You are reading a single comment by @Brommers and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
tallsam
@Brommers
At 2.30am this morning I woke up from a deep sleep and said 'FUCK!!!!' very loudly as I'd just realised I'd forgotten to drill holes in the bottom bracket shell for the chainstays. Normally this would be mildly inconvenient, but in this case I need to have those holes to allow the rear derailleur Di2 wire to go down the driveside chainstay and the rear caliper hose to go down the non-driveside chainstay, so they're not really optional. So I spent an hour or so removing the chainstays from the BB shell, drilling the holes, cleaning up the chainstays and BB shell, and tacking them back into place.
Next job was to file and attach the seatstays. The seatstays are a hoop made of T45 steel, 1/2" with 0.90mm wall thickness, bent into a hoop with a £20 tube bender I bought off eBay, which did a surprisingly good job. The monostay at the top is a bit of random chainstay courtesy of Geoff which I've flattened in a vice so that it's 1/2" thick. Brazed together, and roughly filed, here it is in a very poorly framed photo:
With that in place, it was time to braze the dropouts to the chainstays and seatstays. The dropouts (Paragon Machine Works hooded Syntace X-12 dropouts) are stainless, so they need to be brazed with silver rather than brass. It's my first time fillet brazing with silver rather than brass, but the Cycle Design was surprisingly forgiving and I think it went OK for a first attempt. Other than the fact that I used so much flux it stuck the dummy axle to the dropout...
Next job was to fillet braze the monostay onto the back of the seat tube, having remembered to drill a hole in the back of the seat tube. That's Geoff on the left having a Nice Cup of Tea, and @Jingle_Jangle's elbow on the right.
Final job for the day was to fillet braze the down tube, seat tube and chainstays onto the bottom bracket shell. That's a lot of brazing, and will as ever take a hell of a lot of filing and general tidying, but it's done now.
Fiddly bits tomorrow, after Geoff the magic shot-blasting pixie has done his work - I'm not allowed to use the shotblasting cabinet. Health and Safety gorn mad...