Steel road frame with internal cable

A steel fork is a nice compliment to a steel frame as it can be painted to match and it also can be built to match, both for geometry and aesthetic considerations. The task is so much easier with my new Anvil fork jig.
There has been a trend toward people ordering steel road frames as of late. I really don't have a problem with this as my experience with steel goes back to the times of the dawning of the universe. I guess I'm pretty old.......so here's the latest one. The frame is shot from the non-drive side so you can see the internal brake cable setup. It's not unique to my bikes by any stretch of the imagination but it is a nice touch and gives this welded bike a little more class.

I call it a Swiggoretti.

No doubt, this customer was taken with another builders design....I guess he decided to buy local instead. The task was to replicate certain features but also stay true to how I might apporach building a frame with such large diameter steel tubes. It seems to have been a success. I fell lucky !

Team frames for sale

This team rider, Chris McGovern has decided to start his own team so he's cutting loose of his two team scandium frames. The frames were used for the 2009 season only and appear to be in mint condition. Chris sent me some photos which I was unable to upload. Here's a photo of him with one of the bikes in the lead at the Pilarcitos race at McLaren park last season. Chris can be reached at mcgovski@gmail.com if you are interested in the frames. Chris is 5'11" and the frames have a 57.5 top tube, if I remember correctly. These frames are built form the GX-2 tubing that I haven't been able to get since last year.....it's the world-class stuff.

June scandium batch

Here's what I have been up to the last two weeks. Lots of shiny scandium frames that will no doubt be beaten in a savage manner at cyclcross races. No stainless logos here, just welded tubes and whatever is needed to get the rider around the course as fast as possible. the season is almost here !

Framebuilder commute

I have showed a series of photos about the building process. Now I'd like you to check out my commute home from work , at least when I make the time to do it. The short way to work is only about ten blocks of suburban riding. Today I'll take the longer way, about 1 1/2 hours of dirt. Here's my bike. Only about five minutes of pedaling from my shop door is this, the enterance to Wilder Ranch state park.A number of years ago , lots of mountain bikers, hikers and horseback riders lobbied to get the state to buy this pristeen land and turn it into a park . Lots of hard working folks succeeded and for the last 12-odd years we have this great expanse of open land to explore right out our front door.

All of todays ride will be fire roads but it dosen't have to be. There's a pretty solid connection of singletrack for nearly all the route.

The first half of the ride is all uphill, almost a solid half hour of climbing, most of it like this through open meadows.

I had to shoot this tree-it was really striking this late in the day. There are lots of oaks at this altitude but higher up it is all redwoods and pine.

I guess we get the occasional lightning strike. Although it isn't really high up and the tree wasn't that tall, this is the only explanation I can think of for this incinerated pine.

Here's the final few hundered feet of uphill before crossing over into the university land.

This sign greets you as you cross into the university of California at Santa Cruz. There's a lot of forest land behind the college and it is where I first got the idea to build mountian bikes. In the late '70's my boss at the Bicycle center, Roger Sands took us riding here on road bikes . Roger had a bike that I had never seen until that time....a Bob Jackson cyclcross bike. We explored for a couple of hours until the landowner spotted us and escorted us out of the forest with a stern warning: "Don't come back or you'll be sitting in jail for tresspassing." -It was quite a different time back then. This spot is called 'twin gates' and it is a gathering spot for fans of PBR and mountian biking after work in the summer.

Now you really know you are in California....endangered species signs. I don't know about you, but if I saw one of these tiger beetles I think I would run away as fast as I could.

Ahh, finally-downhill , almost the whole way home. It's getting late so I'm staying on the fire road tonight.

This spot is named " The tanks"......I guess it's obvious why. Over the years this has been the meeting place for dirt cyclists both good and evil, sane and insane, sober and totally shitfaced.I have witnessed many things here, bicycle jousting-sort of....story telling , tall people falling over, a bike being put up impossibly high in a tree. -Hi, Eric !

There are many choices for the decent but I'll stick to this road, the main drag. It is not far from here on this road about three years ago where I did a drunken high-side on this very bike and wound up with a broken thumb and a lot of missed rides. I no longer stop for a toast with the crew up at twin gates .

