The 5 foot solution

This is not the first one of these that I have built. This particular edition "low standover 'cross frame" will have disc brakes. I like taking phots of frames in this state as they look really clean before all the cable guides and other bits are welded and/or brazed on. This is the first steel frame I have built in about three weeks so I'm going slow and the welds are pretty much as good as I like to see. The rider is 5'1/4" with a 27 3/4" stand over. She likes her handlebars up pretty high so the front end of the bike will accomplish that with no headset spacers and no need for some spastic-looking stem reaching up to the sky. Lots of spacers and/or a wacky stem usually means that the bike isn't as good of a fit as it could be.
This part of the frame has a bit more going on than usual. The extra tube that joins the top tube to the head tube will keep the bike strong enough for some rough dirt riding.
It's always a happy day when I can put the frame on the drawing and see that I actually built what I set out to build. A long time ago it wasn't always the case ! Bike frames can fight you many steps of the way......nothing fits , everything needs to be clean and you can't be pissed off and expect to do good work. I used to play a lot of Nirvana in the shop years ago but i found that I would really get angry easily while listening to it. I figured out that really funny stuff is a problem, too......trying to weld a delicate pass while cracking up to some really stupid music usually yields some sort of embarrassing tatoo on the frame where you slipped and melted something you shouldn't have.