Anyone know about re-aligning a steel frame?

some little cunt/cunts/cock/cocks have managed to bend my frame tonight.

my bike was locked with 2 evo minis one sheldon brown style another evo mini locking the front wheel to the frame with a yale kryptoflex cable and padlock locking the saddle and seatpost and with ball bearings in the allen bolt recesses and a 7mm allen bolt stem.

all this pretty much rendering my bike as secure as possible did not prevent some retards trying to nick my rear wheel and in the process rendering my frame scrap metal.

basically the rear drive side chain stay and seat stay have been bent about 1.5cm out and need bending back i don't know how to do it with confidence and am moving to china on the 1st of september. anyone with the skills to re-align the frame please help!!!

can't believe this shit has happened one week before i leave after 2 years of taking care of the frame and using a beer bike for such occasions as tonight. this city is scum to the brim.

rant over. meh.

You need the assistance of a frame builder or a very, very good bike dealer.
1.5cm can be corrected, usually.
As long as there are no big bulges etc on a certain spot (usually near the BB-shell / bridge between chain stays).
You can help the dealer / frame builder by disassembling the BB set already (and probably the head set and seat post, too).
It's approx. 10 - 15 min. work if someone has aligning equipment (jig, table) and dropout alignment tools.

or do as i did and just bend it back in. sheldon covers it in the bottom half of this page http://www.sheldonbrown.com/frame-spacing.html

That's for the toe rag who bent the frame.

Take it to a frame builder, it may be recoverable but a professional opinion as to its safety is essential.

i dont really have the time to get to a frame builder, i'm going send villiers velo down in rochester an email that is the closest frame builder i can think of, has witcombe moved now?

thinking about what happened they were trying to steal the frame and front wheel not the rear wheel and saw the sheldon brown technique as vulnerable to theft.

thankfully i still have my bike and components they even left the rear track nuts and chain tugs lying on the floor. could be worse i suppose.

the cold setting sheldon brown describes sounds too brutal for me to do it myself.

any recommended bike shops in the london area that might be able to do such work?

Cold-set / bend it, should work a dream, have you checked the straightness of the frame by tying a piece of string from one dropout up around the headtube and back to the opposite dropout?

my flatmate who builds frame should be able to have a look at it and see if its possible if yes what the cost would be....we are in se1

What a thick-as-pigshit thief. Funny how the 'sheldon' method made them think they could nick everthing except back wheel ... then they tried ... "Oh it's not a simple as we thought" ... durrrrrrrr ...

Bad luck sweatP. Hope you sort it or just swallow it and can manage to buy a new frame in time to take with you.

i had a chat with an my gf's uncle who is mates with cliff shrubb and he gave me enough confidence to try the cold set method which i did and seems to have done the trick, it was only 10ml out rather than the 15ml i thought it looked last night.

i would have liked to have seen the idiots face when they realised that they couldn't steal the bike although i would have preferred it if they had just stopped rather than trying to force the wheel out.

thanks for the suggestions.