Description

An admitted shoe geek waxes philosophical about running, triathlon, and life in general.
Comments welcome!


Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Finally got it all together


I’ve got a hard-tail mountain bike in the build queue.

I’ve been poised to start fabrication for a little while now. But there were a couple of (critical) hold-outs.

When I fabricate a frame, I usually start from the ends and work my way to the middle. The fork determines the location of the bottom of the head tube, so that has to come before the final jig set-up for the main triangle. When the fork is an “extra” part that can be swapped into the frame in place of a suspension fork, as is the case for most hard-tail mountain bikes, the crown dimension is known, so the frame and fork can be made separately, but…

When fab’ing the frame itself, I start with the assembly of the rear dropouts to the chainstays, and then that to the bottom bracket. Then that assembly goes into the jig and is joined to the seat tube, then the rest of the frame. But…

But there were three missing pieces: The fork steerer tube, the rear dropouts (all from the same company), and some jig cones for the oversize head tube.

I sourced the cones and they arrived fairly quickly. The other parts I had ordered in November… Where were they? I contacted the supply company, and somewhere between charging my credit card and the shipping department, the order was lost. They sent me a T-shirt in apology along with the parts.

So now it’s all together. Time to start making flakes.