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@Brommers
Brommers Bike #2 is now finished and busy being ridden around Mallorca. The build process was, as usual, a last minute and panicky affair. I didn't finish painting the frame until the night of the Sunday before we were due to leave, and as mentioned above I left the frame and fork baking in front of two sets of Halogen lights to let the paint harden.
I started the build in earnest on the Wednesday. Usual things - fit the headset, fit the stem, mark the fork steerer height, chop down the fork steerer, make a bung to fit inside it and bond that into place rather than an expanding bung. Then bottom bracket, chainset, seat post and saddle.
The wheels didn't arrive until Wednesday, considerably later than I'd planned and considerably later than they were supposed to arrive. They're Mack hubs laced to Kinlin XR31T rims with CX-Ray spokes. I planned to run them tubeless with 25mm Schwalbe Pro One tubeless tyres. The tyres were a bugger to fit, and the rear tyre was an even bigger bugger to remove when I realised that I'd fitted it the wrong way round - cue much swearing. However, they pumped up nice and easily with just a track pump, and I added some sealant so they were good to go.
It was only after all of this that I discovered that 25mm Schwalbe Pro One tyres on Kinlin XR31T hubs won't fit underneath a 3T Rigida LTD fork. By this stage it was Friday evening, and I still hadn't finished building the bike, so I had to hot foot it over to the local bike shop and get a pair of Schwalbe 23mm tyres, sadly not tubeless so I'm running with inner tubes.
The rest of the build was reasonably straightforward. The only major issue was the fact that, with hindsight, I should've made the chainstays shorter and fitted the wishbone on the rear stays a little bit higher. I can't get the rear wheel all the way forwards in the track ends without the tyre fouling on the bottom of the wishbone. As a result, I've had to use a half link in the chain, to avoid having to have the wheel right at the rear of the track ends, and there's rather more of a gap between the rear wheel and the seat tube than I would've liked. I'm not one of these waffer-thin-clearance fetishists, but a gap of something more in the region of 10mm rather than 25mm would be better.
Still, it's all part of the learning process. I've ridden the bike for the last four days, and very shortly I'll post some proper pictures of it. In the meantime, here's another teaser...