saturday 2-11

Whew,  it's been a long strange build.

With nothing in the queue but some serious tire kicking I've had time to get my new race bike just the way I wanted it.  I've plugged happily away at it. content not to rush or settle for less than 'just right'.

There's a couple hours left to do on it which I plan to do this morning after cleaning the shop.

One of those things is a hose guide near the front of the bike.  I think I should have moved the insertion point for the rear brake forward a bit but it's no a big deal and way too much work to re-do.  I'll solve the routing issue on a similar bike in the shed and add what I need.

It should go to powder next week,  my guy is shooting me a test  to look at when I drop it off.  If that's a no go then it will just be white.

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Saturday morning

Heres a quick post before I take the crusher on a shakedown cruise.

I put it all together yesterday and she's ready to go,  this is the bike almost done in the shop;

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and here it is after getting some stickers, bottle cages , a flat kit and a pump.  I'm excited!

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Here also in the something different catagory is  the crepe cart almost done,  I'll post more shots of it with the lid and when it's been installed at it's new location.

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Monday the ninth

I took some more stuff to the powdercoaters this morning in hopes that he would be done  with some of the last order.  He wasn't but did come thru by the end of the day.  I can get back on the crepe cart now and I hope to finish by the end of the week.

Heres some shots of my MTB,  I made some progress this weekend after getting my ass completely beat by the seattube.  I got what I wanted but it literally took from 5am to 9:45pm to get it.

Moving forward on it now, I'm just putting everything together without welding (other than the seattube to bottom bracket)  so I can figure out how I want to route the rear brake hose.  It will be internal but I cant decide if I want to run it in and out of the top tube and then in and out of the seatstay or just run it thru the  second toptube and into the seatstay.  If I choose the second toptube there may be a need for a guide tube or hose perch high on the downtube so its not quite such a big loop from the bars to the entry point.    I guess I'll just stare at it this week as I work on other stuff in the shop.  There is some other little features I'd like to include but they are not fully jelled yet.

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New years eve

As promised, I'm getting back to the frames I took to powder the other day.

One is a road bike for my brother Mike, this has been in the works for some time and it's been nice to get a chance to wrap it up.  It's a mixture of life and spirit tubes,  should be a sweet ride.

The gravel crusher is a bike that I  ran thru as fast as I could,  I wanted to get it up and running for winter training. I have some rides planned that will totally benefit from the disc brakes and full fenders. It is going to run 1 x 9 shimano with a 50t chain ring in front of an 11x34 cassette and have clearance for up to a 45c tire.  I have a set of 35c navigators allready mounted to start with though.

I was hoping this would be a big weekend for getting things done on my mountain bike but it turns out i was short on some parts i needed.  Instead, I spent the morning sorting thru wheelsets, matching up skewers, tightening cassettes, patching tubes, mounting tires and getting the bike shop organized.

In the afternoon I started in on the nichols mill I picked up this last spring.   I finally made the decision to take the bastard non-original motor off of it and mount a smaller 110v motor. I plan to control speed thru step pulleys.

Once the motor and belt was off I spun the spindle by hand and it felt sticky.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I had dimantled the spindle assembly to check the bearings, found them shot and unsurprisingly the whole assembly full of grease.

This is pretty typical,  people see a grease zerk and put a gun on it,  most machinery is meant to use heavy oil.   What happens is this;  grease is oil and solids mixed, meant to release the oil slowly.  often times the solids are things like clay or other minerals.  once all the oil runs out  all that is left is the solids which is in effect, dirt.  This is hard on the bearings and really slows stuff down.   In this machines case it was packed tight with no where to go.

I just cleaned it all out and wiped everything down but decided to replace the bearings while I have it apart,  the bearings were both etched with the date 4-20-43.  This could either be the date the machine was built or the date they were last replaced.   Hopefully there will be an autoparts store open tomorrow that carries the bearing.  As usual, I'll keep you posted.

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Tuesday 12-27

Ok,  it was a good weekend in the bike shop,   I was able to weld the  front triangle of the gravel crusher  and add the chainstays saturday morning before going for a ride.  The seatstays were done in the evening before taking sunday off.

Monday I hit it hard doing the finish work and the rest of the brazeons before moving on to mikes bike.

Today all of it including the crepe cart went to the powdercoaters and I got going on my new niner.

Starting with the head tube,I put it on the lathe to add some feature and to part it to length.

These little rings are just shallow cut into the headtube with a filed down end of the parting tool.  This is something that I saw Drew of Engin cycles doing in a photo somewhere and thought it looked awsome.

I'm trying to decide if I want to put one at the top as well but I need to add the top tube first to see if there is room.

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heres the headtube set to height on the jig;

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next up is the downtube miter,  I started by cutting the minor size all the way thru and then without moving it I changed the hole saw to the bigger size and made a partial cut.

once that was done I connected the two cuts with the hacksaw and started filing to fit.

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This miter was a total challenge,  I got it really close and then w

ent to run some errands to think about things for a bit,  when I came back it finished off really nicely.  Trying to hit a paticular spot on a tapered tube was tougher than I thought,   I had it fitting well both above and below where I needed it to go but the short length of the tube limits me to one spot.  more on that later.

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I'll post shots of the two finished frames later,  I just wanted to share the start of the mtb for now.

later,

jake