Two Serious Bikes

Paul Butler's "The Greg Curnoe Bike Project" at the AGO

2011-10-02T18:12:00.000-04:00

Paul Butler's Greg Curnoe Bike Project is under way at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and runs until November 13th.

For my own totally different Greg Curnoe Bike project, completed last spring, read my artistic statement and look at photos.

Gaudi Bike, Step 1; and Bikes and Guitars

2011-09-11T15:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I took the very first step for the next bike, which I am calling for now by the dramatic title "Gaudi Bike." This first step was putting brass in the transitions of some a stamped Cinelli CS lugset to begin my "investment stamped" process—a sort of time-waster that allows me to do nice silver-brazing on old, long-pointed lugs. The seatlug (which has a reinforced binder, also) looks a bit a double-beaked baby bird asking for a meal. I have kept my framebuilding hobby "starved" for the past while; it is hungry!

Below is a photo taken in the same room as the above, my living room:

For a long time I've been meaning to put up a post about bikes and (mostly Fender) electric guitars—relatively simple, often colourful devices whose designs came to maturity in the post-war years and have mostly changed, if at all, for the worse. I'll actually write that post some day—but for now, this accidental juxtaposition of my Sonic Blue Fender Classic Player 60s Strat (the 2006 model with the AY-signed pickups, a phenomenally nice Mexican-made guitar) and Jocelyn Lovell Bike sort of makes my point for me. (Yes, I did design the Lovell paint scheme around this guitar -- including the slightly green white on the headtube, to match the "mint" pickguard! But the blues are a bit different.)

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

2011-09-04T12:54:00.003-04:00

This has been the busiest summer of my life. In addition to finishing and defending my thesis, I've had to deal with the downside of thesis-completion—finding a job—and then preparing to do that job. (I'm teaching a course at the University of Toronto. It's the first time the course has ever been offered before, so I had to develop the entire syllabus from the ground up.)

All of this was made even more challenging by the fact that I had a long-planned vacation set up for August—I had to squeeze a year's worth of work into three months. But the vacation was wonderful. And while I did almost no framebuilding this summer, I did get a lot of ideas while I was away. Here is a cycling-themed summary of my summer vacation.

After spending a few quiet weeks in Poland, I went to London—where my visit happened to coincide with the London-Surrey Cycling Classic, whose start I was able to see. I was hoping to mingle with the riders before the start, but security was tight. No Tom Boonen autograph, I'm afraid—but if you squint, you can see him in the Belgian colours at the front of the pack. Cycling-wise, London reminded me a lot of Toronto: lots of fixed gears, some reasonably nice; generally cycling-unfriendly streets...

I made my first visit to the Netherlands, which I found generally less amazing than most bicycle-loving Torontonians do. I think the Dutch bikes in Toronto are nicer than the Dutch bikes I saw in Rotterdam, which mostly looked like mountain bikes. But I was suitably impressed with the separated bike lanes, and it was exciting to walk across the Erasmus Bridge, where the 2010 Tour de France started.

I couldn't help but be impressed by Flanders. Commuting cyclists get excited about the Netherlands; racing fans get excited about Belgium. I was hoping to bump into Tom Boonen in his home region, but failed again. I bought a copy of Het Laatste Niews, the Antwerp-based newspaper with the excellent sports section, despite my complete lack of Flemish.

By far the most educational stop was Barcelona. I was impressed not by the bicycles, but rather—like every other tourist in Barcelona—by the Gaudi buildings. And Gaudi gave me some very good bike ideas. This is because he is the most incredible constructeur ever. I was particularly floored by the Palau Güell—which is less colourful and crazy than most Gaudi buildings, but was designed from the ground up, and is really conceived as a whole, with every tiny detail (and there are, at least, millions of little details) fitting into the larger project. My favourite parts were the secret hallways above the guest rooms to permit spying; the handmade furniture, wrought-iron, and hardware fittings; and the incredible central dome around which every room on every floor is built. I was so impressed with the Palau Güell that I forgot to take any pictures. Above is a picture of the chimneys of the nearby Casa Batlló, which has charms of its own. I very much like the idea of decorating something luridly functional like a chimney: it would be fun to do something similar with fenders or mudflaps...

I am going to set aside at least one day a week for framebuilding this fall. I have a number of projects in mind—the first of which may well be called Gaudi Bike!

The World's Nicest Carbon Frame Could Be Yours!

2011-07-11T11:17:00.002-04:00

Nice in two senses. First sense: Noah Rosen of Velocolour, painter of all my frames, did an elaborate and stunning paint job, inspired by his childhood love of pinball. (If there was a soundtrack to this bicycle, it would obviously draw heavily on Tommy.) Second sense: this frame is being auctioned to support the charity Right to Play, which helps disadvantaged children in their efforts to play and have fun (a worthy cause!)

It's good-looking and it does good work. It's a very nice frame.

This project was put together by Michael Barry Jr., one of Canada's finest cyclists and the son of Mike Barry of Mariposa fame, Noah, and Pinarello. Michael and Noah jointly came up with the pinball idea; and Noah painted the frame, which Pinarello donated. If you're in the market for a fabulous and unique bicycle frame, and you're looking to support a good cause, go to the eBay auction. It ends in four days.

Also: Michael Barry Jr. is writing articles for The Toronto Star during the Tour de France, which are well worth checking out. His recent blog post on rider safety is a brave and intelligent reflection on a worsening problem.

Back In The Shop, Etc.

2011-07-09T19:42:00.000-04:00

Where have I been and what have I been doing for the last month and a half? I have been to Victoria and to Edmonton for conferences; I have turned thirty and celebrated Canada Day; and I have defended my thesis. (DR.A.HAMMOND cycles now, my friends.) I have not been riding my bike very much, I'm afraid, and I haven't been in to the shop at all.

Until today, that is. It's been months since I've done any brazing—but apparently making bicycles is like riding them. It all went perfectly well. My friend Cory has a Surly that he wants to convert into a fendered city bike. I thought adding a bunch of braze-ons would be a good way to reacquaint myself with the torch. Here are some photos. (Cory is my kind of guy: he drilled all the holes for me, and outlined all the positions with a Sharpie, and wrote exactly what braze-on he wanted where.)

The above photo is the only one that warrants commentary. That's one of those brake-retainer-things for the Nexus front drum brake Cory's going to use. Normally it clamps on; but I've chopped it up, given it a shape (more shaping to follow) and turned it onto a braze-on, which I will braze on when I'm in the shop again, next week. (One comment about the other photos: I used brass for everything except the internal brake cable housing entries/exits. And no flux has yet been removed, and nothing cleaned up.)

I'll be out on another Zoo ride on the Curnoe bike tomorrow. My love of routine and habit means there is a limit to how many ride reports I can make. But I will soon post photos of Curnoe bike, two months into his life. And I do hope to ride to London soon, to visit Curnoe's former studio.

Greg Curnoe Bike Does the Zoo Ride

2011-05-21T21:15:00.002-04:00

The weather has been awful in Toronto for the past week. The day after my last ride, it started raining; it has hardly stopped since. But today was beautiful, at last, and I made the most of it. As you can see from the above pictured, I lived dangerously. The road was broken, but I risked it.

Greg Curnoe Bike waiting for the Go train at exhibition station. The CN Tower looks on. If you look closely, you will see my new Spécialités TA-made Cinelli water bottle.

If you were looking extremely closely, you would have noticed that I had my tubular wheelset in place. Here is my spare Czech-made Tufo tire, which I bought while on vacation in the Czech Republic in 2007. (I tried to visit the factory, for some reason, but the day I planned by trip, a wild storm blew in. I took this as a sign and walked around Olomouc.)

God bless the Go train. This one took me to Rouge Hill station, in about 40 minutes—enough time to read every section of the Saturday Star that interested me. Then off I went.

The eponymous Zoo, which is on the very margins of the Greater Toronto Area. Ride a few more minutes and you see...

... beautiful sights like these. (Did I mention it has been raining a lot?)

But the fun doesn't really start until you hit the gravel—which happened about two seconds after I took this photo. (This ride was about 85km, and I would guess about 35 of them were on gravel.)

Ah, the gravel. Empty of cars, and smooth-yet-rutty, so you're kept on your toes. I made Greg Curnoe Bike to ride over roads like this one. His big fat tubulars are designed to soak up the gravel-bumps, and his big orange fenders are designed to deposit stray pellets safely back on the road.

Greg Curnoe Bike doing what he was designed to do.

A picturesque gravel crossroads. (No souls transacted.)

Riding flat on gravel is fun, but climbing steep gravel hills is more fun.

What my ride companions (none of whom could make it today, alas) call The Roman Aqueduct.

Shortly after the Aqueduct, there is a really windy, hilly section. I needed a break at the top of the steepest of the climbs. (Note spare tubular hanging somewhat perilously, and the aforementioned Cinelli water bottle [my lugs, remember, are Cinelli CSes].)

A particularly glorious, rolling, quiet, wooded stretch. The Italians can have their strade bianche. We'll keep our strade marrone.

And so to Goodwood, the traditional resting place. Normally there is a hotly contested sprint for this sign, but today, being alone, I rode by slowly and took this photo.

The wonderful bakery in Goodwood, which provides all necessary motivation when you're struggling on the gravel roads.

More gravel on the ride back to the Go station.

Waiting for the train near surprisingly scenic Rouge Hill Station.

Today was an excellent test for Greg Curnoe Bike. Lots of rough road, lots of shaking, lots of climbs. He felt very comfortable, no bolts loosened, I rode quickly—and the rear brake finally stopped squealing. He is very good at his job. (And, yes, more teenagers said nice things about him on the Go ride home.)

Greg Curnoe Bike Rides to Acton

2011-05-11T16:25:00.001-04:00

First things first: Adam of Cycle EXIF gave Greg Curnoe Bike an incredible writeup today. Thank you!

Buoyed by this report, naturally he wanted to go for a ride. The weather reports are suggesting rain for this weekend. Since I am working on a research contract this month that stipulates I work 40 hours per week, but does not specify exactly when those 40 hours should be, I decided to give myself the day off and make up the hours on the weekend. I took the Go train from Exhibition to Oakville (happening to meet up with some friendly cycling acquaintances of mine, who were themselves off on a tour to Niagara) and from there rode to Acton. It's one of my favourite rides, and one I've written about before. Here follows a photo summary of my journey.

Everything a cyclist needs: shoes; gloves; a zip-loc bag filled with Fig Newtons; a bidon; and an Arizona iced tea (stuck in jersey pocket) and newspaper (stuck in front of jersey, à la chilly mountain descent) for the train ride.

There was an incredibly strong east wind (an unusual one) today, and it pushed me quickly west along Britannia Road toward southern Ontario's diminutive "mountain range," the Niagara Escarpment, slightly visible in the distance.

Rattlesnake point climb, which is deadly (pun) to ride up, but which looks quite tame when photographed. It's Valkenburgy, I swear.

On top of the Escarpment, having recovered enough strength to fetch my sweaty Olympus point-and-shoot from my jersey pocket.

The Escarpment looks a bit more impressive from the other side. Residents of mountainous regions will be amused that we employ bumps like these as pretexts for ski hills. In the foreground, idyllic Highway 401.

Having climbed the Escarpment a second time, Greg Curnoe Bike leans himself a pole and waits as I relieve myself.

A picturesque swamp that sits atop the Escarpment.

On the day that the Giro peloton dealt with the strade bianche, I rode this one strada bianca and wished for more...

I enjoyed a Cherry Coke on a bench opposite one of Acton's principal attractions, The Needle Gnome (apartment for rent!)

And so I began the somewhat less interesting return journey, fighting the wind, and spending lots of time looking down at all the pleasant triangles visible from the "cockpit."

Upon my return to Oakville, I was dismayed to see that my favourite Tim Horton's was under construction—but most relieved to see this "Mobile Store" parked nearby.

I parked Greg Curnoe Bike against a Tim Horton's garbage bin, with his front wheel held in place by a construction beacon. In this art vs. life battle, life is presenting a formidable challenge.

Thus ended the ride. I had no mechanical issues this time—Greg Curnoe Bike rode like the oft-mentioned "dream." I'm not in great shape, so I didn't whizz up the climbs, but I certainly did no worse than usual. I think the most important mechanical determinants of a good or bad ride are: the gears you use (the 40-24 small gear was fine, so that worked); your saddle (I like the Flite); your pedals and shoes (thank you Ultegra pedals and older Sidi road shoes); your brakes (the brazed-on Mafacs work exceptionally... though still a bit of squeal from the rear brake); the position of the handlebars relative to the saddle (6cm below, check, and I like that the hoods sit lower with non-aero levers—one more position.) Few of these things depend on the actual frame, though some do. As a "whole," Greg Curnoe Bike is ideally adapted to sort of fast, rolling, approximately 100km rides that I prefer.

I thought often of Wouter Weylandt today. I really liked him as a cyclist. It's awful when things like this happen. My thoughts to his family, friends, and teammates.

Greg Curnoe Bike vs. the Real World: The First Five Days

2011-05-08T13:37:00.006-04:00

You have all been extremely patient with me and my logorrheic, overly theoretical tendencies in the last five days. Remember that I have just submitted a PhD dissertation in English Literature, and I have all sorts of garbage stored away in the darkest corners of my mind. This needs to be dealt with one way or another. In any case, I will reward you here with lots of photos and some amusing stories. First the stories, which I encourage you to scroll past if you're not in the mood, and then the photos.

DAY 1: THE FIRST PHOTO SHOOT

My attempt to take nice photos of Greg Curnoe Bike perfectly illustrate the rivalry I described between ordered, harmonious art and chaotic, unpredictable life.

I woke up early on Wednesday morning and headed immediately for Vistek, a big photo supply store on Queen East, quite far away from my house. I went there to buy a 107"-wide white backdrop, which I intended to use to create a studio-esque effect for my pictures. What I had not counted on what just how long 107 inches are. When the salesperson brought out the massive cardboard box I immediately saw what a bind I was in. I had planned on taking it home via streetcar and two subways. I wasn't sure it would fit in the doors; and if it did, I wasn't sure the drivers would let me in. The saleswoman told me, "Don't even think of taking it in the subway. As for streetcars, you know the TTC. Depends on their mood." I hoped I'd find someone in a good mood. A two hour walk home, with an object similar in size and shape to one half of a cross borne over my shoulder, was not at all appealing.

The driver of the Queen streetcar was not in a good mood. He said "No way" when I approached the door and before I said a word. I waited for the next streetcar and met a similar response. I decided I might have better luck a block south on King Street, whose streetcars are less busy. The kind driver said, "Sure, just don't hurt anyone," which I did not, since the streetcar was completely empty. I laid the nine-foot-long box along the floor.

I was lucky with the driver of the Bathurst car also—the car that would take me north to my street. It too was empty at King Street, and I was again told just not to hurt anyone. I laid it along the floor again. Unfortunately, at the next stop, about fifty people got on. Old women were tripping over the box; a teenager stepped on it deiantly; I had to help a woman lift her baby carriage over top of it. After a few more stops, the streetcar was completely packed. By the time I got to Bloor I had made many enemies and just about destroyed the box. But I was home.

It was now 11 o'clock. The forecast had called for partial cloudiness, and after a sunny morning, the clouds had rolled in. The lighting was perfect and I wanted to get my photos while it lasted. I told my roommate, who was slated to be my photographic assistant, to get ready ready ASAP. I could see blue sky in the distance.

In a hurry we walked the half block to the schoolyard whose tennis court I intended to use as a makeshift studio. I tacked the massive piece of paper to the backboard as quickly as I could, rolled it out, and frantically set up my new tripod (purchased that morning.) I wanted to move it as far back as possible, to get the odd collapsed perspective of Curnoe's print. But before I could do that, the wind—which had not introduced itself at all to that point—started blowing. The wind is a familiar enemy to any cyclist, and it reared its ugly head here. I chose my logo—the one from BLAST—partly because it's derived from a nautical symbol meaning "a gale from the north" (for Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, a BLAST of creative energy from Northern Europe). This seemed like an appropriate image for a northern cyclist who struggles with northern wind, and who proposed to send most of his creativity southwards. Appropriately, the gale that was disturbing my photo shoot was coming from the north.

