Progress
Now Playing: Keb Darge - Live at Club Kathmandu
My pace slowed down a bit due to the Thanksgiving holiday, and due to my newest addition - an Atlas lathe on loan from my father in law (Thanks Roger!)

But progress is being made and so far I'm happy with the results. After tacking the sockets, I carved them to shape with a hacksaw and lots of filing. Then I decided that since this is a prototype (a very elaborate one, admittedly) I could use different joining techniques on each joint. So I finished off the weld on the sockets using my OA torch, and then started filing. The picture below shows the bottom socket all filed. It looks really good - too bad it's not stainless! I polished it up a little bit with a Nyalox wheel so that I could get a better look at the flow and form without being distracted by sanding grain. There's a couple of spots that I need to work on a bit more. The top socket is still in its raw welded form. So there's about another 2 to 3 hours of filing left on this piece.

Head Tube Tacked
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I tacked up the head tube and sockets last night. Now I'm going to transfer the pattern I carved into the seat tube lug onto the blank sockets. Then the filing begins.

To transfer the pattern I'm going to wrap a post-it around the lug, cut it to match the edge, then wrap it around the blank socket and use a sharpie to mark the area that needs to be cut out. I don't need the lugs to be exact copies of each other but I'd like to at least get the proportions similar.

Head Tube
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I did some more shaping on the seat lug and it's ready to go. I also started on the head tube section. This is going to semi-lugged, with sockets for the top and down tubes only. The sockets will be filleted directly to the head tube. Aesthetically it looks cool, but it also saves me a from having to cut and file a lot of metal.

Here's the tubing mitered and ready to be tacked so that I can cut and shape the sockets.

First parts
Now Playing: Kid Koala - ScratchCratchRatchAtch
Here's the seat lug, tack welded and roughly shaped. It started out as two pieces of cromo tubing, then I mitered the front socket to fit and tack welded it in place, then I started shaping the socket with a hacksaw and files. After I took this picture I fine tuned the shape, square up the edges, and did some shaping to give it more life. Next step will be to clean out the inside of the socket, miter the top tube, and braze them together. I'll be brazing the tube into the socket and building the fillet around the joint at the same time.

2005's bike: takeapart roadster
Now Playing: Exclusive Mix - Mylo
Every year I try to build one bike frame. Right on schedule, with 2 months to go, I finally started on this one. I've been wanting to build a bike that breaks down into two pieces for travelling. There'a couple different ways to do it and I've been mulling over different couplings and styles of bikes. In the end I finally decided I was going to build something simple. If I'm going to travel to a city most likely I'm going to want the bike to explore around. So I wanted something that I could ride around in sneakers and relax. So I based it off of the old 3 speeds, though mine will probably just run a coaster brake.

The coupling method is a combination of the classic Rene Herse style slip fit and the modern Ritchey Breakaway. Dual seatpost clamps will allow the frame to separate near the top, and a telescoping coupling is installed near the bottom bracket.

Because the lower joint already looks like a long lug, I thought I'd build the frame with lugs. But to make the frame fit into a 26x26x10 box, I had to slope the top tube. Plus I decided to run 590mm wheels. The bike became unconventional enough that I'd have to fabricate my own lugs. That means that I'll almost have to build every joint twice, but I think the final product will be worth the effort.

Here's a screenshot of the frame in Autocad. The green box is the 26x26x10 envelope.