Bi-laminate

Sorry for the lame formatting. Here's some shots early into a build. Combining lugs with fillet brazing is often called bi-laminate construction. At least it is in England. This has never been a common form of joint joinery in the U.S. so I'm not sure if we have a term for it. I like to call it "a little something for everyone!" Heck there's even some tig welding in there. The points have been tig welded on and the weld bead was ground off. Thanks to Erik Noren for welding those on. Tig was necessary because I brazed the lugs and laid the fillets at the same time. Since fillets typically need to be done with brass it made sense to use that for the lugs too. If I had brazed the points onto the lugs beforehand with brass that filler would have melted during the construction. The melt would make the seam between the lug and the added point visible and ugly.

Paint shop is open!

Here's pictures of my first solo paint job. It turned out really well. There's room for improvement but the masking turned out crisp, no runs and the final clear has good gloss. I'm proud of it. The colors are much better in person. The green has a sort of gold pearl effect combined with a candy appearance. I think I'll use that color more.

Computer hiatus

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. This condition goes in streaks and lately I've been hating computers. Hating is too strong a word. Really I've been avoiding dealing with pictures and blogging. These activities so often feel like a waste of time. I know they're not but like so many one person operations sometimes things get pushed to the side for more important tasks.

This randonneuse frame and fork are for Gunner's daughter. He's giving her this as a college graduation gift. Pretty nice gift but I'm biased. I still need to build the front rack for this but I'm going to paint it first. As I'm typing this the drop outs are in the plating bath and will be done soon. After that I'll prep the frame and mask off the nickel for paint. Earlier today I mixed up the epoxy primer and will spray the frame this afternoon. Hopefully I can get a little color on the frame too before I go home tonight. You may have noticed the dragonfly on the down tube. Gunner carved that and asked me if I'd put it on the frame. He explained to me that dragonflies are important to his daughter. At first I wasn't thrilled at the idea. Mostly because I didn't want someone to ask me to carve up something for them. I just don't think I have the talent to do that. Anyway I thought more about the reason for this whole bike being built and realized I needed to get over it. I think it's really cool that the bike is somewhat of a collaboration plus Gunner did a beautiful job. Also my daughter thought it was cool. One should never get in the way of a father's love for his daughter.

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.