It was a man vs. nature ordeal, and nature won. There was no use trying to get the valve stems in the Curnoe position, the cranks in the Curnoe position, the Mariposa butterfly at the right angle, the front wheel perfectly in plane—because the wind, via the sail/backdrop, was threatening to lift the bike off the ground and send it to Kansas. (This wind, as it happens, was a leftover from the storms that ravaged the American South in the form of tornadoes earlier in the week). My roommate, whose job it was to hold the bike upright with one easily Photoshoppable finger, was getting frantic, and feared for the bike's life as well as his own. In a despairing and outraged gesture, I tore down the backdrop, crumpled it up in a gigantic ball, and sent it home with my concerned roommate.

I was alone now in the tennis court and decided to improvise. Instead of using the tennis backboard to suspend my backdrop on, I thought I would use it as the backdrop itself. I set everything up, moved my camera far away, got the tripod in the right position, set the angles right so as to collapse the perspective, set the focus, maxed the f-stop, and pressed the button on my (newly purchased) remote. Thus I got the main photo from my previous post, which I'm extremely happy with. I now like that it doesn't have a white background. The "real life" effect of hardcourt (which bikes ride on, anyway) and the grey wood makes more sense given the "translation back into life" basis of the project. I also like it aesthetically, and I like the way the bottom bracket lines up with the bottom of backstop. You could measure the BB drop, a crucial framebuilding measurement, quite easily from this photo.

So I had my most important photo. But, for my "manifesto," I also needed a photo of the handlebars, the top tube, the fenders, the seat cluster, and the decals. I started setting up the tripod for these next photos. But after half an hour or so, and after only two of the five required photos were taken, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a pleasant-looking young man of fifteen years or so, with an innocent expression and curly brown hair.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, respectfully. "Me and my friends usually play soccer here at lunch."

Alas, it was lunch hour at the high school. I looked to the entrance of the tennis court and saw twenty students waiting politely to get in to the tennis court I'd been using as my makeshift studio. They had no doubt been waiting for half an hour, and I'd been too absorbed to notice.

"Can't you play in the other court?" I asked. I noticed it was empty. I didn't want to go there myself because it didn't have the grey wooden backstop I'd beed using as my background.

He thought for a moment and replied, "It's just that we usually play here."

I could see that this "usually" argument was more powerful than anything I could produce. And he seemed so nice. With some annoyance, I began to pack up my stuff. The curly-haired young man, who had begun to turn back to his friends, turned back again toward me and said, "Oh, but nice bike, by the way."

So I moved over to the other court and took the remaining photos, with which I was not very satisfied. Thankfully while I was taking these (which took probably another half hour) three separate groups of lunching high school girls came up and said some variation of "Nice bike man" before giggling and running away. My bikes are very popular with high school kids. It made me feel better—but I still didn't have the photos I wanted. I decided to go home and wait out the lunch break.

The real world was not through with me yet. When I came back, carrying all my photo gear as well as the bike, an old woman was hitting tennis balls against the backstop (into which my tacks were still sticking, since I hadn't had a chance to remove them.) There was nothing to do but come back later. I came back in 45 minutes, and she was still there. I asked her if she would be much longer. "Why?," she asked. Because I wanted to use the tennis backstop as a photo background. "Oh yes, I'm going to be here for at least another hour. I need to work on my serve." It needed even more work than two hours of practice could provide. I decided to give up. The last of the clouds was about to blow away over Lake Ontario. The photos I had would have to do.

DAY 1, LATER: THE FIRST RIDE

I came home, played with the photos in Aperture, and posted the "manifesto." Feeling liberated, I decided to follow the advice of the last lines of this manifesto and take Greg Curnoe Bike for a ride. The sun, which had previously been my enemy, was now my friend. This would be the first time this year I could ride in shorts and a short-sleeved jersey. Dressed in my most colourful cycling gear, I headed out.

I went down to Lakeshore, up along the Humber, and around the hilly areas near High Park. There were two problems with the bike: the rear brake squealed like a petulant child, and the SKF bottom bracket interfered with the crank spider when I was really pushing uphill. The rest was great. The huge tubulars felt incredible. I came back home via Dundas Street, to introduce my patron, Martin of Hoopdriver Bicycles, to my new bike. He described it in exultant tones, which, coming from him, meant a lot. He took it out into the dusky day light and got extremely enthusiastic about the paint job. He repeatedly commented on how the colours "popped out." It was just the reaction I was hoping for. I rode home.

DAY 2: CHANGING COMPONENTS, AND ANOTHER SHORT RIDE.

I needed to change the bottom bracket, and thankfully I had a 116mm TA AXIX BB in my closet. I'm not at all convinced it's a great design, but I decided to give it a try. The chainline is right, the tread is very narrow, and I even like the way the silver "adjustable cup" looks. I also adjusted the toe-in on the rear brake by further filing the washers on the Mafac draw bolts. They now seemed just right. I also decided to try out my clincher wheelset, built on Mavic MA2 rims (with perfect green/yellow labels), Shimano Sante hubs, and Grand Bois Cerf tires (also with perfect green/yellow labels.) Its 28mm tires are quite a bit narrower than the 27mm tubulars, so the fender lines looked different, but everything seemed okay.

I went for a second ride. The BB presented no problems this time. The rear brake continued to squeal (I'm not at all sure why) though it quieted down significantly by the end if the ride. The clinchers weren't quite as soft as the tubulars, but were nice also.

DAY 4: ZOO RIDE

I didn't ride at all on Friday (I was busy, and it was raining), but I planned a long ride ride for Saturday. Since I'm waiting on my "spare" tubulars, I decided to go with the clincher wheelset. After making sure everything was all set on Friday evening, I got up early Saturday to take the Go train to Rouge Hill for the 9am start of the ride. I forgot two important things: my newspaper for the 40 minute train ride, and my camera for shots of the ride. Thus the lack of photos in this section.

Two people showed up for the ride: Noah, the painter of the bike, and Brian, who had been a friend of Greg Curnoe's and ridden with him in the 70s and 80s. The weather was perfect and it was a nice ride (though we didn't go on my preferred dirt roads). My legs weren't their best over the 100km ride, but it was nice to test them, and to show them what I'll need from them in the coming months. The bike performed perfectly, although I apparently forgot to fully tighten the 40-tooth inner chainring to the 52-tooth outer, and near the end of the ride I heard some rattling, and realized I was about to lose some very precious TA bolts. At our stop at the bakery in Goodwood, several people wanted to talk about the bike. On the Go ride home to Exhibition station, a few groups of Ajax teenagers approached me to express their approval.

DAY 5: THE SECOND PHOTO SHOOT

Inspired by Martin's ecstatic reaction to the bike in the sunlight, I decided to take some more photos this morning. I prefer these photos to the first ones, though they serve a different purpose—they are not there to illustrate an artistic programme but just show whatever I thought looked nice. The direct sunlight creates more variation in the shade of green especially, which creates a Curnoe-ian effect. Also, the bike now has the showy confidence of a machine that has successfully endured a hard, long ride. I didn't clean the bike, so it has some Goodwood dust on it. I left the clinchers on. I left on the chromed Silca pump and the saddle bag, made by Poka Cycle Accessories.

Thankfully, the tennis courts were empty this morning.

Framebuilding detail: I love the way the French dropout attachment looks. This will be my go-to style in the future.

Framebuilding detail: again, nice French dropout attachment, although I followed the painting and used the Italian style for the seatstay attachment. And notice LIFE biting into the dropout faces.

"CLOSE THE ART/LIFE SPLIT ETC." A Statement of Artist Intent for Greg Curnoe Bike

2011-05-04T16:55:00.002-04:00

Greg Curnoe was famous for his manifesto-like declarations. My logo is taken from Wyndham Lewis's BLAST, itself filled with manifestos. So a manifesto-like declaration of artistic intent for Greg Curnoe Bike.

1. ART AND LIFE AND STUFF

Greg Curnoe's retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2001 was called "Life and Stuff."

It was called this not only because Curnoe's art was ABOUT life (mostly his own life), but also because it questioned the borders separating art from life. This work, for example, is a collage of bus transfers, arranged to tell the story of an everyday trip in ordinary London, Ontario:

The Mariposa T.T. print is a good example of Curnoe questioning the borders separating art from life. Its subject, for one thing, is not traditionally artistic: although it is a very NICE bicycle, it is a bicycle. To emphasize the "real-life-ness" of the subject, it is reproduced in exacting and pedantic detail: it is represented in 1:1 scale, with no transformation of size; its wheels are laced exactly like the originals, with the right crosses and spoke holes in the right places; all the logos and decals and advertising ephemera are reproduced; facts and historical details are recorded in a comprehensive list of every part on the bike and where it was purchased. Despite all this real-ness, it's a beautiful print. One of Curnoe's intentions was no doubt to deny that bicycles are just life: that they are already, even before they are painted, in some sense works of art. Maybe this is why he painted it from the non-drive side, where the normal way of photographing a bicycle is from the side with the cranks, the gears, the derailleurs. Look at a bicycle from the other side, even though it is the same thing, and maybe you'll see it in a different way—as ART.

Indeed, Mariposa T.T., for all its real-ness, is not a bike. You can't RIDE it, for example. The most obvious real-life characteristic of a bicycle is its USE: with help from your legs, it transports you (more efficiently than any other device on earth) from one place in the real world to another place in the real world. The print can't do any of this. In this sense it is USELESS.

Baudelaire compares the poet to an albatross: in flight, in the realm of the ideal, he is an elegant "prince of cloud and sky"; but landed on the deck of a ship, in the real world, he is awkward, "weak and gauche." "His giant wings," Baudelaire says, "prevent him from walking."

The bicycle in Curnoe's print looks anything but awkward. But try to mount it, try to ride it down the street. It is at home in the ideal. It is a prince of cloud and sky. Its bright colours prevent you from riding it.

I think of Mariposa T. T. as a TRANSLATION. In translating Baudelaire's poem "L'Albatros" into English, you would want to be as accurate as possible—to get both the poem's "message" and Baudelaire's way of conveying it across to the English reader. But you would not ever be able to get all the nineteenth century French effects across in the very different medium of twenty-first century English. Mariposa T.T. is a translation of a 3D bike into a 2D bike. It is very faithful to the original, and it shows immense respect for the inherent artfulness of the original. But it is also very different—primarily because it is, after all, a work in a very different medium than the original: because it is a translation of life into art. Some things, such as the bicycle's USE, are lost in this translation.

What is the difference between life and art? In Wyndham Lewis's novel Tarr, one character describes art as "Life with all the humbug of living taken out of it." Life is accident, contingency, randomness, the practical, the necessary, the given, the real. Art is order, pattern, harmony, the possible, the imagined.

These differences come out clearly in a brilliant photograph of the Mariposa T.T. print standing in front of some real-life bikes, one of which (the green bike on the left) is its model:

In a photograph, all bikes are reduced to 2D. But though it is the same size as the other bikes and has the same parts as the other bikes, the Mariposa T.T. print sticks out like a sore thumb. If it's an albatross, it's one that has swooped down but not landed. It makes the other bikes look awkward and gauche. Hanging up like pieces of meat, they belong clearly to LIFE: they are dirty, worn, USEFUL, yes, but dull in colour, leaning at random angles, hung with worn tubulars, some are missing wheels, etc. The ART-ness of the radiant, perfect, useless print is clearer than ever when it stands next to its original. The mutations Curnoe made in translating the LIFE-BIKE into the ART-BIKE are clearer too. The original dull grey cable housing is turned red; a black saddle becomes rainbow-coloured; brown tires turn vibrant orange; dark grey brake lever bodies become purple; a grey chain turns red. And a plain green paint job turns three shades of green, two shades of yellow, orange and red. To some extent this is to replicate the real-life way that light falls on a painted tube—to some extent this is a naturalistic, REALISTIC effect—but the effect is so exaggerated that it passes right through the REAL world and into the impossible world of ART.

Curnoe wanted to deny—did deny—the ART/LIFE SPLIT. But still he could not help himself as an artist. He would not be fully confined by the given, the actual, the factual. Using his imagination and his aesthetic sense, he translated life into art.

2. A TRANSLATION OF RETURN IN THREE DIMENSIONS

Greg Curnoe Bike is a translation of this work of art back into life. It is "The Albatross" translated back into French from the English translation.

When you translate something out of one medium and then, ignoring the original, translate the translation back into the original medium, there are bound to be numerous ARTEFACTS. For example, consider this translation:

Original: Greg Curnoe Bike is a translation back into three dimensions of a two-dimensional work of art that is itself a translation into two dimensions of a three-dimensional bicycle.

Translated into French (Google Translate): Greg Curnoe Bike est une traduction de retour en trois dimensions d'une œuvre à deux dimensions de l'art qui est elle-même une traduction en deux dimensions d'un vélo à trois dimensions. 

Translated back into English (Yahoo Babel Fish): Greg Curnoe Bike is a translation of return in three dimensions d' a work with two dimensions of l' art which is itself a translation in two dimensions d' a bicycle with three dimensions.

It's similar—it's made up of the same words as the original, and is in the same medium, though non-English artefacts like d' and l' survive—but it's different. It no longer makes any sense, for example.

In translating Mariposa T.T. back in to three dimensions, I have preserved as many of the ARTEFACTS—dangling Ds, lumbering Ls—of Curnoe's translation as possible. I wanted it to be quite clear that this is similar to the original Mariposa, but that it is different—that it no longer really MAKES SENSE as a bicycle—that it is obviously something doubly translated, and not mistakable for an original.

I want Greg Curnoe Bike to CLOSE THE ART/LIFE SPLIT: to be LIFE (3D, subject to aging, accident, chips, cracks, crashes; rideable, fast, comfortable, properly-geared; straight, properly-aligned, well-brazed) and to be ART (unreal and impractical in its colourfulness, stylized, odd, and unnatural in appearance). I want it to stick out like a sore thumb in a room of dirty bikes; and I want for it to be possible to then ride it out of this room full of dirty bikes.

It is LIKE the original bike and LIKE the Curnoe print but MISTAKABLE for neither. While Curnoe translated the LIFE-bike into an ART-bike, guided by his AESTHETIC sense, I have translated the art-bike into an ART-LIFE-BIKE guided both by my AESTHETIC SENSE and my ATHLETIC NEEDS.

For example, the handlebars. Curnoe preserved many features of the LIFE-bike: the brake levers have no hoods, because this is a time trial bike and you are always riding in the drops, and since brake lever hoods add weight, and you want your time trial bike to be as light as possible. The handlebars are only wrapped on the drops, for the same reason. But he added a few things in the translation into an ART-bike: red housing emerges from the brake levers, and the lever bodies are purple.

In my translation I wanted to preserve as many traces of the Curnoe translation as possible. I use red housing, since it is possible to get nice red housing that works well, for example. But mine is not a time trial bike—I don't want or need a time trial bike like the one Curnoe wanted or needed—so I've wrapped the bars all the way around, though I've left the clamps exposed, to preserve another trace. And since it's not a time trial bike, and I will ride in the drops, on the tops, in the hoods, and all over the place, I need a soft place on the brake levers to put my fleshy, real-life hands. So I get softness and preserve another artefact by using clear brake lever hoods.

Then the split cable housing on the top tube. In the Curnoe painting, an uninterrupted length of cable housing runs along the top tube, clamped in place by Campagnolo clips. Aesthetically this is very nice: it makes a long solid red line, crossed by three nice top-down silver/black strokes. But mechanically it is not desirable: all that housing is heavy and introduces unnecessary friction; and the clamp-on clips add weight and dig in to the paint. So I've used brazed-on split cables, but located them at 12 o'clock on the top tube and used red cable donuts (three of them) to replicate as much as possible the look while maintaining function.

Then there are the fenders. It would be impossible to preserve bright orange tires. Yes, you can buy orange tires—but LIFE will quickly relieve them of their brightness and their orangeness. They will become dull and dirty and brown. But fenders can be bright orange—and while the insides will get very dirty, the outsides will retain their lustre.

These FENDERS are in fact an almost perfect symbol of what I'm trying to do with Greg Curnoe Bike. On the one hand, because they are painted orange and are bright and shiny, they are ART. On the other hand, since they perform the very mundane function of keeping rainwater off my back, keeping dirt out of my drivetrain, and stopping rocks from hitting my paint job, they are LIFE. But they also protect ART from LIFE: dirt and water and rocks want to throw themselves into the bike and age it—my wheels throw up a constant ART-DESTROYING SPRAY—but my fenders keep it off, while at the same time being orange and ART-ish themselves. Riding with such fenders is a practical way of closing the art/life split.

And of course the paint job. It is simplified from the Curnoe version, for practical reasons. (I can only afford to pay so much for the paint job, and Noah has only so much time to spend on it.) But it preserves as many traces as possible of the Curnoe translation. It is as far as possible a LITERAL translation of Mariposa T.T.

