7005 batch nearing completion

I know what is going to happen tomorrow......I presumably will finish these frames and ship them off to the heat treater before I get photos of them so I decided today to take a few last shots of them without paint. These four are completed with the sprint frame in the foreground.

Theses are the two that still need all the guides, bridges and bottle rivnuts , along with the final alignment.

Here they all are in a rather undignified pose on the floor. The racks on the wall are full of completed frames so the floor is all I have for anything in process. The shop gets extra messy during the last week of the month, especially when a batch is going. In the midst of this batch I had to stop and build a steel road frame.....for another builder-long story . I still have some October orders on the list to finish up after this batch, not to mention some repairs as well. The economic slowdown seems to have missed me this winter.....I'm not complaining .

Main triangles done

Here's all six of the first 7005 batch of the year. They are all road frames except the little one in the front......that one is a sprint frame for the velodrome. I hope to have these done by the end of the week making the total for the month nine frames , possibly ten if i can also squeeze in a steel road frame. You'll see it here if I do.

four out of six....

Working hard this week I fell short f my goal , but only just. I'm hoping to have six shiny aluminum frames off to the heat treater by the end of next week. These are four completed front triangles of the six started. I like switching from steel to aluminum and back again every 5 weeks or so.....the variety makes the job more fun and keeps me sharp at both mediums.

first aluminum batch of the year

This pile of tubes represents an afternoons work. I did machine the headtubes yesterday but all the mitering , welding and alignment took place between 2 and 6 p.m. The morning was devoted to a really ugly seat tube repair on a more mass-produced frame. The work came out great but I think I charged about half of what I should have....out of sympathy, I guess. The aluminum batch is at four now but will be about eight when I'm done.

Push bike for a one year old

I have built a bike for a 10 year old triathlete, a mountian bike for a 2 1/2 year old toddler but this is positively the smallest bike I have ever built. The frame is a replica of one of those wooden "Like a bike" push bikes that are currently so popular. If you look at the frame you can see that I started with a tange cro-mo road fork and built it up from there.....the front fork is one that I built a little too short so I chopped it, spread it and welded on some old plate dropouts that I had sitting in a box of leftover Bontrager pieces. The seat tube is from a BMX tubeset , the rest are various cro-mo straight guage aircraft tubes except the headtube which is another relic from the Bontrager junk box. The tube that hangs downward derectly behind the fork is a steering restrictor, something requested by the customer......even one year olds can be very specific.The whole thing looks like a leaping jaguar, or more appropriately , some sort of creature from a movie done with too much computer animation. It was fun and challenging to build.