Geoff Roberts Framebuilding course - first and second, and third frames. And fourth (now finished). And fifth.

5 days, you can read about it here:

http://www.enigmabikes.com/pages/frame-building-academy

@jontea Dave Yates course for lugless ;-)

Top bloke and a great week in the workshop with almost daily air displays from the RAF...

Ooh ta. Will investigate. Lincolnshire way isn't he?

and STI stops:

Just curious, ow do you work out where to put the stops? and how do you make sure they are the same on both sides?

Oh and what tubing have you gone for.

There's a little fixture - a V block with some prongs sticking out of it - which holds the stops in place. I eyeballed how far back to put them, and then to make sure they're level you put two steel rules on each side of the frame, touching the down tube and top tube and then check that the gap between the stop and the ruler is the same.

Tubing is Columbus Zona. You don't get a choice with Geoff. For a first frame, it's a good choice.

Cheers. So many little tricks!

finished?

Not quite. I'm still filing away at the lugs to get the shorelines really crisp. When that's done, it's time for some paint. Then lug-lining. Then the build. I'll try and get round to posting photos from the final day some time soon.

Any updates?

Er, working on it. Only a rather minor and boring one (I've been busy - bloody work) but yes, the story hasn't ended yet.

OK, a belated update. Needless to say, I'm not still doing the course. That finished at lunchtime on the Friday. We were all fairly eager to get away early on the Friday, me in particular, as I wanted to get round the north-western quadrant of the M25 before the rush hour started in earnest, and because Casa Danstuff needed some serious remedial tidying before @Cycliste flew in for the weekend.

By Friday morning the frames were basically finished apart from some filing on the lugs just to tidy up the shorelines and some polishing. @Cycliste bought me some rather nice riffler and engineer's files for Christmas, and I've got plenty of emery tape at home, so I was quite happy to leave the filing and polishing until I got home. However, both Josh and I were keen to try a bit of fillet brazing before we left.

So, after a quick demonstration from Geoff, we fired up the torches and started our first efforts at fillet brazing. This is my first attempt:

I spent too long doing it, as the tube on the right was quite distorted. I need to learn to use a bigger flame, get in, do the brazing, and get out rather than spending lots of time fannying around with a small flame. It's pretty rough, so I didn't spend too much time tidying it up, but I did give it a quick file and polish when I got home so that it looked like this:

Since then I've done a bit of filing and polishing, but nothing particularly photogenic. I've got the paint to spray the frame, but I need to finish off the design for the vinyl decals so that the nice people at Enigma can cut them for me. In the meantime, I've been collecting parts. This bike's going to have mudguards, so I've built it for long-reach brake calipers, and I finally managed to source some VO Grand Cru calipers in black.

I've also got the fork, which is a Columbus Hiver. It's got mudguard fittings but is still reasonably light at 400g claimed (actually 412g on my scales). It'll be painted to match the frame.

So, vinyl decals to design and then it's time to get painting. I'll take some photos of the frame when I've finally finished the polishing and filing. Oh, and I need to stamp the frame number too.

And I did end up grabbing a few more pieces of titanium tube from the scrap box to practise on. My total haul of ti tubing in the end should give me plenty of practice...

I need to stamp the frame number too.

001?

BRMSR001

BRoMmerS bikes Road 001

I think fillet brazing has some similarities to TIG, having used both to build frames. When I fillet braze a frame I'm using a pretty small torch nozzle (normally a #2, sometimes a #3 with a neutral flame inner cone of around 4mm) and 2mm SIF 101 rod.

I don't like putting massive fillets down. Smaller ones are mechanically strong enough to have a joint that exceeds the tube strength, plus your minimising the total amount of heat, the HAZ, and reducing distortion.

I'd definitely recommend playing around with practice tubing to see how getting right in close with a smaller Oxy Acetylene flame works.

It's not quite the same as stacking dimes when you TIG, but with the right settings you can get a similar result with a fillet braze.

Oh, and the Hiver is a good fork, I've used that on a winter build. Just stay away from very wide flange hubs (like Bitex) as they can clash with the inside of the fork legs. Hope RS Monos work well, that's what I went for.

Right, time to get this bike on the road. @Cycliste and I are going back to Enigma in August, me to do the advanced course, @Cycliste to do the basic course. And we're both building track/singlespeed frames.

Having got bored of filing and polishing, and having rubbed down the Hiver fork to give it a key, I've sprayed the frame and fork with primer. I'll hopefully do the top coats next week, once I've worked out how to use my new vinyl cutter to make up the painting masks.