And since it exists in three dimensions, and since it is covered with a glossy clear-coat, it reflects the LIFE and light around it, creating different effects all the time, reflecting the sunlight when outside, a book when it's in my living room, brick when it's leaned against a wall. It's an ART-screen onto which LIFE is projected.

2.1 ASIDE

The decals are among the few things that have survived more or less unchanged through all the translations. Curnoe kept them both because he wanted to emphasize the REAL-ness of the bike and because he appreciated them aesthetically—as decoration. Mike Barry also seems to have intended them primarily as decoration rather than as advertising: he put a Campagnolo decal on the seat tube, for example, even though the bike had Weinmann brakes, TA cranks, a no-name seatpost, etc. This decorative function is underscored on my bike since the products "advertised" (Reynolds 531, for example, or Campagnolo Nuovo/Super Record components) are no longer produced. Since there is no athletic downside to a dove on the fork blade or slanting seafoam numbers on the seat tube, they stay.

3. PRODUCT, PROCESS, USE

I am no expert in art history, but I think I am justified in saying that a major focus of art in the twentieth century—particularly the second half of it, I believe—was shifting emphasis from PRODUCT to PROCESS. Artists have wanted us to look less at the finished object—the painting, the sculpture—and to concentrate more on how it was made. I remember seeing a work at the Tate Modern that was a map and notebook, showing where a particular sculptor went to gather the materials needed for a sculpture that was not itself displayed. Curnoe too was interested in PROCESS, as the bus transfers above (for a journey home and back to his studio) demonstrate.

A Toronto artist named Paul Butler recently commissioned Mike Barry to produce three replicas of the bicycle Curnoe depicted in his famous "CLOSE THE 49TH PARALLEL" painting. Paul Butler himself did not PRODUCE the object: Mike Barry made the bike, and Noah Rosen painted it and wrote CLOSE THE 49TH PARALLEL ETC. on the top tube. Since he did not produce it, he cannot strictly focus on the PROCESS, either, since Mike and Noah engaged in that process. Paul Butler (who describes himself as "a post-disciplinary artist") is instead going to USE the bike—to RIDE it, in the areas that Greg Curnoe rode the original. (An exhibition of some kind will take place at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the same place that hosted Curnoe's Life and Stuff retrospective, from the 17th of September to the 27th of November of this year.)

The following analogy illustrates the differences between these two apparently similar projects. A contemporary artist stumbles upon a document that leads to the discovery, in a field in southern France, of the precise orange tree from which the six oranges that modelled for Van Gogh's "Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges" were plucked. This tree is still alive, somehow, after 123 years, but has ceased to bear fruit. The artist consults with experts, fertilizes the soil, and when the tree produces an orange, he picks and eats it.

What I have tried to do is produce a new kind of orange that looks like the orange as painted by Van Gogh (a literal rendering: with sharp edges separating areas of light and shadow, with thick brushstrokes of colour) but that tastes like a normal orange and has all its nutritional properties. Then I have documented the creation of this new kind of orange. And soon I will eat it. My project encompasses PRODUCT, PROCESS, and USE.

I have PRODUCED Greg Curnoe Bike, along with Noah Rosen, who has painted it. I have meticulously documented the PROCESS of its creation on this blog (this post participates in that process). I tend to regard the PRODUCT as more interesting than the PROCESS, but I acknowledge that the latter holds some interest, and has aesthetic significance of its own. I would go so far as to say that the popularity of handmade steel bicycles at the present moment is due largely to the aesthetically pleasing process of their creation, lovingly documented by framebuilders on their blogs and flickr pages.

I will also USE and RIDE Greg Curnoe Bike. And while I doubt this will be the most interesting part of the project to my readers, it will undoubtedly be the most interesting to ME. As much as I like making bikes, as much as I have enjoyed planning this one and writing about it on this blog, I much prefer RIDING them. (Paul Butler, in this sense, is on to something, and captured something that also seems to have been true of Greg Curnoe himself). Rolling down my street on my way to the library; coming out of a wooded section on the narrow path next to the Humber; feeling spent after pushing myself to up the Rattlesnake Point climb; listening to gravel rattle in my fenders on a zoo ride; lying in bed and, as I close my eyes, seeing some phantom apparition of a road rushing toward me—THAT is what I like most about bikes, if I have to choose only only aspect.

I made this bike to look at, yes, and to write about—but also to ride. I have given it generous clearances so that I can use big fat tubulars and ride on the kinds of roads I like; I have given it big gears so that I can go quickly down these roads and keep up with my riding partners (one of whom—the fastest of whom—is my collaborator Noah Rosen); I have given it a saddle I find comfortable, pedals I find comfortable, brakes I like.

PHASE ONE—the CLOSE THE ART/LIFE SPLIT phase—is done. PHASE TWO begins now. Now it's not so much about COLLAPSING the distinction between art and life as it is about observing the struggle of art and life. It's DRAMATIZE THE ART VS. LIFE ANTIPATHY, ANIMATE THE ART/LIFE AGON, or something along those lines. I'll document this too, by writing about the rides I take and taking pictures of the bike in the places it carries me. I'll show how ART struggles against LIFE as I go on these rides—I'll show how the bike gets scratched, where the rust begins to form—and I'll fight life with cover-up paint, with nail polish, with soap, with grease.

Greg Curnoe Bike is preserved in the above photo—seen from his more USEFUL drive side, but still looking like an albatross—at the cusp of the transition from PHASE ONE to PHASE TWO. TIME NOW TO RIDE HIM (to London, soon, to visit Greg Curnoe's former studio, hopefully), and set the PHASE TWO contest in motion.

Attempted Photoshoot

2011-05-04T14:36:00.001-04:00

Today's attempt at a photoshoot was an utter failure. I thought that, to save myself some money, it would be a clever idea to just buy a huge piece of background paper ($60), tack it to the tennis backboard in the court around from my house, and thus get a "studio look" from natural lighting, and not have to lug the bike or the 9' roll of paper across the city.

There was one thing I was not counting on: WIND. Even the slightest gust was enough to nearly set the tennis backboard sailing. We got a couple of awful photographs before the gigantic piece of paper was ripped off the tacks. I have learnt my lesson.

(You will notice that I (on the left) am dressed up like Greg Curnoe. I did take a self-portrait with the bike later...)

So I just took the pictures with a normal, "real life" background. I think this probably makes more sense for my "project" anyway. The pictures are fairly decent. I'll post my full (now very lengthy) artistic statement later (tonight?), and the photos will accompany it. If anyone is sufficiently impressed by my artistic statement and/or the bike to want to take proper studio photographs, I will allow them to do so at their own expense. And if you need a tattered, dirty, ripped, gigantic white backdrop for the shoot, I have one to donate.

This, by the way, is the closest we got to a "usable" shot. Not great.

Greg Curnoe Bike is Ready for Photos

2011-05-02T15:44:00.000-04:00

All right—all the details are in place and GC Bike is ready for his photos. I might end up doing them myself to save some money... and it would be fun, too. So here are some more poor photographs of the bike, with good ones (proper lighting! un-busy backgrounds!) to follow in a few days, if all goes well.

Better photo

2011-04-30T12:19:00.002-04:00

The bike looked awful with that brick background. It looks better here, though the yellow sort of hides the yellow in the frame. Remaining question: are the housing loops too long coming out of the brake levers? The Nitto cage looks better but still a bit off.

Greg Curnoe Bike Build, Day 3

2011-04-29T17:53:00.007-04:00

Well, it's all it one piece. Here are some photos, with an entirely inappropriate brick background (first photo replaced—it made the colours look all wrong). Proper photos will follow next week.

I'm very happy with almost everything. The fender lines are almost perfect (any imperfections here are due to the angle more than anything.) All the important things are right.

Pretty close:

Here's the seat cluster—one of my favourite areas, with lots of decals, good reflections, lots of colour... (Curnoe routed the cable on the other side, but I decided to go left, for a number of not particularly interesting reasons...)

The rear brake (which works well) and the fender reinforcer.

The day's best view. Lots of triangles, and all the main colours...

The bottom bracket area looks nice. But, unfortunately, I'll probably need to swap the actual bottom bracket. This SKF 116mm JIS taper BB is too narrow by about a micrometer. With the driveside arm tightened almost enough, it's about to touch the overly-large driveside cup on the SKF BB. Another quarter turn and there would be creaking. I'm sure they're very nice BBs, but they're just not practical for use with TA cranks. I'll swap in a Shimano—after photos, for this red cup looks too good! (Maybe the red cup with fit on to a Shimano BB?) The good news is that all the clearances are right with a 116mm BB, and the chainline works...

RED CHAIN! Silly, perhaps—but one of the best details, I think. Note that the Chorus derailleur had no trouble shifting on to the large cog (24). We'll see if the reduced chain gap has any effect on shifting.

View from the front. The Nuovo Record headset was the right decision... Note also the red donuts, which look good. I'll lower the stem a bit.

So now I need a proper studio shot of Greg Curnoe Bike with a white background. Once I have that photo, from the same angle as the painting, Phase One of the project will be complete.

Where Are You Little Shakespeare?

2011-04-28T21:04:00.002-04:00

I spent the day looking in ditches and behind sheds in Port Credit for my girlfriend's lost 20-year-old cat. If you see her, let me know! Back to work tomorrow.

Greg Curnoe Bike Build, Day 2

2011-04-27T18:35:00.005-04:00

Today was all about fenders. And any day spent with fenders is bound to be a pain. Indeed, even though I had pre-shaped these fenders, drilled all the holes, bent the stays, etc., it took a long time just to install them. (Getting the eyebolts centred was the main thing.) But they are now on—and they not only do they fit well around the wheel, but they look incredible colour-wise.

The first thing I did was put on the reinforcer for the rear fender, which Noah was kind enough to prime and paint. Here it is from the inside...

From the outside...

And on the bike.

The front fender was a lot more difficult to install. On the rear fender, you have two fixed points—but on the front only one. It took me at least an hour to get the front fender all ready. But here it is. (Look at how the Columbus [Italian for dove] decal lines up with the fender...)

After this I put on the brakes, without actually setting them up. Here is a photo from the same angle as yesterday's. Do the fenders not look like tires? Admittedly, more like fat Hetres than orange time trial tubulars...

Finally: I took some flak for insisting that Noah paint my cable guide orange, but this photo FULLY justifies my insistence!

Tomorrow I'll set up the brakes, install the bottom bracket and cranks, set up the drivetrain, etc. It should be more or less done by tomorrow night...

Greg Curnoe Bike Build, Day 1

2011-04-26T17:12:00.003-04:00

I picked Greg Curnoe Bike up from Noah yesterday. He looks spectacular in person—the colours are really luminous, but less "neon" than they appear in photos. Of course it's been very rainy and dull in Toronto for the last few days, so that may account for GC's more subdued look. The paint job is really excellent—the only hitch is that, with all the layers of paint, it is a bit on the thick side, and some of the crispness of the lug edges is lost. Since the lugs are all masked, though, this is sort of a non-issue: it's pretty clear where they begin and end. As you can see below, I did decide to ask Noah to put on those Columbus decals on the fork blades.

I spent the day in the shop today getting paint out of places I didn't want it to be, which meant facing and reaming the head tube and crown race, filing out the binder slot, and sanding the Mafac bosses. After doing that I installed the gorgeous Nuovo Record headset and shortened the steerer to the proper length. Once I got home I glued the Dugast tubulars (which I sincerely hope I did correctly) and finished things off by using a bit of left-over tubular cement to glue an aluminum chainstay protector (it's wrapped in yellow electrical tape to hold it in place while the glue dries). Tomorrow I'll install the fenders (which are orange and incredible) and attach all the other parts. Then I'll take Thursday to cut housing, set up the brakes, etc. So the build should be complete by Friday, which, weather permitting, will be a photo day.

The weather has been awful, and I wasn't about to take photos of this bike in the rain, so I took these shots inside and with a flash, for which I apologize.

Update: By steadying my camera against the wall, I was able to get this excellent (though grainy) shot, from an interesting angle...

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #6: From the Front

2011-04-21T07:52:00.001-04:00

Here, in the last of our series, is Greg Curnoe Bike seen from the front, on the proper Curnoe-ian non-driveside. Over the weekend I'll glue the tubulars and get the rest ready. Then on Monday I'll pick up the frame and install the headset. Then I'll build everything up... I'm also hard at work on a lengthy, energetic, and theoretically thorough Statement of Artistic Intent that I will unleash on this blog when everything is ready. I can't wait.

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #5: Drive Side

2011-04-20T12:01:00.004-04:00

Here it is all together. I really couldn't be more pleased! I'll go pick it up from Velocolour soon, and then it's time for more fun. Remember that orange fenders are going on here. Things will only get more colourful.

ps: for those of you just joining us, read about the idea behind the project here, more about it here, and then skim at your leisure.

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #4: Downtube

2011-04-19T14:20:00.002-04:00

Good things do come in threes, apparently. In the last few days, I've handed in a big application for a fellowship, submitted my thesis, and gotten my first look at Greg Curnoe Bike's paint job. In the thesis vs. bike competition, I think the bike is winning. Here's a look at the downtube—with, again, incredible work by Noah.

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #3: Front Drive Side

2011-04-18T16:43:00.000-04:00

After a Sunday rest, the series resumes. Allow me to summarize my thoughts about this photo with the following statement: Noah Rosen of Velocolour is the greatest bicycle painter alive! Note the way the stripe on the headtube lines up with the edge of the logo, and the stripe on the downtube lines up with the top of the shifter braze-on.

I was thinking about putting a red Columbus decal on the fork blades. Reasoning: the fork blades are Columbus; the Curnoe bike had a Columbus decal, on the seat tube; and the Curnoe bike had a red Mariposa decal on the fork blades. But I think this looks so good the way it is that I'll probably let it be.

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #2: Seat Cluster

2011-04-16T18:15:00.000-04:00

Here is the second photo. This one reveals, in addition to the lovely and colourful paint job, some less than stellar lug filing. The lug edges look very mushy and the lug itself a bit uneven—which is a bit surprising, given the absolutely insane amount of time I spent on this lug. But this is the drive side, which is not the "show" side of the bike. Things may, and should, look sharper from the other side. But let's stay positive: it looks pretty amazing.

Greg Curnoe Bike Photo of the Day #1: Headtube

2011-04-15T19:09:00.000-04:00

Noah is sending me one photo of the bike per day. This is both because he is looking out for me (I am submitting my thesis on Monday and need to focus) and because he has a sick sense of humour (I want to see them all!) But this should make for compelling blog-reading for the next little while. Here is Photo #1, which I think already presents a strong case for Greg Curnoe Bike being the nicest bike of all time.

Holy Crap Greg Curnoe Bike Is Looking Incredible So Far

2011-04-12T16:39:00.007-04:00

Photos courtesy of Noah of Velocolour, whose masterful painting they depict.

Wow. The green looks a bit lime-y without all the red and orange to balance it off, and the frame looks generally a bit odd without the parts attached—but this is going to look utterly incredible when it's all built up. It looks pretty damned good right now.

Happy Paris-Roubaix Day

2011-04-10T15:02:00.000-04:00

I was up at 6am this morning to watch the race, and it was entirely worth it. I don't want to be a spoiler and give away the result—suffice it to say that, as a tall and lanky cyclist, it was nice to see a tall and lanky racer take it. Not so nice to see Michael Barry Jr. hit the deck, though.

The picture above comes from one of my prized possessions: a Mavic-branded Paris-Roubaix t-shirt. I was, of course, wearing it this morning.

Another aesthetically pleasing item: my KMC X9 red chain, which arrived in the mail on Friday.

Greg Curnoe Bike: Component List

2011-04-04T17:06:00.003-04:00

Greg Curnoe Bike will be ready very soon. For the truly interested (and bless you all), here is a comprehensive list of every part listed in the upper-right-hand corner of the Greg Curnoe print, and then every part that will go on to my version of the bike.

I only recently got a chance to look up close at the Curnoe print, so I was mostly guessing from the image itself when I put together the components for my version. So I thought, for example, that the original had Campagnolo brakes (they're Weinmanns) and a Cinelli stem/bar (they're T.T.T.). I had no idea that Curnoe used Pino Morroni QRs, but, wow, that's cool. But knowing this probably wouldn't have changed my choices very much, given the semi-autobiographical nature of the project, and given the emphasis I'm putting on "adaptation." The basis of my adaptations appears in the chart itself, where I force myself to justify my departures from the original, either on aesthetic or athletic grounds.

