3...2...1...blast off!

There it is. The new 15' exhaust stack is up and working perfectly. The duct is 24" in diameter so the rain hat needed to be 36" is diameter to effectively keep out rain and snow. Between this project, funerals and illnesses my time at the bench making frames has been limited this last 2.5 weeks. Yikes! Oh well, that's family life.

Davis fork crown

This is a Davis sand cast fork crown from the 50's. The first two pictures show the crown in the untouched state. The crown is pretty crude to begin with. I refer to these sand castings as lumps of coal. It takes a great deal of labor to make them presentable. These castings make me appreciate the quality of investment casting. I wouldn't want to work exclusively with sand castings but occasionally it's fun.

I didn't like how the groove looked on this crown so I filed it with brass. Since the fork will be silver brazed the brass won't melt when I heat the crown up again during construction. You can see I removed a lot of steel in coming up with this shape. Additionally I thinned out the crown a great deal. I will thin it more after brazing up the fork.

Paint class

I'm back from my painting class now. I won't bore you with the countless photos of my squirting paint but the first picture gives you the idea. I'm spraying on primer. The rest of the pictures are of one of the frames. I couldn't get the lighting right to show the green pearl. The frame looks primarily white but in the right light there's green iridescent sparkles within the clear coat. It's subtle and really nice.

Polished crown

Here's a couple of pictures of Frank's stainless steel fork crown after polishing. The pictures don't really capture the shine very well. I need to work on my photo skills. The other two are photos of his fillet brazed stem. The stem will be painted to match the frame. I'm taking this frame and stem along with Pete and Tom's frames and forks to a frame painting class this next week at Doug Fattic's shop. Doug is an excellant builder, painter and teacher. The class will shorten my learning curve a great deal. I'm very excited. I won't be in the shop from March 15-23 and I doubt I'll access the internet until I return.

Tom's club racer

This is another club racer. I know Independant Fabrications has a model called a club racer too but the term "club racer" is an old one. So I don't feel like I'm ripping their idea off. Besides, they don't do lugs. This bike, like the previous two, is designed around standard reach caliper brakes and the brake bridge and fork are built so the brake pads are near the bottom of the slot. This requires a fair bit of accuracy during the build because if the fork is a little too long or the bridge too high and the brakes won't reach the rims. That's bad! Why do I bother with this? Well this sort of bike is all about options. The additional clearances under the brakes allow for a range of tire widths and the eyelets make fenders possible. Tom lives in So. Cal so fenders probably won't make sense but who knows? If he wants to stick 30mm tires on and explore fire roads he can. If that doesn't appeal to him 23mm will be just as at home on this frame. The lugs, crown and bb shell are Sachs castings. Tom has agreed to let me paint it anyway I wish. How cool is that? I will be painting the same as Pete's club racer because they want me to. Pete lives on the East coast so the twins will be seperated by about 3000 miles. Hopefully they will get ridden together sometime though.

Frank's club racer

Here's some pictures of Frank's new club racer. It's made with Sachs lugs & bb shell. The fork crown is a stainless Pacenti crown. I still need to polish it before painting but I didn't want to show it after polishing. The lug edges always look strange due to the polishing rouge that builds up there. Of course, I could polish it, clean off the rouge then take photos of it again. We'll see. This frame is built with lightish tubes and takes standard reach caliper brakes. The bridges are equidistantly spaced from the axle center with fender mounts. This will allow for easier fender mounting if desired and the fender will follow the wheel radius.

The last picture is of my new head badges. I was running low on brass ones so I decided to get some stainless ones. Sorry no more brass ones for a while. I like these stainless badges. They're the same dimensions as my old brass badges.

Miters and stuff

The first three pictures show top tube miters. I miter my tubes with a 1952 Bridgeport vertical mill. I love that old machine. Mounted in the Bridgeport is a mitering jig/fixture that holds the tubes and insures the miters are in the proper phase. This is important especially with the top tube. The top tube is mitered on both ends and if the miters are out of phase the seat and head tube centerlines won't be in the same plane. That's less than ideal. So I make the miters as perfect as possible and the bikes are better for it.

The last two pictures are of a frame in the Marchetti jig. The front triangle is already brazed and I'm getting ready to braze the rear triangle on. The close up of the seat lug shows a little excess silver around the seat lug edges. That's called flashing and will be removed after all of the brazing is done. That cleanup is part of the filing and thinning of the lugs. If the lug was brazed cleanly like this one, the flashing could be left because it won't show under paint. But I like to remove it so if the frame is ever repainted by someone else he or she will be impressed with the clean work. That makes no business sense but it's just a source of pride for me.