Saturday, November 27, 2010

Forks, forks , forks.


Getting caught up on my work these days involves building all the forks and stems that have been on order , some since June ! I'm probably known as a guy who delivers custom frames pretty much on schedule and is horribly slow on building forks-even more so on stems. It just so happens that my shop is efficiently laid out for building frames but not so for smaller stuff. All this said, I rarely refuse an order for a fork-I just have a caveat : You can't be in a hurry if you want me to build you a stem or a fork.
The black fork above has one of the remaining few Ritchey/Bridgestone crowns out of my collection. I think I have four more out of the original 18 or so that I bought back in about 1995.
This unicrown fork will be used with a 29" wheel but on a 26" wheel single speed. The fork with the wheel will add up to about the same height as a 26" wheel in a 100 MM shock fork. I have been thinking about doing this conversion with my single speed.......might be fun to have that big wheel and no boing.
Here's a detail of the disc mount and the little cable guide on the back of the blade. I used some larger diameter rod for the 1/4" thick plate on the mount. I think it's easier to weld with and there won't be a problem with anything not staying together under hard braking.
Here's another crown with a finite supply. Kirk Pacenti is selling his bikelugs.com business so all these nice bits he has been selling might possibly be a thing of the past. This is a great resource that framebuilders are losing.....maybe we just didn't support him enough with our dollars. It's tough for me as there is little that I build with lugs,crowns and the like. Ironically, I have built more lugged forks in the last year than in the previous 7-8.
This Paris-Brest crown is really a terrific design and it will be sad to no longer be able to use it.There's plenty of metal on this crown , so much that I'm sure one could build a fork for off-road with it and feel sure that if anything bent in an accident, it would not be the crown. I have to use a rosebud tip on the torch...the largest flame at my disposal to heat up this massive casting.

16 comments:

FelletBrazing said...

Great looking forks man!

That really is sad about BikeLugs.com
I was stoked that he was able/willing to have that crown made for him/all of us... never got a chance to use it for one of my forks, but it was on the "I can't wait to try that one" list. Sad to see someone with that much knowledge, willing to put so much into the frame building community, not be able to sustain what they have to offer.

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Cucipata said...

I'm a bike fanatic too. Like the blog. Good luck!

beth said...

Okay, I haven't ridden my bike for over 5 years, and yet I just read every word of this post and enjoyed it. Funny how that works sometimes.

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Love the blog, nice to see some infor from across the pond.

Come take a look at how we ride in the uk

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Rick Henry said...

Nice work. I enjoy the detail in which you describe the process of making these forks.

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Anonymous said...

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swiggco world said...

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