Christmas is rapidly approaching, and Santa should have something in his stocking for Leighton. This is a fixed-gear commuter. Front brake only, but running dual brake levers as Leighton likes to ride on the hoods.



Fizik Aliante saddle, Velocity wheelset, Nitto bars and Soma crank.



The frame is Zona and Nivacrom tubes on Long Shen oversized lugs.



Powdercoated in Precious Steeel Pearl yet again.



Oval chainstays and forward-facing rear dropouts.

The year is winding up, which unfortunately has meant that work has been flat out. Add to this the fact that Heather has been sick for what seems like weeks. Consequently, my time has not been my own, and there's been very little happening in the Shed.

I had a few hours blocked out this afternoon for working on Frame #5, but that got derailled when we picked up a car-load of ancient gardening tools from the Trentham tip for $10. What should have been time spent on the frame turned into a couple of hours spent wire-brushing and welding shovels, spades and garden forks. But I'm not complaining - a good scavenge is its own reward.

I did manage to spend some time on the frame though, and can report that the main triangle is mitered, the lugs are fettled and the water bottle cage mounts and front derailleur hanger are all brazed on. Cable guides are brazed on, vent holes drilled and the main triangle is more or less ready for the fixture. One last clean of the tubes and it'll be ready for brazing.



This frame is Nuovo Richie lugs, Columbus Zona tubes and a wishbone rear end. I'm loving working with the NR lugs - they are beautiful, very well made and are, in my opinion, just the right amount of ornate, without being over the top.



I'm planning to use a Strawberry/LAN71 wishbone unit on the seatstays. The connector tube will obviously fix to the back of the seat tube. Advice from those older and much wiser than me is that brazing it to the back of a .6mm tube with no other re-inforcement is not a good idea. The Nuovo Richie seat lug is too short at the back to allow me to braze it to the back of the seat lug. What to do? To cut a long story short, I ended up fabricating an extension to the lug, matching it to the lug's existing shoreline. I brazed it up using brass and then carefully sanded it back till it was an almost seamless addition to the lug. Then came carving the extension to match the lines of the lug. It's finished now, but for a little fettling of the edges. It'll provide a much bigger surface to braze to, and hopefully will be sympathetic to the rest of the lugs.

It's the end of a long and very shitty week, with progress in the workshop to be measured in millimeters. Maybe it's a good time to dig up some photos of my first track frame:









It's brazed from a mix of Columbus SLX, EL and Zona tubes. Track crown and round fork blades, Pacenti dropouts with stainless faces brazed on and long-point Long Shen lugs. The bike has been built up with a complete Mavic track groupset. RARE AS HEN'S TEETH! And I don't care if TC says bullhorns are gay - Mavic 'horns are the shit. Shamus the Wolfhound agrees.

Just a quick update, and no photos...

Not much been happening in the shed this last week, as my proper job has been keeping me very busy. Leighton's fork is back from getting the crown race machined, which means his bike is ready for the powdercoaters. Heather's bike is kind of stalled for the moment, until I sort out what I'm going to do about the seatstays. I've started prepping the lugs and tubes for a new road frame for me: Nuovo Richie lugs and Columbus Zona tubes. And I've had a sniff of interest from another friend, Hugh, who is keen to replace his ageing commuter.

Yesterday I got around to fixing a long-standing gripe of mine: the gap at the back of the bench. It's now filled with a little shelf, complete with 3 double powerpoints and storage room for screwdrivers, tube blocks, bits from the die grinder and all the other miscellany that used to either clutter my bench or roll off the back to be lost on the floor.

Hopefully the next update will have a little more zing to it.

Over the last week, I've been working on Heather's road frame. Progress has been good, with all the prep work out of the way. The fancy fleur-de-lys lugs are a pain to work with though - each lug has a shoreline the size of Tasmania, and the fancy points are remarkably fragile. They do look good though.



This time around I'm brazing all the stops and bosses onto the frame before tacking it together. Much easier to do all of that stuff with the tube clamped level in the vice...



I nicked an idea of Darryl McCulloch in Brisbane. His site shows a 'brazing finger' that he cantilevers off a bench mounted pillar. The weight of the steel strap keeps the braze-on in place. I've experimented with a few different solutions for this sort of thing, but never with any success. Either the jigs were too fiddly to set up or they just plain didn't work. This is sheer genius though. As it happened, I had some fairly hefty flat bar that I cut, ground and bent to a useful point. My trusty retort stand and test-tube clamp supported the far end of the 'finger' and gravity did the rest of the work. It's not as sexy as Dazza's set-up, but I could knock it up in minutes and I can't imagine anything improving it.