It's starting to get dark but I wanted to get in a few more photos of landmarks of the west side dirt commute. This is the beginning of a trail that I named " the lock 'em up " back in 1982. I was on a ride with Mark Michel of the local shop, the Bicycle Trip. The trail had been cut earlier that week for a horse endurance event. We started down the trail and were amazed at the tight turns and steep dropoffs everywhere. There really wasn't anything like it that we had ridden to that point. Both of us though that nobody would ever be able to ride down it without a dab or a crash or two. In a few weeks we were all over that trail , learning all the body english needed to survive the plunge. It is this trail by far that shaped my earliest mountain bike geometry .

Now this is why I live here. Every day I come home to this, a little city on the north side of Monterey bay. I got all sentimental when I stopped for this photo. It's not that great of a shot but it is that great of a place to call home.

And now I am home, all 680 square feet of it. The tortillas are calling and it's 8:15 p.m. The cats need to be fed, theyr'e probably pissed that I'm home so late.

My shoes. I must say, these are the best shoes I have ever owned. I guess that's why the pros use them.

Yeah, I know.....you already saw this one. I tried to delete it but I'm computer challenged and I have been havine a Norton anti-virus meltdown for about two weeks. Is it just me or are the anti virus programs really the biggest pain in the neck ?

Oh, Canada.

Hey, all you hockey pucks out there......you can be festooned with the maple leaf if you like. This custlomer hails from up north and wanted a little symbol of his former home on his bike. The maple leaves remind me of days when folks wanted more stuff in thier paint to signify something to do with their origins. I'll be putting a couple of French flags on a frame in a couple of weeks. I'm all enthused about the whole mountian bike nostalgia going on right now. Old bikes that used to languish in garages forgotten are now sought after as historically significant rideable relics. Maybe one day even my old bikes will be collectable. Vote for me to get into the mountain bike hall of fame ( Industry catagory )and that old lobster in the garage might pay for a new refigerator.....or something.

Anatomy of a build

The customer for thos scandium 'cross frame requested a pictorial of the assembly process. I'll share it with all of you who check out this blog on occasion. Granted , this isn't every last step but given the time I had, it shows most of the process. Below is my drawing table with the plan for the frame well under way. I do a full-scale drawing for every bike-no autocad here , just your basic drafting equipment and a bevel protractor to accurately find the angles.
Here you can see that the drawing is finished. I made a correction to it-that's why there are some extra lines where the top tube is pictured. Having a full scale drawing makes it easy to chek the work as I go along. If the something dosen't line up with the drawing, Iv'e got a problem to solve.

Here's a photo of the boring operation on the lathe. I remove a little material from the head tube to make it a little easier to weld and later machine for the headset. I only have 50 amps in the shop so if the material is too thick , I can't get good weld penetration.

Here's the first weld-seat tube to BB shell. I always start here. I don't have to but it seems the logical place to start as it is pretty much the center of the frame.....all tubes project outward from this point, more or less.

I lay out the complete tubeset on the drawing table to make sure the tubes are the correct length to be used in this frame-too long and I'll cut off the butting and not have as strong of a bike in the end.
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This is the final turning operation on the head tube. I take a small amount of material off the outside and leave a 'collar' at either end of the head tube. I like the way it looks and it puts more material where it is needed in the higher stress zones.

I weld the finished head tube to the top tube early in the process. If I make an error in the head angle , it will be easy to check at this point ans start over if it is too far out of spec.

This is the mitering process being done on the front end of the down tube that will meet the head tube at approximately 60 degrees. All the main tubes and stays are cut this way if they are to be welded to another tube.

This is my home-made main triangle jig with the seat tube, BB shell and downtube held in place for welding. I'll tack the down tube in three places, then remove the assembly from the jig and do all the weld passes. When this is done the main triangle will be in two pieces, this one and the head/top tube sub-assembly.

Here's the front triangle all welded up sitting on the jig.

When the fron triangle is aligned, I check it against the drawing to make sure it's correct. At this point I can use the drawing to orient my rear-triangle jig which bolts to the seat tube.

Here's the rear triangle jig being used to hold the dropouts and chainstays for welding. I leave this jig on the frame until all the stays are fully welded on.

Once the rear triangle is welded up I go through an alignment stage, doing the final check with an appropriate rear wheel and a Park frame alignment stick. It's pretty basic but it tells you all you need to know about inaccuracies in your craftsmanship tht need to be addressed.

Here's the final product laying on the drawing and hooray ! It all lines up as it should. There are a lot of little steps that I didn't get a chance to photograph but this is my first attempt at showing how a frame goes together in my shop. Some day I'll produce a DVD if I have the time.