Jocelyn Lovell Bike in Primer

Noah from Velocolour sent me some pictures last night of my frame in primer. It's really useful as a learning exercise to see things at this stage. As tricky as it is to actually file lugs flat and evenly thin, one of the hardest things is just having a way of telling if you've done a good job or not. Primer seems to bring out all the imperfections very clearly. (And then a good painter hides all of those imperfections, and makes you look like a genius when all the painting is done.)

There's the bike from far away, where everything of course looks very nice. That's truly a massive head tube.

This is the inside tang of the fork crown. I knew the old Nervex crown had some "holes" in it, from the casting process that produced it. But I didn't realize how bad it looked! I should have added brass before brazing.

It looks like I simply forgot to clean up my filing on the (drive side!!) seat lug before attaching the stays. Really rough and ugly in there! The shorelines are a bit on the gobby side too, which is actually a bit of a surprise. The reinforced binder looks pretty rough as well, though probably the ugly stuff will be hidden by the actual binder. This picture definitely makes me wish I had a sandblaster, which would even things out enough so that I would be able to see mistakes like these.

This one's not too bad (and it should look good, being the drive side lower headlug), but the edges could be filed better, and there's a brazing gob along the shoreline.

Very useful to see this now, since I'm working on filing the lugs for the Greg Curnoe bike right now. Patience pays off in lug filing, I see, and the ridiculous among of time it takes to do it right is worth it.