Yes, I do know that I am weird, and that this is just a bike. But by clicking on the image below (and you will need to click to be able to read it), you tacitly acknowledge that you too are weird—and that this is not just a bike!

ps: how awesome was the Tour of Flanders yesterday? I'm going to turn this blog into a racing blog some day!

Jocelyn Lovell Bike

2011-04-01T15:47:00.008-04:00

Spring has arrived in Toronto. This has two consequences for Jocelyn Lovell Bike, who was finished last winter just as the snow started to fall:

I want to ride him.
I can now finally take nice pictures of him.

The question of riding and photographing are closely linked: until I took nice photographs, I didn't want to ride him and get him dirty and scratched; and until it was nice enough to take good photographs, I didn't want to ride him. So now things are in the proper order, and I have taken the archival photographs that will free me to ride Jocelyn Lovell Bike as much as I want.

Keats told the "fair youth" of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," stuck eternally in a painted half-kiss,

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Well, Sweet Bicycle, you cannot now fade, having been frozen in these photographs. But unlike the fair youth, you can now split into two lives—one preserved eternally in two dimensions, and the other as my ever, ever-rideable (and kissable!) three-dimensional companion on blissful Poplar Plains hill climbs.

In fact, we've just been on our first hill climb—and he is a very nice, svelte vehicle. Also, I am happy to report that the first person we passed—a high school student—saw the bike and immediately exclaimed, and I quote, "Holy fuck, that is a nice fucking bike." Thank you, fair youth!

Bye Bye Briggs, A Raw Deal on Donuts, and Curnoe Painting Underway

2011-03-28T13:55:00.002-04:00

In an effort to make room for Greg Curnoe bike, I am saying goodbye to my friend Briggs. He is being passed on to another friend, Jared, who is fully equipped to appreciate his lovely yellow colour and bizarre England headbadge. I've fitted Briggs with a nice 1984 Shimano 600 group, but added indexed 7-speed shifting courtesy a silver RX100 derailleur, and used Tektro brake levers. The saddle is a Rolls.

I got the following in the mail today:

These are cable donuts for Greg Curnoe Bike's exposed top tube cable housing. Obviously I needed these, and did what it took to get them. Bless "Hudz" for making them, but curse them for only making them in packs of 30 or 250. (Curse Hudz also, incidentally, for their stupid name). I had to order this pack of 8 from an eBay seller in England. The total cost was about $10, which is absolutely shameful. I could buy ten actual Tim Horton's donuts for that. (But even Tim's doesn't make donuts in red; and real donuts on the top tube would be messy, and conducive neither to good braking nor to fitness. Alas.)

I heard from Noah today that painting of Greg Curnoe Bike is underway. The fenders are orange and the frame is primed and sanded. Next comes the yellow, then the green, then the red logos. (Then comes love, then comes marriage.) Here is my latest sketch, incorporating the overpriced donuts incarnadine:

Bikes vs. Books

2011-03-16T16:37:00.003-04:00

The books have been winning, my friends. I'm in the period of final revisions on my thesis, and also trying to figure out what I'll be doing next year, and so have been out of the framebuilding shop for the last two months. In that time, dear Greg Curnoe bike has been patiently waiting for me to match Noah's paint-book to the original Curnoe print. That will happen tonight, I'm happy to say.

In the meantime, here is the colour-scheme sketch I'll give Noah tonight. (I can't wait to see the finished product!!)

Greg Curnoe Bike is In For Paint

2011-01-22T20:08:00.001-05:00

I thought the day would never come, but at last it has: I have done everything I can for the Curnoe bike; Noah must take it from here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Greg Curnoe collaborated with a specialist in silk-screening to make the print on which my bike is based (I can't recall where I read the details; if you know them, please leave them in a comment). This was a considerable technical feat, and his work was much admired. Noah of Velocolour is no less an expert, and his challenge will be no less considerable. This is going to be a complicated, time-consuming paint job. I can't wait to see it.

It's very fitting also that my bike will be roommates for the next few months with what's left of the original "Mariposa T. T." As you can read here, Curnoe crashed the bike that served as the model for his painting and had Mariposa rebuild it as a low-profile time trial bike. This bike is in Mike Barry's collection and resides at Bicycle Specialties, where Noah does his painting. Above you can see my frame posing with the seat tube, rear triangle, and (I presume) fork of the original bike. Note the family resemblance in the seat lugs.

Which Headset?

2011-01-16T15:01:00.000-05:00

One of the few things I haven't completely decided on for the Greg Curnoe bike is the headset. Here are the sources of this very important dilemma.

The Nuovo Record headset, photographed in the gold medal position, has many things going for it. For one thing, it (or the slightly lighter Super Record) is the one in the painting. For another, it's really good looking—look at all that engraving! It's definitely the best-looking from the rider's-eye perspective, for instance:

And it gets serious bonus points for the totally unnecessary stylish engravings in invisible places:

It's also in really nice condition, with only the tiniest indications of wear. The downside is that it's made of steel and weighs twice what the others do.

The Campagnolo Chorus headset provides a nice compromise of engraving and weight. It's aluminum with steel races, and weighs around 100 grams. It's also in good condition. But its lower stack height is 12mm rather than the 14mm my frame was designed for—which, according to Olivier, would change the head angle by a really-not-important 0.2 degrees. But still. Plus, let's face it, it's not as shiny or scripty as the Nuovo Record.

Then there is the Stronglight A9. It uses needle bearings, which make a lot of sense for headsets. It's the lightest of the bunch—and Curnoe was obsessed with weight savings, as evinced by the somewhat absurd second incarnation of the Mariposa TT, which had useless plastic Modolo brakes. And the Stronglight was around in the 70s, unlike the Chorus.

I'm leaning toward the Nuovo Record—but let me know what you think. It is, I think you'll agree, a life-or-death situation.

Greg Curnoe Bike is Ready for Paint

2011-01-13T13:38:00.001-05:00

With the kind assistance of Noah Rosen of Velocolour (who, in addition to painting bikes, also repairs them) I finally tracked down some brake cable stops. And so, with the exception of some inevitable fiddling, the frame is done.

Soon—once I have a chance to match the colours to the original Curnoe print—the really exciting part will begin: painting. As I said in my first post about this bike, it's a bit funny that the most distinctive part of this bike will be the paint job, which I won't do. But even this is "artistically justified": while Curnoe did do a watercolour painting of the bike, I'm more interested in the silk screen print on plexiglass he later produced—for which he required the expert help of a silkscreening specialist. So his was a "collaboration," and so will mine be. (The print, incidentally, was made using enamel paints—very close to the sorts of paints Noah will use.)

While I wait for the paint, I'll be sorting out a few last little build details. For one thing, I would like to find a really pretty matched set of barrel adjusters—one M6 (for the rear) and one M5 (for the front—I tapped a Mafac hanger.) If you know of any, let me know. I'll also get some red donuts for the brake cable (another "trace" of the original bike, which used continuous red cable housing on the top tube), some more Kool Stop Mafac pads, a red chain (apparently technology has progressed to the point where this is practicable), and a few other little things. I really can't wait to see it all built up—I think it will be really spectacular. When it's ready, I'm planning to ride it to London, hopefully to visit Curnoe's (former) studio.

Bar Tape and Fenders for Greg Curnoe Bike

2011-01-04T16:06:00.003-05:00

As I was getting a bit sick of working on the grey-and-rust-coloured bare frame—this is, after all, a bike inspired primarily by a very colourful painting!—I decided last week to wrap the Curnoe bike's bar tape.

I drive myself a bit crazy with explanations and justifications for every choice on the bike. The handlebar tape is no different, of course. Since the bike in the painting is a time trial bike, only the drops are wrapped, and its Super Record brake levers have no hoods:

Since mine is a road bike, I wanted hoods, and I wanted bar tape everywhere. But I needed to compromise somehow with the painting. The first solution was to use clear hoods on Super Record brake levers—that way you can see the grey-purple brake lever bodies, but also actually put your hands on them. I thought about wrapping clear or grey tape on the tops of the bars, but decided in the end I'd prefer the look of red all the way up. But to preserve a "trace" of the painting, I decided to leave the clamps exposed. (They're especially pretty clamps, by the way—from Victory brake levers. Since the Curnoe bike has a Campagnolo decal in the painting, take this as justification to show off as many Camagnolo logos as possible.)

The bars and stem are Nitto—copies of the Cinellis, much as my bike is a copy of a different original. The clear hoods are Modolos.

Set up with the levers even with the drops. Note the nice clamp decal.

I began the tape-wrapping process by "masking off" the clamp with two lengths of red tape purchased at Hoopdriver. (I've since begun to wonder if it would be possible just to wrap the bar all the way, and then slip the clamp over the tape. Some quick experiments suggest that it is not.)

Then, using the normal methods, I wrapped the rest. I doubt the bike in the painting had shellacqued bar tape, but that's part of my style, so mine got it. (Bike on stem-holding duty: Marinoni.)

It was really, annoyingly difficult to pull this off cleanly. (Indeed, it didn't come out all that cleanly.) Some tape runs end very abruptly in awkward places on the bar. The trick of cutting tape at an angle in order to finish it cleanly—which works with cork, or with tennis racquet grip tape—does not work for cloth tape. Anyway, I used some Gorilla Grip glue to hold the awkwardly terminated ends down securely, and then this ad hoc fixture to hold down anything else that tried to pop up in the shellacquing process.

If you tape a step back, I think this might be the coolest-looking handlebar ever. The red is really luminescent, the clear hoods are incredible, and the poppy-red housing I have matches the tape surprisingly well.

I really like how the exposed clamp looks, and I love how the red housing shows through the clear hoods where it meets the lever.

I also fitted the fenders in the last few days. I've been working on these for a long time, but this is the first time they've been installed on the bike. I was sort of worried that fenders would spoil the "sporty" look of the bike, but I don't think they will—especially when they're painted orange. The fender lines are pretty perfect (they're maybe a bit tighter on the rear than the front, but not much.) I was hoping they would just cover the tread, to give the effect that the orange-painted fender "is" the tread, and that came off pretty well. (Ignore the screwy fender lines on the front: my draw bolts are all loose here; trust me that, with them properly tightened, the lines are good—tighter on the top and looser on the bottom!)

Aren't radial front wheels beautiful?

The good rear fender lines. The fender pulls up a bit right at the back when tightened—I'm not sure why. The inflated tire does go in!

Here is the external evidence of the internal reinforcing plate for the rear fender. On the inside is a used hacksaw blade drilled with four holes. I got this idea from Mike Barry—and the beautiful bolts from Martin at Hoopdriver. (My leather washer is a bit fatter that I thought it was—but the tire-to-fender clearance still seems to be around 1cm.)

I just love forward fender stays.

I followed the fender-installation instructions in the latest Bicycle Quarterly to the letter. The stays are pre-bent so that tightening the bolts does not serve to bend them.

This picture, if I may say so myself, presents a tour de force of stay-bending: the forward fender stay is bent so that it leaves the fork at a perpendicular angle, then meets the fender perpendicular to the tangent, and is then also bent to meet the eye bolts straight; and the front fender stay too is bent to meet its eyelets.

Finally, this is the actual seatpost, at the actual height, with the actual saddle and actual stainless steel clamp bolt. The saddle in the painting is not one my bum would be very happy on, and the seatpost seems like a rather junky straight post with a bolt-on clamp—so I felt utter freedom here. I love Flite saddles, and this one has yellow and red details that will fit in well. The seatpost is marked with a sharpie so that I know where to polish it.

It looks like I've finally tracked down some brake cable housing stops for the top tube, so I should be able to finish all the brazing some time this week. (The demise of Bikelugs.com has been most inconvenient for the building of this bike!) Then just a little bit more filing to do. Close!

Biography and Autobiography, Et Cetera

2010-12-26T16:03:00.003-05:00

I am now on to the second in my Canadian Nationalist Biographically-Themed Bike Series. I've done the Jocelyn Lovell Bike, dedicated to one of Canada's greatest cyclists; I'm getting close with Greg Curnoe Bike, dedicated to one of its greatest artists. There are other biographically-themed bikes I'd like to make: a Mike Barry Bike, for example (though in a sense all my bikes are Mike Barry Bikes!); and a Steve Bauer Bike (my mother grew up in the same small town as Canada's best-ever road cyclist, and actually babysat for him once.)

I've been noticing lately, however, that quite by accident, the Biographically-Themed Greg Curnoe Bike is also very Autbiographical. For example, the paint scheme—the highlight of the bike—is going to have horizontal panels on each tube, with yellow on top and green underneath. This is primarily to match the Curnoe painting upon which the bike is based, but also incorporates the paint schemes of the two bikes it's going to replace, pictured at right.

The green Marinoni was my first ever road bike. In the summer between first and second year of university, I remember seeing someone riding on a lugged steel road bike, and being extremely drawn to the thin tubes. This was at a time (around 2001) when road bikes were still very uncool (at least in London, Ontario) and somewhat unusual. I myself had been riding an ugly CCM road bike all through high school. It was my aesthetic reaction to that bike that made me decide to get a road bike. I looked on eBay (one of my first eBay purchases) and found my green 1991 Marinoni Special from a seller from Sudbury (where I was born—another autobiographical element!) for $300. I had no idea what I was buying, but the gods were clearly watching this purchase closely. It's a gorgeous bike—the more I work on my own frames, the more I realize this. And it's been my main bike since then—I even did a two-week-long tour on it once!

The yellow Brigantia was my first handmade bike. It was built by an amateur in Toronto (much as I, an amateur, will build its replacement in Toronto) and while it amateurishness shows in some respects, I've gotten a lot of ideas from it.

In addition to the colours, Greg Curnoe Bike will also incorporate many of these bikes' most distinctive features: double-tapered stays and a low bottom bracket from the Marinoni, generous tire clearance and long point lugs from the Brigantia. I'm also pillaging parts from both bikes: the stem, bars, and headset are coming from the Marinoni, along with the cassette. Briggs is donating the Chorus derailleur. (I'm going to keep these frames as "scultpures," I think.)

While I'm obsessively analysing every aspect of the Greg Curnoe bike, let me also note that I got myself a copy of The Competition Bicycle by Jan Heine for Christmas, and noticed a lot of similarities between GC Bike and the Cupertino Bike Shop's Cinelli Supercorsas. They not only share lugs (Cinelli CSes) and fastback seatstay attachments, but both use Mafac brakes. I'm always looking for ways to "justify" my departures from the bike in the Curnoe painting. Mostly I think that just as Curnoe needed to adapt the actual Mariposa to his aesthetic needs, I need to adapt his print to my athletic needs. But the famous Cupertino Cinellis help to explain two of my most obvious departures from the print—the brakes and the lugs—through their connection to the fastback. Supercorsas undoubtedly have the most famous fastbacks of any production bike—and the fastback is the most distinctive feature of the Mariposa in the Curnoe print. (The Competition Bicycle is a really nice book, by the way! Get the last of the first editions while you can!)

I've been up to a few things over the Christmas break. The first is building up a set of clincher wheels for the GC. Practicality suggests that I will ride this bike more often, and over longer distances, if I don't always have to worry about puncturing my expensive Dugast tubulars. I had a pair of very nice NOS 32-hole Shimano Sante hubs in my closet just waiting for an assignment. I also had a spare Mavic MA 32H rim for the front, and some 302mm DB spokes (I still need an MA or MA2 rear rim with the appropriate decal). The resulting wheel is not only very strong and attractive, but also fits in very well to the bike's colour scheme—both in terms of the label and the massive green dust shields on the Sante hubs.

The labels on the tires I'll use—28mm Grand Bois Cerfs—fit in pretty nicely, too. (These came off Niles, who is undergoing a slight transformation into what Mike Barry would call a "treader"—an everyday bike. He'll get Pasela 28s.)

I also cleaned off the 7-speed Uniglide cassette that I was using on my Marinoni. I got this as part of a complete Santé group I bought on eBay a couple of years ago, but until I cleaned it, I had no idea it was so beautifully shiny. I'm not sure I've ever seen such nice Uniglide cogs before...

I decided to use it as a 6-speed rather than use all 7 cogs. As a 7-speed it's a 13-14-15-17-19-21-24. That 14 isn't incredibly useful; and as a 6-speed it's slightly lighter and nicer for friction shifting. (Luckily I have a rather robust collection of 6- and 7-speed Uniglide spacers...) Here it is installed on the fancy tubular rear wheel:

One of the many nice things about Uniglide is that when the cogs get worn down, you can simply flip them over, since they don't have the unidirectional tooth profiles of Hyperglide cassettes. The cogs were actually not particularly worn, but I decided to flip them over anyway. And just like that, I have an essentially brand new, shiny 6-speed 13-24 cassette...

