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

Right, so a wee while since I've updated this thread.

I've been through a few iterations of brakes. The lever on that Gatorbrake 6pot never seemed to be in quite the right position and the feel was a bit, meh. So I took the non-leaking rear M755 caliper from used it to replace the leaky front one, handily this also meant I can now run a 180mm rotor on the front without any adaptors. I had a BB7 on the rear for a week or so and I did consider going full cable for a while but then I got an old set of m585 brakes and dual control levers off a work colleague so I've mated a 585 singlepot caliper to the rear 755 lever that was now minus a caliper and it feels great and my levers now match so my cockpit ocd is satisfied. There's a wee bit less free lever stroke than on the front brake but its fine.

I also treated myself to a Thomson dropper when a possible career move (which would have meant money being a bit tighter) failed to materialise.

I'm now pretty satisfied with the setup but while I like certain aspects of the 'compact' frame I do sometimes wonder if it is maybe just a little bit small for me.

Thing is, singlespeed frames designed around long travel forks in sizes other than teeny tiny are not exactly growing on trees. Anything that does show up on eBay tends to be pretty high end and as such, out of my budget. I know, I just bought a Thomson dropper so I can't really talk about budget but then again, I did just buy a thomson dropper, I can't really afford to spend much more on this bike right now...

Anyway, I saw a 20" Genesis IOID frame on ebay for buttons so have bought that. 20" will maybe be a bit on the large side for what I want to use this bike for but I'm not even sure if that'll be 20" c2c or c2t nor whether the steerer on the Krampus fork will be long enough for the headtube but the frame was cheap enough that if it doesn't work out I can just sell it on and shouldn't lose too much if any money on it.

Got the IO frame today.

I said above it was listed as 20", well it was actually listed as 20.5". I did get a bit worried when I opened the parcel and found a manual for a 17.5" Genesis IOID but it all worked out in the end, it seems Genesis measure centre to centre so the 20.5" is to the top of the seat tube and it'll be an improvement upon the FireEye but not too large.

My steerer also fits just minus 1 of the 2 spacers I was running on the FireEye.

I was a bit worried about the a2c length of the fork, I looked at the IOID spec before buying the frame and saw that the bike originally came with a suspension fork but I bought the Krampus fork to replace a 150mm travel fork and I didn't think the fork on the IOID would have had anything like that much travel.

After fitting half the headset, forks and wheels to the IOID I did get a bit worried by the negative bb drop but, overlaying images of the 2 shows the angles to be very similar. It should be noted that in the photos below, the IOID only has a bottom half of a headset fitted so the fork is sitting a bit slacker than it does now it's fully built.

The seattube angles are pretty much identical.

The bb is a bit higher on the Genesis but I've clipped pedals on rocks a few times with the FireEye so I think I'll be glad of that.

Looks to be an improvement in terms of size. Nice work.

Looking good! I like your builds :)

Yeah I'm a lot happier with the amount of exposed seatpost, no longer feel like it's a massive lever that'll be tearing my frame apart.

Been doing a bit of work to my long suffering Genesis Flyer recently.

I've been wanting to learn to braze or weld for a while and sort of made a new years resolution to do so this year. I thought I might get a change of job that'd help with this but since that fell through I decided to teach myself.

I wanted to start with something sort of non-structural so that if it went wrong I wouldn't be taking a trip to the dentist etc and as I ride the Flyer brakeless I decided to chop the brake bridge out of the rear triangle replace it with a piece of plate steel cut into some sort of design.

I have a garage but it has no power so any sort of welder is out of the question.

I decided on Mapp due to the low cost and compact size etc of the torch. I know it's not the hottest flame but there's plenty of videos on youtube and threads on forums from people who have build entire frames with Mapp so I reckoned it'd be good enough to start with anyway.

I bought a torch and gas off ebay for a little over £50, picked up 3 sheets of 3mm stainless steel from ebay for a few quid too and then some silver solder rods and flux powder. I actually bought 2 setcs pof rods, first I bought 2 54% rods and a sachet of flux powder for about £5 but after using up both of those rods on my first unsuccessful attempt I bought another set of 10 45% rods and more flux powder which cost me around £15.

A couple weeks went by and I hadn't plucked up the courage to do anything with the stuff so one day when I was bored at work I cut the brake bridge out the frame and made a cardboard template as I thought that'd kickstart me into action.

I then cut the piece out of one of the sheets of stainless, although I did this at my dad's garage which has power I only did it up there in order to use his vice. It was all cut and finished by hand.

It took me 3 attempts to get the brazing right. I think the 1st two times I was making everything too hot so the solder was just running out. It also didn't help that the piece would expand when hot then contract as it cooled pulling it away from the stays.

Around this time I noticed that the ends were a bit more than 120mm apart, I got a bit worried that heating the seat stays had warped something but actually with a wheel in there everything lined up as it should so I think it was just that the brake bridge had been holding the stays together a bit. I used a toe strap to pull the track ends together a bit before the third attempt.

On the third attempt I also flipped the frame over and went in from underneath, using a bit of bent spoke to hold the new piece in place. This meant that gravity was helping and the the solder has somewhere to pool up as well.

I didn't hold back on the solder on the third attempt so there was plenty excess to clean up.

