Apparently Sheldon Brown had a massive heart attack yesterday and sadly passed away. Although he’s been suffering with MS recently, I’m led to believe this was unexpected.

A sad day indeed.

Apparently Mario Cipollini has some pretty hefty tax bills to pay so he’s coming out of retirement at age 40. He’s signed to the controversial (some say) Rock Racing team.

Currently playing in iTunes: Fable of the Brown Age by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Here’s a pic of a fat boy riding his Shand at the Single Speed World Champs in Aviemore in 2007.

Many thanks to Simon Barnes for the image. More of his excellent photography can be found on his flickr site.

I especially like this one.

Currently playing in iTunes: You Don’t See Me Crying by Neal Casal

This is quite interesting….

Which reminded me of this poster I noticed the last time I was at the Transport Museum in Glasgow.

Currently playing in iTunes: The Drunken Sailor by Jim Eldon

Here’s the toptube/headtube join just out of the soak tank.

Clean up the flux residue with a wire brush. Short time with some files and we’ll have a nice smooth fillet.

Pictures of the finished joint coming up next.

Currently playing in iTunes: Play Me Something by Roddy Woomble

I’ve put a couple of new posts up on the build page.

You can get to them by clicking the build link at the top of the page or by clicking here

Currently playing in iTunes: Four Strong Winds by Neil Young

Main tubes cut, mitred, cleaned and set up in the jig. A small amount of flux is added to each joint (the red stuff) and small ‘tack’ brazes are laid down to hold the frame together. Normally I tack at 6, 12, 3 and 9 o’clock. The order of these tacks are quite important. When you add any kind of heat to the tubes they want to move, expand, twist and so on. In order to keep the frame as straight as possible I add the tacks in order that each subsequent tack brings the frame back into alignment.

Once the frame is all tacked, it’s taken out of the jig and onto the alignment table to make sure it’s still straight. If it needs tweaked then we do that at this stage.

Here’s a close up of the downtube/headtube junction about to get tacked.

Currently playing in iTunes: Wild Mountain Berries by Kelly Hogan & The Pine Valley…

A mountain bike based on the geo of Petes existing bike, a Trek 8500.

35mm seattube with internal sleeve (31.6 seatpost). Columbus Life tubing mostly but with a Reynolds downtube.

Although bike will be built with rigid forks, they’re suspension corrected. The frame is a pretty big and with the long forks, the downtube length was bigger than anything Columbus could do.

Theres’s an external sleeve on the bottom of the seattube (tube at the top of the pic) for some additional strength. Also some nice turned down headtube reinforcements (tube at the top of the pic). It’s a 1.1mm headtube so with these reinforcements it should be plenty strong enough!

Here we have all the main tubes cut and mitred. The chainstays have been bent but are still to be cut and the seatstays will be bent and cut once the main triangle is together and the chainstays are on.

BB and seattube in the jig all fluxed up and ready to be brazed. This is one of the first operations that get done. I finish this joint as much as I can before doing the rest of the frame as the BB junction is one of the hardest joints to get into to clean up once it’s all together. The seattube is aligned after this process to make sure the BB and seattube are perpendicular.

This is the seattube and the downtube. I do as much of the braze-ons before building as possible. There’s no chance of the frame shifting out of alignment if we do it pre-braze. It’s also much easier to get into the tubes and do the drilling and stuff.
The tube at the top is the downtube and it’s got 2 sets H2O bosses (1 underneath) and a set of crudguard bosses. These have been installed and have been cleaned up. The bottom pic is the seattube. It’s just come out of the soak tank and is still all gunged up with flux residue.

Here’s pic of the seattube all cleaned up. You can also see the BB join in this pic.

all the images from this build are available in the PJ1 flickr set

I’ll have some pics and stuff up here soon…..

I’ve added a new section to the site called ‘builds’. You should see it up there on the top alongside the other navigation stuff. You can also get to it by clicking here.

It’s an attempt to get better at documenting the builds that I do. We’ll see how it goes. Ideally I’d like to make them posts that you can subscribe to but I don’t want them to clutter up the normal posts that go on the front page, so until I work out the best way to do that they’ll be available through the builds link at the top. Go on click it!