I may finish the Greg Curnoe bike completely this week. There's just some lug filing to do, and adding three braze-ons. But there's no rush. One of the things I'm most excited about doing next is matching the colour of the paint to the actual Curnoe print. I know someone who happens to have an original, and Noah Rosen of Velocolour has agreed to go and visit it with me to match the colours of the print to those in his paint sample book. But the person with the print is out of town for another month. This will, in any case, force me not to rush the final filing...

Merry Christmas Greg Curnoe Bike

2010-12-24T10:12:00.003-05:00

I brought Greg Curnoe Bike home from the shop for Christmas—a time of year, after all, when you want to be near your loved ones. He is still not finished: he needs brake cable stops on the top tube and a derailleur stop on the driveside chainstay (they've been in the mail for a month) and there's lots of lug filing to be done. But I decided to dress him up for Christmas anyway.

Not all of this is as it will actually be on the finished bike, of course. You can mentally subtract about 10cm from the handlebar height, for example (much trimming of the steerer is needed!) and since I didn't have enough hands to carry home the actual front wheel, that's a totally incorrect Sante/CR18/Pasela 35 front wheel deflated to approximately the proper diameter. The fenders are also not installed. But everything else is pretty much as it will be—and I'm happy to say it all looks very good and fits properly.

I believe I've already made it quite clear how I feel about the seat cluster area. This shot reveals the full complexity around the binder. This began as an old hollow, stamped binder that I then reinforced, filling the usual bevelled spot in the centre with a big brass fillet, and then brazing the mitered stays both to the actual steel and to the brass. The seatpost (a nice Sugino Super Mighty) is not the one I'll use—the flutes are too long. I forgot the Nuovo Record post I'll use at the shop. (Though painted flutes would look really nice! Hmm....)

From the proper Curnoe non-driveside. The seat lug looks even nicer with a seatpost installed! There's still some filing to be done on this lug, but it's getting pretty good.

Some filing needed here too, but again, pretty much right. There's a little imperfection in the lug itself there that will need some Bondo. Though not the easiest to work with, these Cinelli CS stamped lugs are about as nice as lugs get.

From the other side. I just can't get enough of the Richard Sachs Newvex crowns. I love the way the chevrons look on top of flat crowns; in fact, all three of my bikes have them!

Good measurements and clearances all around in the BB area: the BB height is 10.5", which is what I wanted; the chainrings will be in the right place once I've tightened the BB (a 116mm JIS SKF); there's good clearance between the crank arm and stay; and there is 12mm between the tire and the CS bridge for good fender lines. It's also possible to insert a fully inflated wheel into the horizontal drops, with the fender installed. How, you may ask?

Well, I filed the bottom of the dropout so that they are the exact minimum size to provide maximum contact with the skewer faces with the wheel in the desired position.

While I'm on this subject, I will note that Campagnolo 1010 dropouts, with adjuster screws set to maximum length, look like the tonguey mouths of heraldic bears:

(Of course the toothed Cambio Corsa dropouts are even closer.) In any case...

There's lots of clearance for a bolt inside the eyelet, too, so I can use draw bolts for the fender stays on both sides. That's a 6-speed Uniglide cassette on a 7-speed freehub body. (I think I'll switch the 13-21 to a 13-24.)

Clearance at the seatstay bridge is also 12mm, which is just what I wanted. This was not always the case, however! I'm not sure how, exactly, but on my first attempt, I put it 8mm from the tire. I think what happened was that I brazed it in place without a dummy axle in the rear drops, and the spacing must have been < 130mm. It was actually pretty fun to un-braze, remiter, and re-braze the bridge. You have a lot of power with a torch, some files, and an unpainted frame!

You'll also notice in this pictures that I've brazed on spring retainers for the Mafac brakes. This is another story of a mistake. I was laying on my couch one day last week watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when it suddenly struck me that I had put all my Mafac bosses on backwards. I'm not sure what prompted the memory, or how I was so sure, but I suddenly knew what I'd done.

Like the ones used on this Mariposa, my Mafac bosses are designed to be used with a little aluminum plate that serves as a spring retainer:

For these to work properly, the flat needs to be aligned on the inside of the stay/fork blade. Otherwise, the sprint hole ends up in the wrong place and the spring ends up with too little tension. My bosses, of course, were all aligned to the outside, which put the spring retainers in precisely the wrong direction. (Hey, you know what? This Mariposa appears to have its bosses on bakwards too! That spring it as 11 o'clock, and it's supposed to be at 1 o'clock! So maybe I would have been fine after all!)

Once I'd discovered this, my options were either to completely un-braze and flip all the bosses, which I really didn't want to do—or to braze on spring retainers. Obviously I chose the latter option. And actually, I was happy to have the opportunity, since I'd found a little problem with the way I brazed my spring retainers on to the Jocelyn Lovell Bike.

This is hard to explain in words, but I'll try. The bosses I bought from Amir consist of three "steps": the tip is the surface on which the brake arms turn; then there is a larger-diameter area where the springs sit, with the aluminum spring retainer plate sandwiched in there; and then finally the largest-diameter area, which you miter to the stay. On the Jocelyn Lovell bike, I had brazed the spring retainers on to the largest-diameter area, and made them align with the edge of this area with the spring area. However, the bosses are designed to accomodate the depth of the 2mm aluminum plate. So in effect my spring retainers were 2mm too far "back," and as a result the spring had too much room to sit in, and sort of flopped around. I don't have a picture of this on the JL bike, but you can see that Peter Weigle did the same thing here:

Obviously, if Peter Weigle is doing it, it's probably okay. But notice how the spring is nicely sandwiched on the Mariposa with the 2mm aluminum spring retainer, but not at all here. I wanted that sandwiching! (It might actually affect the may the brake works. I think the spring is supposed to push against the brake arm as a way of securing it against the brake bolt. But I don't know.)

So what I did was cut four little rings, 2mm in depth and 12mm in ID to match the diameter of that part of the Mafac boss. Luckily the ID of a piece of 14mm seatstay is 12mm, and we had some scraps laying around. Cutting these things with a hacksaw to a consistent width of 2mm was beyond my ability, but it didn't need to be exact. I brazed a tube on to these rings. They came out looking a bit like rings, didn't they?

I slid these on to the bosses, being very careful to get the spring-retaining tube to line up at exactly the right spot for proper spring tension (I used the crescent from my Mafac Competitions as a guide for this), and then brazed the ring to the boss and fillet-brazed the tube to the back of the boss.

It was not an easy brazing operation, since the bosses are pretty massive and the tubes absolutely tiny. Also, building fillets with 56% silver is not merely difficult but stupid. I should have used 45%. Anyway, after a nightmarish amount of work, I had my brazed-on spring retainers, which provided the desired sandwiching effect.

And, really, is there anything cooler than a Mafac brake with brazed-on bosses? I really don't think so. (I find something especially beautiful in the way the brake arms align with the top of the crown here.)

I leave you with a Christmassy image from the shop. There is my fork in the vise; if you look closely, you can see the forward fender stay installed. It was a particularly cold day, and the upper window was completely frosted over.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Brrrrrr

2010-12-10T19:16:00.002-05:00

Olivier and I were talking today about how utterly Canadian we are. I'm on to number two in my Canadian Nationalist Biographically-Themed Bike Series (Jocelyn Lovell, check; Greg Curnoe, close). He's building a replica of Canada's most famous bike, the CCM Flyer (which Curnoe also painted, though I can't find a copy online).

And we're doing it in sub-zero temperatures! It's been below freezing all week in Toronto, and our unheated shop has been spared none of the mayhem. We're working in winter coats, toques, and mittens. Those beautiful and seasonal ice crystals are on the inside of our window.

There's been some mayhem in the shop as well. I got quite the scare this week when I went to add some silver to a little gap on the (sort of important!) drive side upper headlug. When I added my spot, I got a little on the shoreline... so I decided to clean it up by melting it down to the lug point. Much to my surprise, however, when I got everything up to temperature, a good portion of the lug just melted and flowed away. You see, as Gertrude Stein once said, "There [was] no there there." In my over-zealous quest for thin lugs, I had filed away the steel, and was down to the silver filler. (This must have been one of the spots where the lug wasn't sitting very flush to the tube—a hazard of my preferred stamped lugs.)

There is an element of Canadian-ness to this screwup also: it was because it was so dark in the shop that I couldn't see the very obvious fact that I had filed through my lug.

So all I could do was add a big blob [haha, I caught a typo that said "blog"] of silver and try to "reconstruct" the lug. This I did, and it actually doesn't look too bad, except for the pinholes:

It's also a bit uneven (overly thin... again.) As stupid as this may sound, I think I'll actually go in and add some more silver rather than try to get Noah to fix it with Bondo. This is a learning experience, so why not just keep at it until it's right? Right?!

Besides that little flaw (and the fact that I needed to un-braze the brake bridge, since it was about 2mm too low for perfect fender lines—another learning experience!), the bike looks really nice. Right now I'm fiddling with the fenders (I decided to use smooth fluted Honjo 42mms). I'll just try to make that lug look as good as possible, wait patiently for my stainless steel brake cable stops to arrive, and keep messing with the fenders. (The new Bicycle Quarterly has yet another article on setting up aluminum fenders, and it's useful. Details in the next post.)

Here's how the bike looks, positioned very deliberately in the Canadian snow—and pictured from the (thank God) properly Curnoe-ian non-drive, non-missing-lug-spot side:

Despite the absolutely innumerable errors on this bike, I really love it.

Speaking of my other Canadian Nationalist Biographically-Themed Bike, I finally put the finishing touches on the Jocelyn Lovell bike build. Namely, I added some of the new Kool-Stop salmon Mafac 4-bump pads. They look nice! But, alas, I will not be testing them on the road until the snow goes away...

Greg Curnoe Bike Progress

2010-11-28T15:32:00.000-05:00

While I have been too busy lately to do my work and work on bikes and maintain this blog regularly, I have had sufficient time to do items one and two. And so now, a belated report on some exciting progress on the Greg Curnoe bike.

I am actually now almost done. The rear triangle, as I am increasingly learning, is by far the hardest part of the bike. There are a million things to get right, and no fixture, however awesome, seems quite able to hold it all together. Then there are the specific challenges of the Curnoe rear triangle: mostly that weird and beautiful fastback attachment. This presented added challenges of fixturing, mitering, and brazing—and did in fact result in the rear wheel sitting very slightly off-centre between the seatstays. A half milimetre or so of dropout filing fixed that, however.

Now I'm in the midst of adding the braze-ons. It's always really hard to get bridges perfectly straight when you're doing everything by hand and checking straightness by eye—but they came out alright. The rear cable hanger was a bit tricky but come out pretty well. I'm now officially good at Mafac braze-ons, but I did end up putting one on backwards this time! I must say, though, it was pretty fun and easy to take it off and flip it over. Screwing up is always the best way of learning.

Now, the specifics...

Here is the bike with a faux-build. I'm afraid it's getting dark up here in Toronto, and I couldn't get any decent indoor lighting to take this photo. (This is also a big problem in the shop -- it's hard to see anything past about 3pm!)

Here is my pride and joy. Good Lord I love this seat lug and stay attachment! There's a lot going on: the old stamped Cinelli CS lugs have a reinforced binder, and the 11/14/11 double-tapered Deda seatstays are silver fillet brazed straight on to it. It doesn't look exactly like the one in the Curnoe painting, but it's pretty damned close—and even nicer, if I may say so myself. The cutout on the side of the seatlug (present in the Curnoe painting) is pretty cool too. You can't argue with a seatlug that looks like an angry bird mid-scream.

I'm also pretty fond of this whole aspect of the bike. With normal wrap-around stays, it can be tricky to place the Mafac bosses, since the brake requires 60-64mm pivot spacing, but with 130mm spacing and wrap-around attachment, you really have to miter the bosses to the extreme inside of the stays. With the fastback attachment, I was able to miter by bosses exactly to the centre of the stay. (And the stays are 14mm at the brake boss—nice and wide.) Since no brake is attached to the SS bridge, I was able to use a nice thin tube (9.5mm), which I think looks very nice. There's plenty of room for the 37mm fenders I'm going to use.

This picture tells a slightly more disappointing story. I went to the rather insane trouble of moving the derailleur hanger on this bike (normally it sits right at the "front" on the dropout slot)—all so that I could reduce chain gap and thus get good shifting performance from a Huret Jubilee derailleur. Well, let me tell you, the chain gap is very reduced: so much so that I won't be able to get the derailleur to shift on to the 21-tooth cog I had wanted to use. I could maybe get away with a 13-18... but since I actually want to ride this bike, it's a no go. I could just move the wheel back in the slot, but that would mess up my fender lines, and sort of defeat the whole purpose of getting really low chain gap. So I'm going to use this Chorus 10-speed derailleur. They shift better, anyway, aren't very heavy, and will allow me to use my preferred 13-24 rear setup. (Of course they don't look as cool as Jubilees.) Anyway, not quite a tragedy. (And I have a rear dropout that won't look like anyone else's!)

Here's the stop for the rear brake cable housing. It's offset a bit to the non-drive side and also pointed up, both of which should help the cable path to the brake. This little fellow also serves as a second SS bridge, which is nice since fastbacks are reputed to be weaker than wrap-around attachments. I'd think they're stronger than anything else in tension—there's nowhere to go!—and I'm sure my double-bridge setup will keep things from shifting around side-to-side. So should be very strong! I might even use this setup on my randonneur bike; I don't see any disadvantages... (Yes, there's still lots of clearance for 45mm fenders).

Brazing on the downtube bosses was an immense pain. I would get them centred (held in place with a c-clamp), but then during tacking one of them would slip—or I'd get them just about brazed and then the whole boss would shift slightly. Anyway, I finally got them just about right—and the shifters definitely look centred mounted.

So what's next? Well, I still need to add water bottle bosses (one set on the DT) and brake cable stops (I'm going to use single stops, placed at 12 o'clock on the TT) and a derailleur stop. Then I need to file the lugs some more... and then paint! I have (I think) decided to hand-paint the bike. Obviously this fits into the whole Curnoe theme. But I'm afraid it will look awful. I am obsessively trying to work out how to do it by hand and make it look really good...

Jocelyn Lovell Bike: Build 1.1

2010-11-02T15:35:00.000-04:00

Since I wasn't happy with my shellac colour, I took it off, wrapped some new white tape, and then applied somewhere between 20-25 coats of clear shellac. Now it looks right! Everything still needs to be polished, and I still need new Mafac brake blocks, but otherwise this is pretty close. It looks great now—and seems to ride very well too!

Definitive Answers about TA Track Crank BB Length; and Jocelyn Lovell Bike: Third Look

2010-10-30T14:46:00.002-04:00

First things first: let no one every again wonder what bottom bracket spindle length to use with a TA Pro 5 Vis "Cyclotouriste" Track/Piste/Pista cranks (abundance of words to help Googling.) The answer is: 107mm JIS. Using a Shimano UN72 bottom bracket, this gave me exactly 42mm chainline. Now, mine are newer-production arms with laser etchings, and from what I understand, the newer ones occasionally need longer spindles than the older production. But any shorter than 107 and the spider would bottom out against even the remarkably low-profile UN72. So I can confidently say: pretty much anyone with TA cranks, with the exception of some hypothetical people with laser-etched arms different from mine: use a 107mm JIS spindle. (So much for TA's recommendation of 111.5mm—maybe they were talking about ISO taper BBs to fit in their JIS-taper crank arms. They're a funny company.) And do use really low-profile BBs like the Shimanos. The SKF 107 would NOT work: the "fixed cup" side sticks out too far, and the spider would bottom out.

Well, that's settled. Here's a look at the first iteration of Jocelyn Lovell Bike's build. I'm happy with most of it except (a) the tape colour, which is too brown—I'm already about 15 coats of clear shellac in to fixing this problem, and (b) the Wippermann Connex chain has a lousy master link, which I had to remove since it severely messed up my drive train. Who needs master links anyway, though, on big fat healthy chains? More photos of the bike when I'm completely happy with it.

Jocelyn Lovell Bike: Second Look

2010-10-25T18:34:00.000-04:00

Some direct sunlight brought with it a better chance to take nice photos of this brilliantly painted bike. Here they are.

