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.

Christmas is rapidly approaching, and Santa should have something in his stocking for Leighton. This is a fixed-gear commuter. Front brake only, but running dual brake levers as Leighton likes to ride on the hoods.



Fizik Aliante saddle, Velocity wheelset, Nitto bars and Soma crank.



The frame is Zona and Nivacrom tubes on Long Shen oversized lugs.



Powdercoated in Precious Steeel Pearl yet again.



Oval chainstays and forward-facing rear dropouts.

The year is winding up, which unfortunately has meant that work has been flat out. Add to this the fact that Heather has been sick for what seems like weeks. Consequently, my time has not been my own, and there's been very little happening in the Shed.

I had a few hours blocked out this afternoon for working on Frame #5, but that got derailled when we picked up a car-load of ancient gardening tools from the Trentham tip for $10. What should have been time spent on the frame turned into a couple of hours spent wire-brushing and welding shovels, spades and garden forks. But I'm not complaining - a good scavenge is its own reward.

I did manage to spend some time on the frame though, and can report that the main triangle is mitered, the lugs are fettled and the water bottle cage mounts and front derailleur hanger are all brazed on. Cable guides are brazed on, vent holes drilled and the main triangle is more or less ready for the fixture. One last clean of the tubes and it'll be ready for brazing.



This frame is Nuovo Richie lugs, Columbus Zona tubes and a wishbone rear end. I'm loving working with the NR lugs - they are beautiful, very well made and are, in my opinion, just the right amount of ornate, without being over the top.



I'm planning to use a Strawberry/LAN71 wishbone unit on the seatstays. The connector tube will obviously fix to the back of the seat tube. Advice from those older and much wiser than me is that brazing it to the back of a .6mm tube with no other re-inforcement is not a good idea. The Nuovo Richie seat lug is too short at the back to allow me to braze it to the back of the seat lug. What to do? To cut a long story short, I ended up fabricating an extension to the lug, matching it to the lug's existing shoreline. I brazed it up using brass and then carefully sanded it back till it was an almost seamless addition to the lug. Then came carving the extension to match the lines of the lug. It's finished now, but for a little fettling of the edges. It'll provide a much bigger surface to braze to, and hopefully will be sympathetic to the rest of the lugs.

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.