Weekend Update

Another busy week for all of us at our day jobs, but we made good progress this week on several things. First, our frame painter needed a good stand to hold bikes while he painted so, with some tubing, a couple items from Park, and a late model Chevy flywheel I put together a stand for him. Here is the flywheel base and height adjust:



The top with Park clamp arm and internal seat tube expanding frame holder.



Complete stand with Andrew's Road frame in it:



I hope it will work well for Taylor. Besides building the stand we were on to working on Bill's frame. Bill's getting a 29er with a new request for us, a curved top tube. If you remember the post from the previous week with Mo bending tubes with our roller bender, well that was our first attempt at bending tubes and we found that although it did bend the tube, it also flattened the tube because we were using rollers that were a little large in diameter. Well then we constructed that large wooden bending curve for our second attempt at bending the curves. Today we mounted that bending curve on a platform and got too bending. Here is the curve mounted on the platform with the strap in place.



Mo with the 1 1/8" .49 4130 tube packed with sand and ready to bend:



After Mo has put all his force into the tube, he is pleased with the smooth, sweet bend on the tube:



While Mo was working on the bending the tubes I was welding up Bill's bottom bracket and seat tube joint:



Here is a close up of the joint:



We then both focused our attention on getting the rest of Bill's tubes mitered and setup in the jig including that curved top tube. Cutting the miters on the top tube was interesting learning experience which took a bit more hand filing to fit then cutting in the mill. Here is a shot of Bill's frame with the tube set in the jig (We still have one more miter to do on the downtube)



With the curved tube in there, I think the frame is going to look great. Next up this week, is to finish that last miter and get Bill's tubes set in the jig for tacking.

Lots of photos in this post, lots of progress made. I will try to get back to more frequent updates this week, if my day job will coorporate.