There has been a bit of a hiatus in DB's frame. Some depressing health stuff in the family, a very heavy work schedule and a few other things have kept me out of the shed. And all the while, I've been niggled by the fact that the right chainstay attached about 1.5mm lower than the left seat-stay. No-one other than myself would have noticed it, but it bugged me. So I decided I would fix it.



Off with the stay, clean it up, reposition it and have another crack. You can see just how much surface corrosion you get in a couple of weeks. The right one is lovely and clean, but that rust bloom just keeps coming back to freshly cleaned steel.



Not that you can tell once you've coated it al in flux and hit it with the torch. All fixed now, and I can stop being bothered by it.



The finished seat cluster. The end caps look nice against the seat lug - very crisp. I've been looking forward to this next bit for ages - trimming the excess off the seat tube and getting the top of the lug all tidied up...



... and after some work with the half-round file and then cutting the slot with the warding file, it's close to done. I think it might need a touch more work just to clean up the curves a little, but it's almost there.




Final task for the night - reaming the seat tube. It'll take a 27.2mm seat post and the reamer had very little work to do this time around. A tiny bit of resistance in the first 50mm or so, probably due to a bit of heat distortion, but it really didn't need much work at all. OK. enough for now. Maybe some work on the dropouts tomorrow if time permits. Nice to be back on it.