I had been planning on using the polished Dura Ace track cranks I used on Niles... but one look at these TAs up against the frame and I was convinced.

The only problem is getting the BB spindle length right. Some rough measurements suggest 107mm is going to be the way to go with these arms (the newer production ones). Unfortunately I can't use an SKF—the way the fixed cups are designed would make the spider bottom out.

Thank you, Wyndham Lewis.

Thank you, typeface designers at the Bauhaus, French logo-makers, Wes Anderson, and people who know Illustrator better than me.

It's a shame the 531 decal won't be in plain view—but the painted Silca is actually probably prettier. Lots of nice points at the seatlug...

Pump and seat tube.

Bottom bracket area. (That half-installed SKF, a 116mm one, is definitely not staying. Too bad, as the non-DS "cup" is red anodized and would match!)

Schopenhauer and Jocelyn Lovell Bike: casting shadows.

Jocelyn Lovell Bike: First Look

2010-10-24T21:56:00.000-04:00

I went to pick up the completed frame today from Noah at Velocolour. I must say, I was totally blown away at how beautiful it looks. I remember Doug Fattic telling me that the key to success in frame building is very simple: have a good painter. I think Noah has made me look very good.

I doubt the colours will come across that well in these indoor shots, but they're absolutely beautiful. The blue is very light, the cream very creamy, and the red nice and bright. The masked headtube looks wonderful, and the painted pump is fantastic—I'd thought about having a panel on the seat tube, but this sort of has the panel effect while preserving the minimalist feel.

Noah used masks instead of decals, and the logos all came out looking great. I love the way the red jumps out of that massive white headtube. (And the Mafac spring retainers look so good that they almost seem worth the incredible effort...)

Again, not the greatest photo—but you can see the white-painted triangles on the Nervex crown, the 531 fork decal, and a bit of the downtube logo. Literally every possible tube on this bike is 531: all the frame tubes, the chain and seat stays, the steerer, the head tube, and the fork blades.

A better look at the fork and the lower headlug. I'm very proud of how nice the crown looks now, given how ugly it was when I started with it. (My lug work is far from flawless, but isn't so bad. I generally like the shapes, even if they're not filed as thin as I'd ideally like them.)

The colour contrast is really, really nice!

This is the other creative paint detail: the tops of the tack ends are painted white. I hear that a few people who've seen the bike in the shop have commented on the angle of the dropouts/track ends—they should be parallel to the ground with the TT level (so that the head tube angle/BB height is constant regardless of the position of the rear wheel), but they're angled with the chainstays, like on a normal bike (so that the rim stays in line with the brake pads). It's a minor thing and it won't bug me too much—and I was only following the angle of the track ends themselves.

So now it's time to build it up—I have a feeling JL will look even better with all his parts. I'll have some professional-quality photos taken when it's ready.

Jocelyn Lovell Bike in Primer

2010-10-04T09:21:00.002-04:00

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.

Greg Curnoe Bike's Fork

2010-09-26T12:02:00.001-04:00

For the past week or so I've been working on the Curnoe bike's fork. It's been a bit of a pain. First, the steerer/crown joint was decidedly tricky. I decided to leave the cast-in lip in place on the underside of the crown, in order to line up the bottom of the crown with the water bottle boss I'd added to the bottom of the steerer as a fender mounting point. Unfortunately, this made adding silver tricky (since the silver needed to turn a 90 degree corner before beginning its journey to the other side of the joint.) I'm not entirely sure what kind of penetration I got in the joint, but it seems to be adequate.

Then, raking the blades and brazing in the dropouts was tricky. This was my first time using the fork bending mandrel, and it was a learning experience. My first blade came out pointing off about 15 degrees off-axis — one for the scrap heap. I thought I had the the next two matched in rake, but in the fork fixture it was clear they were off by a few millimetres. This resulted in one of my dropouts being cocked a bit, but I was able to clear that up with some creative filing.

The next step was brazing on the Mafac bosses, which went smoothly enough, and then brazing in the fork blades, which actually went very well (there's the fork in the jig, about to have the blades brazed in). I did a very slow preheat, and experimented with using different flame sizes for different parts of the joint, and this was very successful. I got a lot of silver in there!

Here's a close look at the crown post-brazing. Doing the bosses first makes a certain amount of sense, since trying to brass-braze them after doing the crown/blades would melt the silver and make a mess. Speaking of messes, you can see quite a bit of burnt flux around the brake hole. Filling these holes is a gigantic pain, since you need to get the steerer and crown up to brazing temperature, and they're both massive and slow to heat. I did manage to fill the front hole, but the rear simply wouldn't go. I'll get Noah to fill it with contrasting paint instead! For future reference, I will remember to fill these holes while brazing the crown/steerer joint, when everything is already up to temperature. Also visible in the picture is my fender mounting point at the bottom of the steerer.

Here is how the fork came out. That's Greg Curnoe Bike's front wheel, a radially-laced 32-hole Mavic SSC tubular rim with a Dugast 27mm tire. The crown is a Richard Sachs Newvex that I significantly reshaped. I really like the bend our incredibly simple wooden mandrel produces. (This fork has 51mm of rake.)

A close up at the "pool-style" dropout attachment. I would call it "French-style," but it seems that French builders filed in deeper radii than I did here. I like the way this looks, and it very closely resembles the style on the original Mariposa. (By the way: the hub is a polished Deore DX [cost, about $5], and the skewer is an old Camapgnolo. I love the conical nut, and want another matching one for the rear!)

Below you can see the cool triangle-accented top of the Newvex crown (the triangles will be painted in contrasting yellow to the fork's green colour), and a mounted brake. I'm going to use a NOS Competition on the finished bike, but these well-used ones confirmed that the bosses were mounted in correct alignment—no interference between the brake arms. I left quite a bit of clearance on this fork, since I'm going to mount fenders at least some of the time. Actually, this bike will be very versatile—you could even use it for cyclocross if you were so inclined!

Of course, the bike in the painting has neither fenders nor lots of clearance. There is quite a bit of compromise, in fact, in adapting a cool-looking painting-bike to a bike I will actually want to ride (and I'll ride it a lot, since my rides are increasingly fast and shortish, and this will be a sort of 'racing' bike). The Curnoe bike is a time trial bike; mine has two chainrings, clearance for fat tires and fenders, a wider crown, Mafac bosses, etc.

But I can justify most of my changes. For instance, the tires in the Curnoe painting are bright orange. Bright orange tires do not exist in the real world—but you can quite easily have fenders painted bright orange. Having (orange) fenders not only makes the bike look more like the painting, but also makes the bike more useful. I am going to do the fastback seatstay attachment, which might seem like a weird move for a bike with fenders. The main reason to do a fastback it is that it's probably the most distinctive feature of the bike in the painting. But it's also practical for this bike; the fastback puts the seat stays close together at the brake bridge area, which means I'll be able to mount my Mafac bosses on the centre of the stays instead of on the inside, which can be a bit precarious. There should still be plenty of clearance for the 37mm Velo Orange fenders (which will indeed be orange) I'm planning on using.

Mike Barry's Greg Curnoe bike

2010-09-23T13:06:00.000-04:00

While progress been underway on my own Curnoe bike (updates soon), Mike Barry has completed the first of two replicas of Greg Curnoe's famous "Close the 49th Parallel" Mariposa (see the story on Mike's blog). Mike was commissioned do do these replicas by Toronto artist Paul Butler. The finished product is, indeed, a work of art.

Here is Curnoe's painting of the yellow Mariposa:

And here are a bunch of pictures of the replica. The mustardy yellow colour is really wonderful—a colour you would never think of painting a bike today, but extremely distinctive. If only he could find a green freewheel! (Remember, though: this is a replica of the bike, not the bike in the painting...)

Jos is Off, Back to Greg C

2010-09-11T21:42:00.000-04:00

I dropped my Jocelyn Lovell bike off with Noah at Velocolour on Thursday. I brought my camera to capture the incredibleness of the Mariposa shop (where Noah paints)—but as usual, it was so very incredible that I forgot to take any pictures.

The best thing I saw was a replica of Greg Curnoe's Mariposa road bike that Mike Barry was recently commissioned to build. It was painted a truly beautiful and utterly un-fashionable mustard yellow colour. No one would even consider painting a bike that colour today. When I found out about this whole replica project, I was a bit surprised—since I had my own Greg Curnoe replica project in mind. But mine is a bit different—different bike, different "bike of a painting" concept.

Anyway, seeing that bike inspired me to get back to work on my Greg Curnoe bike, whose front triangle I've already finished. Time now for the rear triangle. It's pretty clear in the model-painting that the bike has "French-style" dropout attachments. I'd never done those before, but was looking forward to trying them, since if done right it seemed like they'd require almost no cleanup. At right is the dropout and the stay ready to go. (I must say, I find this style of dropout attachment—and this picture—pretty gorgeous.)

As it generally has these days, brazing went well. I was able to fill the stay with perfectly even and smooth pools of brass, as this photo (with Curnoe's blurred out, self-portraited face in the background) shows:

But this photo, taken right after brazing shows something else.

In all my excitement to try out this new dropout style, I forgot to properly square my dropouts. You can see in this picture that the slots are not at all parallel. I did this yesterday and brooded over it all evening. Today, after a nice long ride out in the Goodwood area, I went in to the shop to fix it.

This too went pretty well. I put the non-drive dropout in the vise, heated up the joint (without fluxing it, since I didn't want my beautiful little pools to run out), and once it was red, just pushed the stay down. I checked it after cooling, and now it's pretty much right. This opened up a little gap on the top of the dropout/CS joint where I'd pulled down; I filled it with silver. This is a poorly lit picture, but it shows a now properly-squared dropout and some very nice silver-coated "pools."

I also did my trick of adding a fender-mounting boss to the underside of the steerer, and in fact got my fork crown/steerer joint tacked before realizing that Martin was closing the shop. It sits fluxed and tacked on the floor of the shop, waiting for my return on Tuesday to finish it off. Then I'll build the fork, then finish off the rear triangle (with its exciting fastback attachment!).

Last Steps Before Paint

2010-09-05T17:34:00.000-04:00

I did a bit more filing in the shop on Friday, and cut a drain hole in the BB. My attempt to put a serial number onto the underside of the BB was not particularly successful. Since we don't have numbers, I managed to write a very sloppy, uneven "AH TWO," and then added "SEP IO," using the letters "I" and "O" to indicate 2010. I had planned to write "Jocelyn Lovell Bike," but neither my skills nor space permitted.

I also did some "correcting" of my lug filing. I think I went a bit crazy with Niles's lug filing, but I'm beginning to worry I've not gone nuts enough on JL's lugs. They seem a bit lumpy, and tend to taper toward the edge. I think I'll go in and just clean up a few little spots, and then bring the frame to Noah at Velocolour on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Since then I've been finalizing my decal sizes and shapes. On Niles I used different head tube and seat tube decal shapes (indeed, I used a headbadge on Niles), but for this bike I'll just use a simplified shape, adding a slanting line (to suggest an A and an H) to the nautical symbol indicating "A Gale From the North" as used in the British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis's 1914 small magazine, BLAST. Here is my decal, next to the original.

(Speaking of Wyndham Lewis, I have an article about him in the current issue of The Walrus, Canada's answer to the New Yorker and Harper's. Buy a copy!)

I'm going to keep my downtube decal excatly the same. I'll put the logo on the head tube, seat tube, and on the painted pump also. I've experimented with scaling the logo to the tube it sits on, but it seems to look best if all the decals are the same size—except on the 7/8" pump tube, which does need a 10% smaller decal.

Other things: I brought my crankset and BB in to the shop on Friday to test that the clearance would be okay. I also "converted" the Nuovo Record strada cranks to pista by sawing off the tabs for the inner chainring. Unfortunately, after doing all this, I realized that the lovely old 48T chainring I'd purchased on eBay as a 1/8" ring, is actually 3/32".

I have a nice 1/8" cog for the back, and don't really want to switch to 3/32". So I thought about using this Stronglight/TA track setup. Then I thought about using the Dura Ace track setup currently on Niles.

It's a bit "modern"-looking, but it's still nice. I'll probably use it. And hey, according to this picture, Jocelyn Lovell used (two!) Dura Ace track cranks:

I had been planning on using these Campagnolo Triomphe brake levers—

—but now that I'm not planning on using the Campagnolo cranks, I think I'll use my Shimano 105 BL-1050 non-aero levers instead:

The question, now, is how many brake levers to use, and what to do with the second one if I do use it. I came across this incredible picture of Mike Barry on his son's blog:

That's Mike going hard in a 1950s time trial in Britain. He's on a bike almost exactly like the one I just made: one brake, rear-facing track ends, etc. He's only got one brake lever (on the right side!). I'm definitely tempted to use this bike for a road time trial or two next year (imagine going up against awful modern time trial bikes!). But I also want to use the bike for a hill-climbing training ride I do fairly often. This photo from the British Hill Climb Championships shows someone on a fixed gear bike with two levers, though the blade is taken off one of them:

But I often find that bladeless levers both look odd and feel odd when you're pulling on them out of the saddle—I like to wrap my fingers around the blade. So what I think I'll do is find a way of fixing the blade in place—so that it won't rattle when going over bumps—rather than removing it. Olivier and I took the first steps toward making something like this today:

On the left is the housing stop that sits in the BL-1050 brakes. On the right is a highly technical illustration of something that would sit in the same place—but instead of acting as a housing stop, would just pinch the brake cable and prevent the blade from moving. (It also fairly closely resembles my logo...)

That's it for now. I'll bring it in for paint soon!

Filing, Day One

2010-09-02T20:33:00.001-04:00

I took care of most of it today—just a bit of cleaning up here and there. Here's how he's looking today.

The seat cluster, all cleaned up. I'm really happy with how this all came out...

The fork with brazed-on Mafac bosses. Huge head tube!

Slotless front dropouts.

Crown and lower headlug.

From above. (There's some waviness to take out of that lower headlug...)

And now, some lovely hand-drawn colour scheme mockups. (Those are fork crowns seen from the top on the left, obviously.) I'm currently leaning toward the bottom one:

Update: I finished everything off today — it's ready for paint now! Also mounted the cranks to make sure clearance was okay. It is—but the NOS Nuovo Record 48T track chainring I bought for this bike... is not a track chainring! It's a 3/32". I can't believe I didn't notice!

Anyway, here are my latest thoughts on colour scheme, including a painted Silca pump:

It's All Over But the Filing

2010-09-01T21:12:00.002-04:00

Today was another long, hot day in the shop—but I completed all the actual brazing for my second frame, a track-like fixed gear I'm now thinking of as "Jocelyn Lovell Bike."

Toronto is suffering through a three-day late-August heat wave, and today felt to me like the hottest of them. I was planning on doing some lug filing, but I don't have the patience when it's this hot. And it didn't really have time, either. Mitering the seatstay bridge, brazing it in place, filling all my vent holes, and brazing in a pair of watter bottle bosses took almost all day. I just had a bit of time to work on the seatstay/dropout finishing.

The photo at right was taken after I brazed in the water bottle bosses. It looks like a frog with a fire in its belly. It also accurately describes what it was like to be in my small, non-air conditioned shop on a 33 degree day with a torch in my hand.

The first thing I did today was miter and locate the seatstay bridge. This is a reasonably tricky, since the two miters need to be in phase with one another, and the angle needs to be right. I scribed a line on the 5/16" tube to orient the miters to one another; and my smallest half-round file just happened to have a curve corresponding to the diameter of the 14mm stays. With a little bit of work, I had it right. Brazing went exceptionally well; the fillet is very small and clean. Unfortunately the stay came out very slightly crooked; but probably not by enough for anyone but me to notice. (The good news is that the wheel sits perfectly straight in the completed rear triangle.) Here's the bridge, after the flux came off (no cleanup):

In that picture you can see the second thing I worked on: filling vent holes. This is a very fun activity—you drill the vent holes so that they correspond to the diameter of brass rod, and then to fill them you stick the rod in and silver-braze it in place. It's a fun challenge to see if you can braze the rod in without bending it excessively (it weakens as it heats up.) It's a good exercise in heat control.

This one, as you can see, bent a lot! This is a fat 3/32" rod, and it was very long and heavy. (I like this picture!)

Next up were the water bottle bosses. I only decided to put these in at the last moment. I wanted to keep things as "clean" as possible on this bike—but then I thought it was a bit stupid to deliberately limit my options distance-wise by not putting on bosses. I decided to use star reinforcers for these bosses—and let me tell you, it's a massive pain enlarging the holes in them to accept the bosses. They're tiny and thin and extremely hard to hold in a vise. (I ended up using rubber soft jaws, which worked acceptably.) My brazing was again pretty perfect—I'm having a good run!