Unfortunately, things have ground to a halt for the moment. Firstly, I've run out of silver brazing flux. Annoying, but easily fixed. Secondly, there is a mis-match between the diameters of the seatstays I am using and the socket-style fancy dropouts that match the lugs. Perhaps I could push through this impasse, but my gut feeling is that I'm better off ditching the dropouts and swapping to a more adaptable conventional tabbed style horizontal dropout. In the meantime, I'll braze up the main triangle and then perhaps put the frame on ice for a week or two. I've got a stack of shed projects that need to be finished, so this might be a good time to get busy on them.

Tomorrow: mountain bike ride, and a massage and spa in Daylesford.

Sunday morning and Dave drove up from Melbourne to join me for a ride. He's racing in the Golden Triangle 100k race next weekend and has set up his hard-tail for the race. He wanted to give the bike a 'shake down' before the race.

I promised him some fire-road climbs, some flat out descents and some very twisty, narrow singletrack. After an initial romp through singletrack near my house, we spat out onto the Blackwood Ridge Road, which climbs steadily up and up... and up.















Now, Dave isn't the fastest guy out there. But put him on a steady climb and he just chugs away like a diesel. Now I'm not the fastest guy out there either. And riding 3 times in 6 months hasn't made me any faster. Suffice to say that Dave kicked my arse into next week. Which was all the more humiliating since he began the ride telling me that he was feeling sick and wasn't sure how well he'd go. Yeah right...

The long fire-road descent down the New Sultan track was where I thought I'd peg him back. After all he was on a hard-tail and I was on a very well sorted dually. Sure enough, after shifting into the big ring and railing the first few corners, I was on my own. And I bombed down the track in much that fashion, till I reached the intersection with Lerderderg River Road. Where I waited... and waited... and waited... Eventually, I saw a blue speck in the distance.




















Dave appeared. He'd stopped for a few minutes to try and troubleshoot a mysterious rear hub noise. So much for me dusting him on the descent.

With Leighton's bike finished, I managed to do a big clean in the shed. The workbench is clean of metal filings and worn strips of 80 grit. Tools are put away. And in a fit of organisation, I made some simple tubing racks out of some pine I had laying around.














On those racks and in the metal dish is a very long term project: a road bike for Heather. It's based around the ornate Long Shen Fleur De Lys lug set, and will be primarily Dedacchia tubing, with some Columbus Zona and EL thrown in where appropriate. I've had these tubes for nearly 2 years, so it's great to finally be doing something with them.

Leighton's bike is finished. I brazed in the rear bridge and did the final cleanup on the rear dropouts today. The rear bridge is a short length of 1/2" cro-mo tubing with a water bottle boss brazed into the underside. I brazed it - as I always like to braze bridges - from the inside out.

A little coil of silver was wedged into each end and fluxed up. I gently sweated the tubes, using the flame to pull the silver through the joint to the outside. When I was done I had a perfectly radiused fillet, with no cleanup whatsoever. Very satisfying.













A trial fit with a track wheel from the first bike I built lined up perfectly, with the wheel exactly centered in the rear triangle.

A few photos outside and I'm going to call it done. Next stop, the powdercoaters, but I'm waiting on getting the fork back from friend of mine who is currently turning the crown race down on his lathe.





















Shamus joined me for the photos.

After an email exchange with ace US framebuilder Steve Garro, I've decided to get off my arse and keep a blog. This entry comes most of the way through the building sequence of a lugged fixed gear bike I'm building for a friend, Leighton. The bike uses Long Shen oversized arrowhead lugs, forward facing horizontal lugs, a straight blade lugged fork and Columbus Zona tubes. It's the first frame I've built since moving to Blackwood. Some months were spent getting the workshop up and running, but the effort has paid off: it's a very productive work-space now. It'd be nice if it cleaned istself though.... The floor is already filthy with scraps of 80 grit paper, gobs of flux and metal filings.














The main triangle and rear end are brazed, and this post finds me in the middle of cleaning up the brass brazed rear dropouts. Earlier today I reamed the seat tube and faced the head tube. In the next day or so I'll braze in the rear brake bridge, which should be the end of it.














With this frame finished I can then turn my attention to something I've been promising Heather for a while: a Campy equipped road bike for her. I'll be building it from a mix Dedaccai and Columbus tubes, using the very fancy Long Shen Fleur de Lys lug-set.

The weather here has been crazy this past week. We went from nearly 30 degrees on Friday and Saturday to an overnight low of 2 last night. Hopefully things will fine up before the weekend. I'm planning on heading out on a trail ride wih Dave on Sunday morning, which should leave me nice and sore for the hour long massage scheduled for Sunday afternoon!