So I figured I might go back a year and a half ago to my first frame build and share how things have progressed over time. I decided to build my first bike after going on a binge of watching pithy bikes youtube channel, and after having a good hard think about it I decided that people have built bikes with less tooling and equipment than I have, so I should just make it happen.
I started off by making my “jig”. I drew up some standoffs in tinkercad to hold the tubes in place:
For the head tube and seat tube
for the bottom bracket
At this point I wasn’t even thinking about the rear triangle, that was a job for future me. When you have a challenging task and you don’t know what to do, break it down into more manageable chunks. The goal at this point was to make a front triangle, thats all. So I 3d printed the standoffs. The bike I wanted to build was a rigid mountain bike, 27.5+ so I drew up what I wanted in bikecad (quite similar to what stooge cycles makes) and then transferred that to a piece of mdf and attached my 3d printed standoffs
the head tube and bottom bracket were donated my a rusty marin hardtail frame from the early 90s.
Next thing I had to figure out was a way to notch tubes. I came up with a clamp to go in the toolpost of my lathe like so:
So a short while later I was getting somewhere
The tubing is straight gauge 4130, 1.25" tt 1.5" dt and st. There is no local source of framebuilding materials in New Zealand, just a bit of straight 4130 in limited sizes so thats what I used. I’m going to leave it there for today cause its past my bed time so I will pick this up again later!