It will take a day or two to get everything perfectly filed (I'll try not to go too nuts.) Then comes the all-important matter of finalizing the colour scheme!

Seatstays

2010-08-31T21:09:00.000-04:00

I was a bit apprehensive about today's tasks. I've never done "semi-wrap" seatstay caps before. And the rear triangle is generally very finicky—once it's set it's set. But it all went as well as could be expected.

Step one was shaping the caps. I did this by dry-fitting everything in the rear triangle fixture and using the brass hammer with a smaller-headed drift. It was incredibly easy, and required no heat.

Then it was time to braze in the seatstays. Using a Doug Fattic contraption to hold the stays in place at the dropout end (an elastic band looped around the dropout and a brass rod sticking out of the SS venthole), I used my regular 56% silver to make my fillets. I remember doing this with the bike on the surface plate in Doug's class, so I did it that way. The horizontal position is pretty ideal.

This step seemed to go very well—but you never can tell until the flux is off.

After I'd done both sides, I moved on to the seatstay/dropout joint—which is both less intimidating and less photogenic.

(Speaking of photogenic, though, note the perfectly white background. This is the projector screen I brought in to mitigate the effects of backlighting. We work with a workbench directly in front of a window. Out the window is very bright white concrete, which can make it very hard to see what you're doing. So I thought placing a white screen behind me while brazing might help. And it did—at least a bit.)

When I got home I soaked off the flux, and was pretty happy with what I saw. My silver fillet is absolutely perfect on the drive side: I kept all the filler on the lug (none crept on to the tube), and the fillet is gap-free:

On the non-drive side it's a bit clumpier but still really good.

I even managed to keep the points more or less symmetrical. (And I like that fairly slight amount of wrap).

There are a lot of ways to screw up the seatstay caps, and there aren't many ways of getting in there and fixing it if you do. I'm really happy I managed to do this cleanly. Now the bike is pretty much done! Just a seat stay bridge (I think I'll skip the CS bridge) and I think a set of water bottle bosses. Then some lug filing and cleanup on the dropouts.

Monty's Getting Close

2010-08-28T17:44:00.003-04:00

I've been back in the shop every day for the last three days, and have gotten Monty very close to completion. Yesterday I did some finish work on the dropouts—for example, put these little points on them:

I also brazed the chainstays into the bottom bracket (a bit clumsily—my two months off showed themselves). The first thing I had to do today was clean up the inside of the bottom bracket, grinding down what was left of the brazed-in chainstays and then re-tapping the threads. With the BB opened back up, I was able to put the frame on the surface plate and make sure the dropouts were centred. Then I used a new tool Olivier made that uses a true wheel as a reference for determining that both dropouts are also at the same height. (Imagine a wheel in a bike with centred dropouts at different heights... viewed from the back, the wheel would jut off to one side, like a slash: /).

Once I was sure the wheel was going to track properly in the dropouts, I started to work on the seatstays. I capped them quite a while ago, so I just needed to cut them to length; nonetheless a tricky and important job. Here is the driveside stay dry-fit in place:

And here's the other end of the same stay:

Those dropouts really are elephantine. Lots of filing to be done once the seatstays are brazed in.

I have also decided on a new colour scheme for Monty. He will be light blue, cream, and red—the colours of the Canadian cycling team in its glory days. Here's Jocelyn Lovell on a track tandem, showing off the colours:

These colours seem fairly closely related to those of the Royal Canadian Air Force, seen here:

Some similarities to the Toronto Blue Jays logo during the period they won their World Series titles...

And, quite a bit like the first Mariposa—which was also a fixed gear.

Monty will be a Canadian nationalist, much like the forthcoming Greg Curnoe bike.

One more day in the shop and Monty will be ready to head to Velocolour for paint...

Update: Here is a proposed colour scheme for Monty, who I think I will rename "Jocelyn Lovell bike." The frame will be the light blue colour all over, except for a masked cream head tube, and red logos and decals. The fork crown will be blue with the "chevron" painted red, and the fork blades and dropouts will be white. I'm not 100% sure I'll have the Reynolds 531 decals applied (to the frame and fork), but I think I will.

Back in the Shop

2010-08-25T18:59:00.001-04:00

Two years ago, I spent the month of July learning how to build bicycles in Niles, Michigan. This year, I spent all of July and most of August teaching 40 University of Toronto students how to write effectively. Between that and various other academic responsibilities, I only had time to briefly drop in to the shop one—to check out Olivier's now-complete first frame.

Today, finally, I took the afternoon and did some work on the long-neglected Monty, my fixed gear bike. I brazed my cool Campagnolo track fork ends to my Reynolds 531 chainstays—and it was extremely fun.

I'd never slotted chainstays, but I was left with no choice, since the Campagnolo track ends are so shockingly massive. I slotted 15mm, though I might have gone longer. I used the usual system of sticking the dropouts on an axle and making sure they're square with one another. Here they are, set to almost exactly 120mm:

It felt a bit weird brazing after almost two months off—but it came off okay. Here's everything post-brazing:

Given their hugeness, lots of filing is required for these track ends. I did a bit today, but more remains to be done...

I should have lots of time for frame-building over the fall and winter. For now, I'll concentrate on finishing this bike off, and then move on to completing the Greg Curnoe bike.

Brakes and Cranks

2010-06-29T18:13:00.009-04:00

But enough about framebuilding! Lets talk about parts.

My fellow eBayers have been snoozing a bit of late, and I have snapped up some really nice Mafac brakes in the last little while for very little money.

"Racer"s are very nice and easy to find—but for reasons I don't quite understand (perhaps just because they're hard to find; or maybe it's the brass bushings) I like all the other ones best. And in the last couple of weeks, I have purchased almost every one of them, as the photo at right demonstrates.

And now, individual photos:

Mafac 2000s — Third Version

These are New Old Stock and very shiny. They also have those cool wheel guides. This is the third version: the first was engraved; the second had the other style of straddle cable. I don't know what I'll use these for, but I'm sure I'll find a use...

These came in their original box, which is a prize in its own right!

Mafac Competitions — Second Version

Also New Old Sock. Exactly like the 2000s, except they have shorter reach (and the earlier straddle cable). These are really gorgeous, and are going on Greg Curnoe Bike.

Mafac Competitions — First Version

The engraving gives these away as the older models. They're used but in really good shape. I got a pair, but I'll only use one—for Monty's front brake. Perhaps I'll build another fixed gear bike some day, and use the other one for that... Here's a picture of this brake on Monty's fork:

Mafac Criterium Cantilevers — Blue Anodized

Who knew such things existed! New Old Stock, and they even cane with original Mafac braze-ons, marked "AV" and "AR" for avant and arrière. I think I'll use these on the bike I'm planning for my girlfriend, "Kitten Paradise," which will be extremely colourful.

Also in my collection, though not purchased recently, are my...

Mafac Raids

These are also New Old Stock. And while not as pretty as the other centrepulls, extremely hard to track down, and certainly an exciting brake in their way. As soon as I'm competent with "advanced" framebuilding skills like squeezing massive tires into short chainstays, I'll build a 650B bike with these brakes.

The Raids are really huge. They eat Competitions for breakfast.

I have also recently purchased a really nice 48T Campagnolo Pista chainring, with the idea of using it on Monty. I have a pair of Campagnolo Strada 170 cranks which with a bit of filing would become identical to a pair of Pistas. But soon after I got that ring, I came across a very cheap TA 48T track ring. It looks pretty nice on this Stronglight 49D crank arm (whose spider is awfully out of true—I'll try to fix it, but it's pretty bad.)

Which do you prefer? I'm leaning toward the Campagnolo, though it requires filing my cranks (always feels a bit like a crime), and the TA/Stronglight combo is noticeably lighter.

Greg Curnoe Bike

2010-06-27T13:23:00.007-04:00

Since Toronto has been effectively shut down over the last few days by the G20 meeting, I gave myself a working holiday at the shop. My goal was to see if I would build a front triangle in two days, working 10 hours a day. The bike I was working on was the Greg Curnoe bike.

This bike is going to based on the above print, by Canadian artist Greg Curnoe, of a Mariposa time trial bike. I'm not trying to build a replica, since I don't really want a time trial bike. But I will use some of the same components: Huret Jubilee rear derailleur, TA cranks (doubles, though), Super Record brake levers (with clear hoods to replicate the hoodless look of Curnoe's bike), a radially laced front wheel (but with my Mavic SSC rims). I'll differ in using brazed-on Mafac Competitions, a front derailleur, a different saddle, etc. I'll also build it around fenders, though I'm not sure I'll always leave them on. And I'll use a fastback attachment.

The main thing—strangely given that I'm the one building the frame, not painting it—will be the paint job. Curnoe's print was of a green Mariposa, and he added the yellow, red, rainbow, orange, etc., parts, constrained only by his imagination. I'm going to have Noah of Velocolour do a "literal rendering" of Curnoe's print; the bike will have yellow on the top of the tubes and green underneath, for example. This can only be taken so far: the lugs will probably all be green with yellow lining, and I'm not sure what to do about the rear triangle. I think I'll paint the fenders orange. I don't think I particularly want a red chain.

Why this particular painting/print? I owe my love of bicycles to it. Growing up in London, Ontario—where Curnoe was from—I saw it constantly, and it is directly responsible for my aesthetic appreciation of bikes. I love also that it's a painting of a Mariposa, my favourite real-life marque. (Here are two links about Curnoe/Mariposa).

"Mariposa T.T." is a painting of a bicycle. I'm going to make a bicycle of a painting!

I've already assembled all the components (see here and here). I have also moved the derailleur tab on some Campagnolo 1010 dropouts to give me more options with my Jubilee rear derailleur. This weekend I took it from here and built the front triangle.

I decided to use some original Cinelli CS stamped lugs for this bike—the ones used on the Cinelli Supercorsa. They don't much resemble the short-point lugs in the print, but I like them better! I decided to leave the shape more or less as-is, since the paint job will be sufficiently busy without added curls in the lugs. I did make a cutout in the side of the seatlug, though, to match the painting and create some visual interest in the absence of wrap-around stays.

I did subject these lugs to my "investment stamping" process—which was slightly less time-consuming this time around, but not much—but I forgot to take any pictures. Rest assured that the rounded transitions are filled with sharply pointed fillets of brass!

I spent Friday doing that and mitering the tubes. Yesterday I finished reaming out all the tubes, cleaning them, etc., and then started brazing around 2pm. Here is the first joint, the seat tube to bottom bracket, which went fine:

The flux had to be soaked off that and the excess tube filed off. Then came facing. The cool, oldish Roto shell needed quite a bit of material taken off.

Then I needed to slightly adjust the downtube/BB angle, which was quite a bit of work. Unfortunately I mitered the downtube to the "unadjusted angle," and so it pulled in a few milimetres in the proper position. Probably not a big deal—I added a silver fillet at the bottom just in case.

Here we are tacked and ready to go (with all levers depressed) at about 4pm:

Here's the bike with three of five joints completed, viewed from proper Curnoe-ian non-driveside:

And a particularly picturesque flux gob on the completed seat lug, photographed after I'd arrived home at 6:30.

My brazing was pretty perfect this time, with nice tight shorelines and only one tiny gap to go in and fix. This was mostly because I did a better job of making sure all the points sat flush against the tubes before sticking them in the fixture.

After messing up the front end clearance, I was particularly careful this time around, and completely changed the way I used the fixture. I also made a paper drawing just to be sure. Happily it seems to have come out as intended.

It also came out absolutely straight to the milimetre. This is a sign of good miters, which is good to see, since I did these quickly and by hand.

I now have another fork to make (for this bike) and some rear triangles to complete (for this and for Monty). I'll be busy with teaching for the next few months, so I fear it may take a while...

Further Progress

2010-06-20T17:11:00.000-04:00

I have, at last, finished filing Monty's fork. I'm pleased to report that it scarcely resembles the unshapely hump of rust I started from last week.

There you can see that I managed to put sharp edges along the sides of the crown. This resulted from a process somewhat like sharpening a knife.

Above are the brazed-on spring retainers for the brazed-on Mafac bosses. Good Lord, what a lot a work it was to make those silver fillets, then file them to a nice shape, and then try to work that shape into the shape of the crown! I don't think I'll bother with this very often (my Mafac bosses came with aluminum tabs to use as spring retainers), but this looks nice in any case.

There's the back of the crown, showing the much thinner and swoopier shape of the crown, as well as the properly filled brake hole.

I'm in another holding pattern now, as I wait for head tube facing tools and some track ends to complete the rear triangle. But I was able to finish capping the stays. With all my filing practice from working on that cursed Nervex crown, the full process of brazing and filing these took about 45 minutes.

This is sort of what Monty will look like. He'll be a nice bike! Click to enlarge.

While I wait to finish off his rear triangle, I have begun the "investment stamping" process for the Greg Curnoe bike. These are Cinelli CS lugs, and I'm not going to do much shaping, since I like their avian profile as it is.

Indeed, the more I work on frames the more I question my tendency to engage in needlessly time-consuming things like filing ugly crowns into shape, filling obsolete lugs with brass, brazing on spring retainers, etc. Perhaps I'll be reminded why I've done it when the frame comes back from paint.

Next steps: finish the rear triangle, start on the stem, and then start the Greg Curnoe bike.

Brazed Fork #2

2010-06-13T12:02:00.001-04:00

I finished brazing the fork for Monty yesterday. I seem to always forget my camera when really picturesque things are happening, and this was one of those times. But I do have some pictures as it come out.

The last fork I made ended up about 5mm out of centre, and I had to cold set the fork blades to one side to get the wheel to sit perfectly straight in the fork. This time instead of brazing the fork fully in the jig, I just tacked it, then aligned with a true wheel, and then brazed it fully in the vise. Luckily it required no cold-setting at all this time, and came out perfectly straight.

The brazing itself went reasonably well. It's a slightly tricky joint to braze, since you don't have an exit point to dump excess silver. The shore lines came out pretty well, but are a bit "fulsome" in spots. The Nervex crown also added some difficulty, since none of the points rested very well against the blades. A lot of tapping with the brass hammer eventually settled this problem. Here's one of the nicer shorelines.

Incredibly, after all the filing I've already done on the crown, the brazing process revealed that I still have a lot left. Notice in this photo both how thick the crown is, and how the angle doesn't match the line of the blade. I'll file it to be thinner and in line.

Here's the back of the socket, where the same needs to be done.

I'm also thinking of using some Mafac Competitions I have in my closet, instead of the Universals. I'm tempted mostly by the brass bushings and the fact that I already have all the hardware—but we'll see.

Filing Monty's Fork

2010-06-10T20:38:00.003-04:00

For the past few days I have been very busy filing the various component parts of Monty's fork. First, the Nervex crown. For all their fame, these crowns are decidedly ugly out of the box. The casting is really rough (and we'll forgive that—this is a fifty year old crown.) Note, for example, the incredibly thick tangs (which are also pointing off in very different directions) and the ugly flat spots between the blade and steerer sockets.

I spent the day today trying to clean it up. I used my biggest round file to create a round transition between the blade sockets and steerer opening. The one thing I don't think I'll be able to do much with is the rounded-off transition between the top and the sides of the blade sockets. I've seen other Nervex crowns with perfect 90 degree transitions. Working with this old stuff gives you a lot of respect for the framebuilders of the mid-twentieth century, who not only made crowns like this look beautiful, but did no in great quantities every day. Here is what I've come up with so far (and yes, I'll need to add more silver to fill in the brake holes...):

I'll finish the filing once I've brazed in the blades.

Speaking of them, I also spent some time filing my dropouts today. Doing slotless dropouts creates a lot of extra filing work, but also gives you some extra room for creativity. I filed my scallops at a sort of weird angle, and also filed the dropouts themselves to give them a very circular shape.

Here's another look, backlit to bring out the odd shape.

Next step: brazing in the blades. Then waiting for my track dropouts to arrive, then finding some thin flat stock to cap my seatstays...

Down with Drop!—and, Say Hello to Monty

2010-06-08T15:51:00.002-04:00

After the excitement of last Tuesday, when I brazed my nice front triangle, I was brought somewhat down to earth the next day, when I was visited by my old foe: bottom bracket drop.

Niles's one flaw is his unusually low bottom bracket. 83mm for a fixed gear is a whole lot. Although it has not really bothered me in practice, and I've only struck the road one, when I was going over a low curb.

