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.