Where there's smoke...

Not much has been happening in the way of framebuilding recently, as the lack of updates on the blog might suggest. It's been damn cold and rainy in Blackwood recently, and nights spent pottering in the shed are uncomfortable to say the least. I needed a heater, and I made one.



It's an old industrial water tank - 1/4" plate all the way through. Welded internally between the top and bottom doors is a round grate, and there is another round plate welded to the bottom to cap it off.



The air control system uses a sliding plate over three corresponding holes in the airbox so I can regulate the air going into the stove. It seems to work quite well.



The door latch and handle were bodged up out of scrap. The latch bit itself is brass brazed into the end of a seatstay offcut. Just like making up a plate dropout! There's a length of stainless steel spring silver brazed over the chainstay to form the handle.



I fired it up on the driveway this afternoon. The inside of the tank is coated in some kind of epoxy sealant, so I wanted to give it a good hot burn in the open air to get rid of it. So far it seems to work perfectly. I'll weld some legs on it and then connect it up to the existing flue in the shed. Hopefully I'll be toasty warm this weekend. Expect to see a bit more action.

Dropping the balls

The work/life/fun balance has been all out of whack recently, and time playing with bikes in the shed has been the last thing on my to-do list. It's been months since I last posted a blog entry and in that time we've gone from having had to evacuate 3 times in the face of fire threats to now, where the temperature is regularly in the minuses.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my priorities have turned to trying to heat the shed. It's bitterly cold out there, particularly as the only time I get to myself is after about 7pm at night when the boy is asleep. I'm mostly finished building a very funky wood stove, fashioned from an old water tank. Most of the grubby work is done, with the very real possibility of firing it up this weekend. I'll post again in the next few days with some more pictures and an update as to where I'm at with my new road frame.

Fire

I wasn't kidding when I said it was hot.




Yesterday was the hottest day on since records were first kept in Victoria. It was the highest fire danger in history. Much of the state is on fire, and over 85 people are dead, with hundreds of homes destroyed. We're fine, but friends have been burnt out and my parents are literally in the line of fire.

So, no. I haven't been building bicycles. I haven't been in the shed. I've been far more pre-occupied with how I might survive a fire than use one to melt some silver. We'll resume out scheduled broadcast when the state stops burning and people stop being killed.

If you can't stand the heat...

I've been quiet on the blogging front, but somewhat busy in the shed.

My road frame is brazed up, bar the wishbone seatstays. I need to have a long think about the order in which I do things from here on in lest I end up melting existing brazes.

I've been working on a fork bender, shaped from a monolithic lump of redgum. No pix for now, but soon to follow.

Today is Australia Day - our national holiday. Think 4th of July for Aussies. Heather, Rufus and I abandoned our country retreat for the day and headed into Footscray. In addition to being Australia day it was also the Chinese Lunar New Year - the Tet festival. So we spent Oz day in a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, watching Vietnamese dragon dancers scare away evil spirits with fireworks. This is a great country sometimes.

No so great is that this coming week is predicted to be the hottest week in a hundred years. Four consecutive days over 40 degrees (104F+) Given we live in the middle of 1/4 million acres of eucalypt forest - and no, I'm not making that up - and given that we are in the height of the bushfire season, I'm getting a little nervous.