M_V's multitude of bikes and adventures in the land of framebuilding

So good. I wish I had your work/JFDI ethic. I'm still fiddling around with the gravel frame I started making in January...

That's cracking - top work

I once condensed 3 bikes into one, that only involved sticking risers, 35c knobblies & MTB brakes on my commuting bike though...

Whoa those bars on that GT are too good! Would 100% buy. Great stuff on here

I wish I had your work/JFDI

Same, i overthink everything and it takes me weeks to do anything meaningful

So rad.. Do you find that the fork is overbuilt for a seatstay? A fork sees a lot more stress than a seatstay right? (sorry if this is discussed earlier, had a little stalk but didn't see it)

Yeah it’s definitely heavier than it needs to be/would be if I used seat stays. If I could bend then I might be tempted to try chainstays as they are available in the same ovalisation.

That said, I don’t think it makes enough difference to the overall weight of the frame that I need to worry about it and when I was building the frame for my mate I initially did a set of actual Zona seat stays which I built into a wishbone piece that’s shaped for 130 or 135mm spacing and when I tried to tweak it in to 120mm I kinked the stays with surprisingly little effort so knowing he was planning on using a rack mounted child seat I actually got a bit concerned they were not going to be up to the job.

I guess the weight difference between beefier seatstays and fork legs would be a fair bit less.

Also, the ‘steerer tube’ bit isn’t actually a steerer tube, it’s a bit of 25.4mm plain gauge top tube so that helps keep the weight down.

looks like the perfect winter trainer/mile-muncher to me. I'll take one in purple with neon yellow paint spatter pleasethankyouverymuch.

really nice this, as is all your work

Same

Same

Oh aye, yes, very much. applause

Cheers all for the kind comments.

I think for that JFDI attitude, just remember, they are just bikes. I think when I gave up on the stigma of 'puppy slaying' it made it a lot easier to make these mad creations!

So so good.

Thanks!

Not sure this is really the place since it’s not my bike but I got to work on something rather tasty today.

I’d brazed the disc tab onto the frame a while ago and the owner has been struggling to get a Profile disc hub in stock for ages, he decided last week to just go with the Halo MXR Supadrive so I got the wheel built and I think the hub was a bit cheaper so there was a pile of nice parts to throw at it too.

It’s interesting to see the way mtb tech is filtering down into the bmx world.

4 Attachments

That rear fork (crown) is so cool. Never seen that before, but it makes so much sense.

they are just bikes

This is what it should be, none of this fancy shit, just real bikes. Kudos. I wish I had more space, cannot find anywhere local to set up making / breaking stuff

Nice work on the BMX - was over at the pump track at Cathkin a few weeks ago & there was a guy tearing it up on what looked like a ti BMX frame with bolt through axles & Hope f/r discs - was dying to get a proper look at it but had a rampant 3 year old threatening to take someone right out i so was slightly preoccupied, was a cracking looking thing, no idea what it was...

Was it a 20” wheeled thing or larger? Owner of this has a ti 24” jump bike and spends a lot of time at the pump track.

Think it was a 20" but I could be mistaken - was hard to get a proper looks at it, was either 15 feet in the air or hammering round the berms at warp speed - anodised green hubs / maybe brakes too, loud freehub

this is absolutely superb. love your work dude

Oops, I'm meant to be getting rid of bikes not buying more...

What have you got planned?

Need to see what fits and what doesn’t.

If I’m lucky it’ll have that weird size headtube where you can turn a 1 1/8” headset down a bit and make it fit, if not then maybe make a segmented fork with some bmx style dropouts I’m getting laser cut.

Might widen the rear end or at least move the bridges so I can fit a wider tire in. I’ve seen some people squeeze a 29” wheel into similar frames which would probably help with the fact the bb will probably be a bit low as is.

Schwinn arrived and almost disappointingly the bb sits at a sensible height and a 2.4” tyre fits in the back of it no bother. Seems like I won’t need to get the hacksaw and brazing torch out after all.

It’s got the 32.6mm id headtube so yesterday I turned down some Hope cups to fit and that let me fit a Surly 1x1 fork which will has raised the bb height to about 11” which will be fine.

I’m going to run it with cantis at first at least so don’t need quite so much ground clearance as I would to run it with a coaster.

4 Attachments

Is that. A Warco bench lathe? Your dad's is it? Any good?

bmx style fork sounds hott