Although I've made a few forks to date, they have all been straight blade jobbies, largely because I haven't had access to a fork blade bender. There are no locally made commercial units, so it seemed I was going to have to make one myself. So behold my hillbilly-fabulous bender.



The mandrel is an offcut from a length of redgum fencepost I found in the woodshed. I cut, sanded and planed it to a constant radius and then routed a groove down the middle. For those of you not familiar with it, redgum is a fantastically dense and hard eucalypt which proved to be just about idea for this.



The fork tip clamp was knocked up out of some steel offcuts in the scraps bin, and is anchored by a pair of M10 cap screws that are threaded into hexagonal threaded rod couplers. The wood block is grooved to match the fork tip. Note the pint-sized bottle of Little Creatures - perhaps the finest beer in my world.



At the other end of the lump of wood is the bending stop. This is another M10 bolt and rod coupler, and provides a repeatable way of raking fork blades to exactly the same point.



Doing the actual bending itself is this little doohickey. It's a short length of 25mm angle, with a bored out 1/2" nut brazed to it. The nut pivots on a 1/2" bolt that pierces the bending arm. It all looks kinda Soviet era agricultural, but damn me the thing works. Effortless, repeatable and consistent bends.

Total cost was about $10 spent at the bolt shop. Everything else was already in the parts bin or was scrounged for free. Given that the commercial benders like the Hammil Engineering one run at over $US350, I'm pretty happy with the results.



And these are the results: on the left is an older straight blade fork, in the middle is a threaded road fork on NOS Columbus SLX blades, then a threadless road fork on more modern Columbus blades. All use socket style dropouts and are a fairly generic 365mm a-to-c and 45mm rake.



The nice thing about banging out a few in a row is you get a much better feel for the heat control. Come this last one, there was virtually no clean-up beyond scrubbing the flux off.

Next stop: disc braked cyclocross fork.

The boy slept for nearly two and a half hours in the middle of the day - time enough for me to hit the shed and braze up the fork for my wife Heather's bike. The crown and fork ends are the Long Shen Fleur-de-lys pattern, both in stainless.

Went together without a hitch, although it needed some post-braze tweaking. With the flux all gone, now begins the long and laborious process of filing, sanding and polishing. I've been fighting a losing battle with tendonitis in my elbows for about 10 years now, and hours of repetitive sanding and filing is pretty much the worst thing I can do, so I'll have to ration this task out over the next week so I don't have a total melt-down.




I've pretty much done the rough filing on the crown, so at least I've made some progress. Fork ends are a lot easier, and should be done before I dose up on anti-inflammatories and head out to the pub this evening!



The last couple of days here in Blackwood have been stunners. Well below freezing overnight, and clear, still cloudless days. Everything going to plan I'll head out on my dual suspension Ellsworth tomorrow morning and crunch some ice on the local trains. Have a good weekend.