Here it is after I cleaned it up a bit. Decided I'd not do too much more cleaning up till I rode the thing incase the new piece pinged out at the first bump but I've ridden it a fair bit now and it seems to be holding up so I'll probably clean up the excess solder a bit more now andtreat the frame to a new coat of paint of powder.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c271/mechanikal_vandal/7BC4E5B2-FB0C-4DD4-BD68-D0F2F9022A12_zps9ju7px7h.jpg

So for around £75 I've taught myself how to braze and I've also personalised my frame

I have a set of stainless rack braze ons that I'm going to attempt to attach to a fork next I think. I'll probably need more gas for that but that's less than £20 and now I've got the hang of not spending ages getting everything red hot it should last me a while longer.

you're doing it! looks great!

Yeah I reckon this gunna look sick

Took me half my ride home last night to figure out what the white van passenger shouted at me just after leaving work, I think it was "Your bike is the devil".

Mission accomplished!

Good read, this thread! I get the impression you're either riding, tinkering or ebay-ing at any given time :)

Edit: also, kudos for upsidedowncross. Vobiscum satanas etc :)

Been doing a bit more brazing.

Started off as just a practice piece but size was about right to hold a 13l Alpkit drybag so turned it into a front rack.

It's not perfectly square, I know this. All the mitres were hand cut/filed with no guides and I prefer the imperfect look so didn't go to much effort to keep things square.

May add brazeons to the fork legs and do something to do away with the pclip at the fork crown too but happy for now.

Looks good.

Is that all on MAP gas? (ie one gas bottle only) or is it some kinda oxy/acetylene or oxy/propane setup?

Yup, all map/Mapp/mappro whatever they call it.

Nice. Impressive stuff.

#rep

Added rack mounts to the fork today.

Looked at Paragon and Ceeway for bosses etc but ended up just making my own, out of the of cuts from the cross between the seat stays.

Started like this,

P clip removed and the paint still looked ok, for about 5 minutes,

Paint off, parts fluxxed and clamped,

End result,

By 'paint off' do you mean you just burnt it off? Doesn't look like a terribly clean brazing surface. Although the joint looks strong.

I bow to your experience though I've only done a bit of brazing and that was in a proper workshop and everything was clean and non-structural.

KILL IT WITH FI... oh wait. As you were!

I filed/sanded the paint off of the joint area.

The burnt looking paint in that photo is because I initially clamped the new piece straight to the fork leg but not long after I started applying heat to the area the clamp expanded and fell off so I had to start again. The flux is covering the clean area.

Sweet. Great work.

Since I've been cutting, beating and brazing the Flyer into submission lately I decided I should treat it to some fresh powdercoat,

Hopefully get it finished tomorrow and will post a full pic soon.

Also tomorrow I'm hoping to get time to tackle turning my Genesis IO and my Surly 1x1 into one bike.

The Surly currently sports drops...

...as I got hold of a set of drop bar Versa Alfine STIs recently but I'm going back to flat/riser bars as the Versas are not working out for me for a few reasons,

• With the large up shift paddle on the Versa, I find I can't hold onto the bar and brake, I have to have all my fingers around the lever which is fine on the road but means control is quite compromised on rough terrain.
  
• The Versas were cheap and probably for good reason, intentional downshifting is fine, goes one gear at a time but if I bump the downshift button by accident, it tends to drop me into 1st gear which is a total pain in the ass.
  
  

I've also identified an issue with the Genesis, the Krampus fork fucked the geometry on that and I was fine with that in terms of how the bike handled but recently I slipped off the pedal and landed on the toptube (the standover, bb height etc is ridiculous on it now, I need the dropper post just to get on the thing!). I didn't think too much about it at the time but I'm still sore from it and we are talking a couple of months now so I want to avoid a recurrence of this.

I also hiked up a couple Munroes this summer and rode down and carrying that 29+ wheel on your back ain't fun at all.

I could just put flat bars on the Surly and shorter forks/a 26" front wheel on the Genesis but that'd leave me with two pretty similar bikes and I already feel I don't ride the Surly as much as I'd like to.

I'm going to take the Surly frame, swap the fork for one with a disc mount, rip the hub out of the 29+ front wheel and rebuild it into one of the Onza rims I have, use the rear wheel from the Genesis for ss mtbing and keep the Alfine wheel to swap in if I want to rack up the miles. I'll either use the front brake that's currently on the Genesis or I've bought a set of Hope Tech M4s from retrobike so I'll see what nick they are in (having reach and bite adjust on the lever would be nice) and a canti on the rear, maybe look at an HS33 for the rear in time.

My Thomson dropper is currently with I-Ride, they are looking at the wiggle in the top section, so that'll go on when it comes back, I just hope there's enough room for it, it was almost at it's lowest in the Genesis frame and I think the Surly might be an inch or so higher to the top of the seat tube.

Cockpit will probably be a bmx stem with either set of DMR Wingbars I have or the bars below for a Klunker type look.

Might stick the 810mm wide risers on the Flyer!

Do you still have those Torsion bars knocking around?

landed on the toptube
identified an issue
swap the fork
rip the hub out
that'll go on when it comes back

wingbars are always rad

Progress on the Surly so far,

The Tech m4s I bought look pretty minty so I think I'll be bunging the front one on.