So, colour coats. This bike is going to be my winter trainer, and is going to be fitted with mudguards and mudflaps. The mudflaps will be the new club mudflaps I helped organise, which are in the club colours of black, red and yellow. So I thought I'd do a colour scheme which is mostly black, with red highlights (a highly original colour combination for a MAMIL chariot) with hints of neon yellow, to match the club colours.

I also decided I wanted some boxlining type of things on the main tubes, which meant vinyl as I'm definitely not up to doing boxlining by hand quite yet. However, while I've sprayed a few bikes before such as the Dawes and my Planet X, I've always used vinyl decals either put on top of the clearcoat, or on top of the colour coat and underneath the clear coat. This time I decided to do things properly, and to use vinyl but only as a paint mask, and to do the decals and boxlining properly in paint.

So, I bought a little vinyl cutter (a Silhouette Cameo 2), some low-tack masking vinyl and application tape, and printed out my decals.

The ones with the 'Brommers' badge are for the downtube, the shorter ones are for the seat and top tube, and the roundels are badges for the headtube. Since the boxlining and decals are to be red, the first thing to do was the give the frame a coat of red paint:

and then stick the paint masks on:

Then apply the black colour coats, and carefully peel off the vinyl masks (my technique for this requires some refinement as there are a few little scrapes as a result of my efforts):

The result is far from perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the results:

My idea was to add a layer of red pearl on top of the colour coats, just to give the frame a bit of sparkle. In my mind's eye it was going to be a very subtle effect, only visible as a hint of red shimmer in bright sunlight.

It hasn't quite worked out like that. More to follow...

So, that nice subtle hint of red pearl I had planned. Turns out the pearl was, well, very pearly. Very pearly indeed. And that if you put a thick layer of red pearl on a black base, you end up with a purple bike. Who knew?

Pretty sure I wouldn't have chosen purple and red as my No. 1 Colour Combination Choice, but I'm definitely not doing it again, so purple and red it is. Because this is going to be my winter trainer, I've added some thin strips of black 3M reflective tape (it reflects silver, but is black if there's no direct light) in the middle of the box-lining, between the pearl coat and the top clearcoat. So it should stand out at night.

Next, lug-lining. @Cycliste reckons lug-lining will be a bit OTT, but sod it, go big or go home. Anyway, I've got a new lug-lining pen I want to try out - it's a bit like a giant adjustable tweezer with a handle, and is apparently much better than using a brush. We shall see.

Given the purple colour, I've given up the idea of yellow lug-lining. That would be a bit much. More red, I think.

Well, using a lug-lining pen certainly makes life easier than using a brush, but I still need practice at lug-lining. I don't think it looks too bad in the photos, but I'm also pretty sure it doesn't look as good as it does in the photos in the flesh. Still, once again, I'm not doing it again.

And yes, I know the photo above is appalling even by my own low standards. I would blame the poxy phone camera, but only a bad workman blames their tools.

As you can see, I've started building it up. More photos when it's finished.

What brush were you using for the lug-lining?

Bike frames are fairly hard to stripe as you've got a curved edge, but not impossible. You'll always have that 'by hand' element but this is actually quite nice. I reccomend a pin-striping brush as you can get a lot more paint into the brush. It will also soak up an unsteady hand (well, makes sense in my mind anyway)
At first it will be much harder than whatever you're currently doing, but after a hour or so you'll be able to do it much better than what's already been done.

Last time, when I used a brush, just a 00 brush of a fairly nondescript variety. If I tried using a proper tapered pinstriping brush I'd just get paint everywhere.

I actually really love the end color of the frame!

Very nice job so far, hopefully it will ride nicely as well.

I think you should name this colour scheme "Oprah" or maybe "Symbol". I do like it though.

I took Bike #1 for its first proper ride today, after a quick start-stop-steer shakedown on Saturday. It may be a case of 'a face only a mother could love' but I think it rides pretty well. It's surprisingly nippy for a bike that weighs 9.15kg, and it seems reasonably stiff and as comfortable as steel bikes tend to be. I have to say, I'm rather taken by it. But I'm biased, I know.

In the meantime, I'm back at Enigma for another go (hence the change of thread title). And this time I've dragged @Cycliste along. I'm doing a fillet-brazed single-speed bike with every feature liable to make Geoff worry and get stressed - thin oversized tubing, bi-oval tubing, 44mm headtube, internal brake cable, wishbone rear stays, the lot - while @Cycliste is making a 650C fixed/SS frame. Progress is good so far - I'll try and post some pics of my second frame, and @Cycliste's first, when I get a mo.