We’re in Alpine now. Found a 1917 (supposedly, it may be 1890s) house that needs a little work.
I just finished the backsplash in the kitchen this weekend. Still a lot of projects, but the big ones are done.
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Nothing like a house move to get in the way of frame building! Just recovering from that myself!
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The water heater of course kicked the bucket and dealing with the home warranty has been . . . fun.
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I’ve FINALLY replaced the downtube of my hardtail frame. If you remember This Post in the Fail Thread, I cracked the 34.9mm Downtube up at the head tube junction November 2024. I left it with a friend in June of last year so he could develop and test his “stuck seat post puller”. He broke 3 versions of that before he could get my seat post unstuck. But about a month ago, he told me he got it out. (grease your seat posts kids)
I cut the old downtube out, and sanded and filed back all the old downtube bits and braze. I measured the distance with a string. (the string didn’t really work but the ol’ eyecrometer did the trick) Cut and mitered the new 38.1mm tube and then brazed it in. Wish I had more photos, but I get in the groove and just charge ahead. I think it’s my ADHD hyper focus mode, let me know if you experience similar.
I reused the cable guides from the old downtube after I torched them off. They are quite crispy, but they only have to hold cables, so it doesn’t matter. And my plans for paint are gonna be quite ugly, so nothing really has to be perfect.
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Sweet! Which tube did you end up using?
This one. I’ve got a 160f/150r alloy prototype from work that I have to test right now so that’s taking the abuse. This bike will still get ridden hard, but maybe not as hard as before.
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I really want to take some nice photos of my hardtail before I post them up here, so I’m going to post photos of the old school GT frame modification I did with a friend yesterday.
We changed the rear IS mount to the front standard to allow for slightly larger rotor options (not that he’ll use them) and that keeps the mount above the rack mount so we don’t have to cut it off.
We had to get creative for the cable routing since it’s made for Canti brakes. So we brazed on an elbow on top of the rack mount to redirect the cable down the seatstay to a cable stop. Turned out perfect in my opinion.
We burned the paint a little, but we tried our best to save as much as we could. The wet rag trick really does help.
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I’m trying not to just dump photos here, but I’ve been working on several different things at the same time, so I’ll do my best to manage that.
This post will be about the All-Road bike I’m making. I’ve made some decisions and I’m gonna explain my thought process because it makes me laugh. I ride track bikes to work most days. I like the agile nimble quick handling. I was thinking about the all-road category and how my personal version of an all-road bike would be different. I like the tire clearance because I don’t believe tubeless tires below 28mm should even exist. But due to my track bike riding, I don’t like the higher stack that these all-road bikes have. Also, because I commute like a man who has no sense of self preservation, I prefer a higher bottom bracket that allows me to pedal through corners and not worry about pedal strikes. After looking at my design, I realized it was a Cyclocross bike. So that’s what I’m gonna make. I’ll keep the fender mounts, but I will ditch the dynamo routing. (saves some money anyway)
This drawing may not have the details you might want to see, but it’s what I have for my process in building the frame and fork.
Speaking of, I built the fork. Pretty proud of how that turned out. Not gonna go into detail, but this is my first disc brake fork, my second fork ever. This fork has massive tire clearance. Pictured here with a 35mm tire. The disc side fork blade required a small dimple to clear the 160mm rotor. I used the disc specific fork blade for the left side and a standard blade for the right side.
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I’ve been slowly making progress. I am planning a lugged frame sometime this year (if I’m lucky) so I thought I would practice my silver brazing. I’m a little rusty, but after some practice I was feeling better.
Of course I didn’t take photos of my water bottle bosses (with skull reinforcements) cleaned up and I didn’t take photos of the reinforcement rings for the head tube during the process. So this is what you get.
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