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.