I got the frame tacked on Thursday so its now a bicycle frame for the most part but I still have a lot of work to do but luckily its the fun part, I think. Thursday night I about fell out on the floor. The rear end was bonded and I checked it for straightness and it was spot on so Thursday afternoon I put the down and top tubes in place with a little 3M DP420. I went to check it out about 3 hrs. later and everything looked pretty solid, the epoxy seemed dry to the touch, so I took the frame out of the jig to throw on the alignment table and check to see how straight it was and to also hang it on the scale just to see where I was at. So as I'm tightening down the lock nut on the bottom bracket shell holder with the frame parallel to the table the whole front triangle started slowly getting closer to the steel surface.
"What the ....?" Anyway, it wasn't as solid as I thought so I immediately threw it back in the jig and beefed up the epoxy a bit more and let it cure overnight. "There, thats better." Standing around trying to pass the time while epoxy is drying is not exactly like steel frame building as I'm always a bit eager to move on to the next stepbut all is well up to this point.
I threw a wheel in the frame to make sure everything is aligned and its spot on although this photo here appears to be leaning. Actually the frame isn't sitting perpendicular in the stand. Anybody who has spent much time on this blog at all knows my photography is less than stellar. For some reason little things like this leaning photo bother me, sometimes to the point that I will go take more pictures in order to correct it but this time I'm not gonna worry about it.
This photo shows how little space I have between the chain stays. This is with a 23c tire and its sufficient but my Vittoria 25c's tighten that gap up a bit more, they work but I was hoping to have a bit more room. Like I said previously, I'm not too excited about the chain stay selection at the moment but I'm looking at options.
Bob finally got over his Bronchitis and machined the bottom bracket shell for me. The cutouts are almost 1" in diameter so there is plenty of room to push all the Di2 wiring up into the downtube. When I first saw that the holes ran into one another I was worried about the possibility of too much material being removed and I wondered if stomping on the peddles could actually bend this bottom bracket. I doubt it seriously as this shell is a pretty solid piece of steel and there is less than 1/3 of the circumference missing, not to mention that this whole area is gonna be wrapped with a handful of layers of laminate, however it did cross my mind. I guess we'll find out.
I didn't have a brake bridge planned out yet so I just kinda threw this idea together real quick. Its just a piece of thin steel tubing with a couple layers of carbon that should be sufficient to hold the caliper. I plan on improving this on the next frame but this should work for testing purposes. Once I get this bonded in then I can start to build up the fillets in all the junctures and I enjoy making fillets so I'm looking forward to that part. Thanks for stopping by.
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