etched I set up the seat tube and BB shell in the jig and ‘tin’ them. Tinning is the first part of the fillet process and it’s just a simple brazing operation where I flow brass into the joint and space between the tubes. In this case I braze the seat tube to the BB shell and the pinch barrel to the top of the seat tube (I’ll be attaching the fastback seat stays to it later).

While this is cooling I prep the rest of the main tubes and get them ready to add to the seat tube. The tinning process is just the same as it was with the seat tube to the BB shell. The whiteish paste covering the joints is brazing flux that is an acid that cleans the tubes as they are heated and allows the brass to bond to the steel as it should. The rest of the tubes are loaded into the jig and I completely tin each of the joints one at a time. Once done, they take just a few minutes to cool to the touch.

Once cool the front triangle is removed from the jig and placed into a Park repair stand that allows me to spin and position the bike as I’d like to do the brazing. It gets a fresh coat of flux and then I start brazing. The actual laying of the fillets takes about 35 minutes or so. It always seems like it takes no time at all as I end up so focused while it’s happening. The laying of the fillets becomes one of those autopilot kind of things where I run on instinct and little conscious thought occurs. I really enjoy it.

You can see in the photos what the fresh and still hot joints look like. They are covered in a glassy coat of melted flux that makes it a bit harder to see what is going on. Once cool the joints are soaked in a very hot water/corrosion inhibitor solution to soak the flux off. This takes awhile – maybe 20 minutes per joint. This is a good time for an email check and bathroom break before getting back to it.

Next come the time consuming part – the finish work. I do it in stages starting with the most aggressive and getting milder as the process goes on. You can see the stages in the photos starting with the raw joint and ending with the fully shaped and polished joint. The first stage is roughing the shape with a hand file. If I’ve done my brazing job well there is little to do here and this goes very quickly. Next is ‘file backed emery’ which is just like what it sounds like. I use an old worn out file to support 80 grit emery cloth to further refine the shape of the fillet. Next comes the use of the ‘3^rd thumb’ tool. Yes it’s a high tech device consisting of some rubber tubing shoved over and old round file. It’s soft and allows for a smooth contouring of the fillet. This is now more a polishing act and less of a shaping one. The next to last step is to use narrow strips of emery cloth to further polish and blend the joint and the final step is to use a rotary brush in a drill to give the joint some shine. Frankly I don’t really care about it being shiny but the shine makes any defects really stand out so I can go back and work them some more. The various joints take different amounts of time to finish. A simple head tube joint takes about 12 minutes from start to finish. There is lots of room tom work on these and easy access so it goes really fast if the brazing is clean. The bottom bracket can take a sold 40 minutes or so because some of the areas are harder to get at and are concave in nature.

You can see in the photos what the finished fillets look like. It’s pretty damn hard to take good photos of the finished and polished fillets as there is nothing for the camera to focus on but you’ll get the idea.

You no doubt noticed that I’m building just the front end at this point and that it has no braze-ons. This is for purely pragmatic reasons. I work on the front end first and then add the rear because it makes it much easier to work on. It’s just a much smaller and easier to handle thing to deal with in the vice. I’ll leave the braze-ons off until the end for safety reasons. When I am doing the work with the strips of emery cloth it is being pulled hard and fast over the joints and it sometimes breaks. I can tell you from personal experience that if it breaks and I rake the back of my hand over a split cable guide things get really messy, really fast. So I leave them off until all the fillets are finished.

The next step is to prep the tubes to be used in the rear end of the frame and to add them to the front. That will be our next installment.

For what it’s worth – this frame is being built just fort the show and does not yet have a home. I’ve included the BikeCad image so you can see the sizing. If you think it might work for you and are interested in purchasing it please contact me. Once the show is over it will go to Joe Bell’s for the owner’s choice of paint.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with more later.

Dave

I stumbled across this and had to share -

Dave

Mind twisting

Details that is – do they really matter?

I think many would argue that no, they don’t. I think some would say that all the fussing over the details borders on fetish and that too many people concern themselves with the minutia of framebuilding to the detriment of the big picture. I suppose for some that could be true.

At the same time, to me, the details are immensely important. I love the details. They are what I focus on once the big picture, important stuff is in the rear view mirror. In fact if I wasn’t allowed to fuss over the details then I think I’d find another line of work. The work just wouldn’t be interesting enough and the focus shifts from making the bike in the vice just right to getting the bike in the the vice out the door so the next one can be started as soon as possible. I feel the strong need to live and work in the moment and to not be thinking about getting this one done so I can start the next – and so on. It’s zen-like I suppose this ‘work in the moment’ deal, and for me it’s very satisfying.

I’ve had builders and customers alike ask me why I fuss over things that no one will ever see. Why do I concern myself with the tightness of a tube mitre or the straightness of a pair of water bottle bosses? Why worry about getting lugs lines as crisp as possible when they will only be covered by paint and the customer will not see them? Why spend so much time doing this stuff when in the end it doesn’t ‘matter’? Well to be blunt I don’t do it for my customers – I do it for me. Selfish I know but there you go. I do it purely for my own enjoyment and it keeps me excited to walk up to the bench after over 22 years. Knowing the bike is as good as possible in every way before I send it out the door makes me smile and feel proud of the work. I work toward making each bike as good as possible and then making the next one better still. I know that I could make more money if I changed the way I do things but I also know I would enjoy it all less. It’s not worth it to me in the long run.

So to answer my own question……….. do the details matter? Yes, to me they do. I hope they do to you too and that you understand.

Thanks for indulging me.

Dave

It took much too long to get my computer issues worked out but with a new machine on my desk and a new router I’m back to rolling along again. So now I can play with photos and work with BikeCad and all that good stuff.

I’ve been working on a JKS the last few days and it’s going very well. I’ve included a number of photos of the building progress and its status as of this afternoon. I’ll be finishing this bike up this week and then diving into a fillet frameset for the show.

It’s good to be back. Thanks for reading.

Dave

Computers are funny things. When it’s working as it should I feel like I’m not to dependent on them – and when they act up, as mine has been doing, I get really frustrated and realize I can’t do much of my job without one.

It’s working at this very moment so I’ll try to get a post in. I’ve been working on a lugged road frame that is headed to Taiwan and the frame is done and the fork is in progress. I should have the whole thing done and off to JB tomorrow and then I’ll start working on the last show bike.

The last show bike will be a fillet frame that will be shown sans paint. I like to show a raw fillet frame so that people can see what it likes like under the paint. This frame is just a gleam in my eye at the moment and has no home yet so I have no idea what size it will be. We’ll see………..

Thanks for looking.

Dave

Happy New Year.

With the holiday break in the rear view mirror it’s time to wrap some stuff up in the office and get back to building bikes. I’ve had a nice diversion in working on my show booth – shipping crate over the last week and it’s about 90% done at this point. I need to do a bit of final work on the shelves, lighting and floor surface but the bones are all there and it should all come together pretty quickly at this point. It’s been a lot of work and no small amount of money but it will be worth it in the long run as I should be able to use the same crate for a number or years. I look forward to next year when all I need to do is  pull it out and load it up and be done with it.

But now it’s time to get back to the bench and do something I feel good at (I am not a woodworker – the stuff as a mind of its own) and get the next few bikes going. Be looking for the next bikes in this space soon.

All the best,

Dave