This time, however, the problem was the reverse. When I put my front triangle into Olivier's magnificent rear triangle fixture, I discovered that I had not the 80mm of BB drop I had intended... but 60. Subsequent analysis has revealed three sources for this discrepancy:

I measured BB drop in line with the seat tube, not horizontally from the axle line. That cost me about 4mm.
I calculated my wheel radius by adding 311 (half of 622, the BSD of a 700c wheel) to 30, the height of my tire. But 311 only takes you half way through the braking surface — to the "bead seat," not to the edge of the rim. So I should have done 316 (the radius to the edge) plus 30. That cost me 5mm.
Other peculiarities and errors too dull to go into cost me the remaining 11mm. But I did take note of them all, and won't make the same mistakes next time around.

A bike with 60mm of BB drop would be perfectly rideable. But the resulting bike would really have an absurdly high bottom bracket — you could ride over a log. For a bike I intend to ride often, it just won't do!

Naturally my next step was to determine what to do with the lovely front triangle I had just made. (This step is illustrated in the above image.) I have three bikes planned for myself at the moment: (1) Adam Jr., the randonneur I had been attempting to make; (2) Greg Curnoe bike, a road bike; and (3) an as-yet-unnamed fixed gear bike of utmost simplicity. I would have won back 10mm or so of front end clearance with the Greg Curnoe bike, since it's not going to be made with fenders in mind. But the fixed gear was a better match: for fixed gear bike you want a less bottom bracket drop anyway (and thus a higher bottom bracket); and I'm going to use 700x24 tires and very little clearance. The front triangle ended up matching this design perfectly.

So I decided to use the front triangle I had already brazed for the fixed gear bike. Of course I needed a name. I got it from the rims I was planning to use: Mavic Monthlery Pro tubulars. His name is Monty.

The wheels weren't built yet, so I built them over the weekend. Monthlery Pro rims, Dura Ace low-flange track hubs, DT Swiss double-butted 302mm spokes, and Challenge Strada 700x24 tubulars. These are beautiful and light wheels. I spent quite a bit of time polishing the non-anodized rims. And even though the rims were NOS and came with their labels intact, they had pulled up on the edges, so I safely removed them and put on some replicas in their place. I'm going to have the bike painted to match them: red with gold decals.

Once the wheels were built I started on the fork. I had a flat, Imperial-oval crown of uncertain provenance that seemed like a good fit. I also had some matching Reynolds 531 blades that were pre-raked exactly the right amount (45mm), and a threaded 531 steerer:

Today I did several things. First I brazed the centrepull bosses onto the crown. These are at Mafac spacing, but I happened to have a Universal in my closet that I thought I might use instead. I needed to drill the pivots out, and I'll need to repurpose some bushings from Mafac Racers, but they should work fine. I then brazed the steerer to the crown, and brazed in the dropouts. This is all illustrated here:

It all needs to be filed. And the roughly-cast crown needs quite a bit of work to open it up for the blades. But once that's done, things should move quickly. I'll need to get some track dropouts and do the rear triangle, and then I'll make a stem. But there are very few braze-ons for this frame — probably only water bottle bosses. So it should all go quite quickly...

Front Triangle

2010-06-01T20:21:00.002-04:00

Here it is, posing in front of its big brother, Niles, who I rode to the shop today for good luck.

My miters have been done for weeks. The lugs have been carved for months. All I needed to do was clean the tubes, flux them, stick them in the fixture, and hope for the best.

There's everything in the fixture. As you can see, I needed to use all sorts of clamps to keep my lugs in place during the tacking phase. My "investment stamped" lugs are pretty and have long points, but are bad at basic things: like conforming to the shape of the tubes they're supposed to join. With some brute force, however, I was able to get them tacked in the proper place.

(When I finished the front triangle and stuck it back in the fixture to make sure everything fit in as it was supposed to, I noticed the seat tube was off by about half a degree. Now I see why: I didn't have it clamped into the V-block! Oh well. I wanted a 72.5 degree ST angle anyway!)

The actual brazing went really well. I had been a bit concerned that my top tube miters weren't perfect. But the silver jumped eagerly across the miters in every case and at every joint. Who needs a milling machine! Also, I had forgotten the cool sound that silver makes when it draws across from one side of a joint to the other. I think it's best described as a crispy suck.

The downtube/bottom bracket was just like the seat tube/BB, except that I got it right the first time, and my shorelines were nicer. When I did the lower head lug, I used too big of a flame and had a bit of trouble controlling the movement of the silver. Also that lug had some sizeable gaps to the tube in places. Still, it went fine. The upper head lug and the seat lug went extremely smoothly — I used a tiny, barely audible flame, and my shorelines came out nicely.

I'll skip the process shots and go straight to how things looked when the flux was soaked off. First, the seat lug:

I thought I'd like the shape of my lugs, but seeing it on the actual bike is pretty exciting! The shorelines here are pretty nice but a little bubbly. I still need to clean up my reinforced binder. And there's a pretty big glob of silver that I'll need to file off—a byproduct of my (successful) attempt to tap the point into place and get it to stick. Note also how little seat tube is sticking up above the lug. I wanted a 64cm frame, and I just barely got it.

The upper head lug:

This is the nicest-looking lug on the bike, I think. Nice long points, and smooth transitions from the top tube to the head tube.

The bottom bracket:

While I was brazing the DT/BB I was able to get in and fill the tiny gap in the ST/BB shoreline.

The lower head lug:

It looks a bit messy in that photo, but it's actually pretty good. What a nice long point! And I like the rounded, point-less attachment to the head tube.

I'm pretty excited to have the front triangle done! Now comes a lot of lug filing. Then I'll start working on my mitered seat stay attachment idea, which is likely to be time-consuming.

I close with a shot of the fender mounting point in my steer tube, seen from the inside.

Fork is Finished

2010-05-28T21:47:00.001-04:00

Well, this is an achievement: the first bicycle element completed in the shop!

There is little to explain from today. I cleaned the inside of the crown (with my Dremel knock-off), fluxed everything, and set it up in Olivier's very nice fork jig. Then I put the whole thing vertically into the vise.

I brazed the joint complete in the fixture. For the front triangle, I'll only tack in the fixture, then align on the surface plate, then complete the joint in the vise. Since I don't have much of an alignment system for forks, I figured I would just braze it where it's straight—in the jig—and hope it came out straight.

The good news is that it was indeed pretty straight. And my filing of the Mafac bosses to provide clearance for the fork tang worked well, and I think it's pretty neat how that all came together.

But as the keen-eyed will have already noticed, I brazed the fork crown in backwards. I had filed the flat off the "front" of the crown but left this flat on the "back," since I was going to pass a generator wire through the hole. Well, you don't really need flats for generator wires anyway. This was the gods' way of telling me it would look better if I filed both front and back smooth. I realized the crown was backward as soon as I finished one side, so I filled the hole with silver, and when everything had cooled I filed it smooth. It now looks like this:

The Mafacs seem to sit pretty well on the completed fork—they'll just need a bit of filing/cold setting to have perfectly smooth motion. I'm pretty pleased with how that worked out.

I'm also happy with my shorelines, which came out very nice:

Most of all, I'm happy to have completed something! Thanks to Amir Avitzur for the Mafac bosses, to John Clay for the beautifully raked blades, and to Kirk Pacenti for the excellent Mitsugi crown.

More Fork

2010-05-27T19:05:00.000-04:00

Lots more incremental progress in the shop this week. Famebuilding is a very low-speed activity when you're as picky as I am. But I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out.

The first step this week was trimming the blades so that the wheel sits both exactly half-way between the two blades and gives the correct wheel clearance underneath the crown. This was an important but non-photogenic process, involving many calculations and much careful hacksawing. Eventually I got everything right.

Normally the next step would be to braze the blades into the fork crown and complete the fork. But I'm using brazed-on Mafac bosses on this bike. Since these bosses are much higher-up on the fork blade than cantilevers, and since I want to fillet-braze them in place with brass, I thought I ought to attach them before doing the blades/crown. If I were to brass-braze the bosses after silver-brazing the crown, the heat would draw silver out of the crown.

So I proceeded to brazing on the Mafac bosses. The whole thing was a very inexact process. The miter was tricky to get, for one thing, since the fork blade is oval and its radius is always changing. Then you need to have the bosses end up between 60 and 64mm apart for the Mafacs. It took a lot of fiddling, and eventually I settled for pretty loose miters. But I thought the brass would fill them.

Here are the bosses jigged in a rack tang (another element of inexactness!):

Unfortunately the first try was a total failure. I tacked the bosses in two spots each, but when I let everything cool and unscrewed the bosses from the jig, the screws only turned a few times and then stuck in place. I torqued one screw so hard that the tack broke. On the other side, the bolt broke off in the boss. I heated up the boss on that side and un-tacked it. I figure what happened was that things got very hot inside the boss and the screws oxidized and wouldn't come loose. I'm sure I didn't get brass on the threads, because they did loosen a few turns.

Anyway, I had to do everything over again, including the tricky miter. This time I used much shorter bolts (indeed, I used the same bolts, as they snapped off, with three threads or so left) and greased them. When I tacked them this time, there was a nice little grease fire on each bolt, but they unscrewed just fine. Then I fillet-brazed them properly. They came out looking like this before filing:

And with some filing, like this:

I then stuck the blades in the fork crown to see if the bosses were more or less lined up. They were. I won't know for sure until the blades are properly brazed in to the crown, but it definitely seems like things will be fine. (The crown is backwards here; the photo below shows the proper, smooth-sided orientation).

The pads even ended up in the right place!

Originally I had planned on brazing little tubes on each of the bosses to act as spring retainers. But I mitered the bosses so deeply that there isn't really room for this anyway. And the little tab-retainers that came with the bosses are actually very nice. I'll just use them:

Interspersed with all this Mafac stuff has been lots of dropout filing. My "slotless" method is definitely a gigantic headache in terms of filing. Without eyelets it would be fine; with eyelets it's endless. This would be a totally impractical method for a production shop. But for me, it's more good practice. Here is how things look so far:

And here is a shot that shows what a long process this has been. I taped this drawing of my fork to the workbench last week when I was trying to figure out where to trim the blades. It is now very tattered, and covered with the aforementioned calculations. But it does show that I was able to successfully do what I intended.

I would have finished the fork today, but the inside of the fork crown is very dirty, and unfortunately inaccessible with emery cloth. I'll need to get Olivier to sandblast it or else dunk it in acid.

Otherwise, the next step is brazing the front triangle! Things are coming along.

Riding in Niagara

2010-05-23T22:24:00.001-04:00

I've spent the past few days visiting my mother in Fenwick, Ontario and have spent a lot of time riding. The roads are beautiful around here: a great mix of flat farmland and the occasional surprising hill. I was riding the incredible dirt roads around Goodwood earlier in the week, but Niagara certainly gives that area a run for its money. Here are some photos:

This weekend also happened to be the running of the Niagara Classic—a well-known local race, which runs a few kilometers north of my mother's house. I went and previewed the course last night. The famous Saylor's Hill is steep. The Senior 1 men had to climb it ten times today. Once up there on Niles (my fixed gear) was sufficient to wear me out.

Here's a shot of the hill (Niles is visible in the bottom right):

And here is the lead group on the first lap:

The next time I come I'll leave my fixed gear at home and have a bit more fun on these climbs and descents...

Fork Progress

2010-05-21T21:54:00.004-04:00

My lack of taps/facers for my bottom bracket combined with my lack of a steer tube to keep me out of the shop for some time. But the arrival of both has resulted in all sorts of action in the last two days.

We got "Xpert" (aka IceToolz—thank heavens they're not sold under that name in Canada) taps/facers. After one tapping and one facing, they seem like a great deal. The kit includes English and Italian taps, and the facer uses a Campagnolo-style spring system. There is some gratiutous carbon tape on the handles, but there's nothing else to complain about. They even come in a nice hard-shell plastic case.

After facing my BB shell I cold set the seat tube into alignment—it was off by a few thousandths of an inch. I can't do much more until yet another tools materializes: a head tube alignment system. Olivier is working on it.

Next, the fork. For a while I've been thinking about the best way of getting a fender attachment point under the fork crown. The nicest I've seen is this one by Peter Weigle, though I couldn't quite figure out he did it (and don't particularly like the way that the steerer isn't brazed all the way in to the crown. I worked out something I could understand a bit better. I took a piece of steel sheet and fillet-brazed it to the bottom (here represented as the top) of the steer tube. Then I filed it flush with the steerer. It ended up looking like this:

Then I drilled a bunch of holes. (Keep in mind that I did all this without a lathe—and actually without even using a ruler. Which is why things are not perfectly aligned.) First I drilled a hole for a water bottle boss and brass-brazed it in place. Then I drilled holes on the "right" and "left," both of which are angled in. These are for passing wires: one for the generator-to-switch wire, and one for the switch-to-headlight. Then I drilled drain holes at the front and the rear. Then I drilled four more small holes, for fun. It came out looking like this:

You'll notice that the water bottle boss is not flush with the bottom of the steer tube like in Peter Weigle's. I left it like this so that there would be room for all the cables to enter/exit the steerer. I left a extra few milimeters in the front wheel clearance to compensate.

The next step was brazing all this in to the fork crown. That went well, though I didn't get all those holes perfectly aligned. It's hard to see when things are covered in flux!

Here is a look at the nice silver penetration (and the gorgeous Pacenti Mitsugi crown, filed into my shape):

And here is everything all is place. I think it looks pretty nice—and of course will be functionally very good too.

I kept my roll going and brazed the dropouts to the fork blades. I did these "slotless," as I did my rear dropouts. With the rake more or less matching my drawing, and with the blades cut to the same length, I stuck everything in Olivier's lovely fork jig. It all seemed to fit together, so I tacked each of the dropouts in two places. (Note the presence of an Arizona iced tea in this moody photo. I accomplish nothing in this world without one by my side.)

Then I took everything out of the jig, put the steerer in a tube block, the dropouts in an axle spaced at 100mm, and fitted it all together.

Using this slotless method has advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, everything is "literal": you don't need to slot the dropouts at any particular slight angle, or really worry about fixturing at all: you just hold it in a fake axle and everything ends up at the right angle. On the downside: there's a lot of cleanup work (filing), and with eyelets things are tricky. I was also a bit worried that it would come out really crooked.

Thankfully it didn't. Here's the wheel held provisionally in place, more or less centred:

I still need to file the dropouts, shorten the blades by a centimetre, and braze them to the crown. But this is more or less what it will look like—though will have a bit less clearance, and a lot less steer tube. The rake on the blades is really nice—thanks to John Clay.

I'll get the fork finished up and hopefully tack and braze the front triangle next week.

Adam Jr.'s Rear Wheel

2010-05-15T21:26:00.002-04:00

I apologize for the lack of posts this week! Without bottom bracket taps/facers I can't do very much. I've been doing a bit of fiddling with my fork, but nothing exciting just yet. But the fun will start Tuesday, when the taps/facer should arrive.

In the meantime, I've built up a rear wheel for Adam Jr. (the bike currently in progress; a randonneur.) A few years ago I built up a nice randonneur wheelset: Mavic MA (identical to MA2, but with single eyelets) 32-hole rims front and rear, with a SON28 in the front and a Phil Wood "Riv" freewheel hub in the rear. I have now un-built both of these wheels. I swapped the SON28 for a SON20R when it came out. And, given my recent obsession with 6-speed Uniglide (and my acquisition of no fewer than fifteen NOS 13-24 cassettes) I decided to switch from the Phil hub to a Shimano Deore XT M730 hub from 1987.

I did this because:

the Phil hub was 135mm, and that started to seem like a problem given my desire for low Q-factor
the Phil hub is set up for 7-speed, and by going with 6-speed (even better than 7-speed for friction shifting) I won back much of the dish that 130 vs. 135mm had lost me
Uniglide freewheels are hard to find
cassettes let you easily create custom ratios, and Uniglide cassette cogs are reversible for double the wear life
the XT plus cassette is a bit lighter

The Phil hub is certainly gorgeous—but I actually think I like the way the M730 looks better. Like the Phil, it's not anodized, and polishes up very nicely.

Also, I'd recently come across some nice 36-hole MA2 rims. For a rear wheel, those double eyelets are nice. And for a randonneur wheel, why not add a few extra spokes? The Deore XT is drilled for 36, and so I now have a 36-hole double-eyeletted MA2 rear matched with a 32-hole single-eyeletted MA front. It's a pretty sensible arrangement.

The problem? Decals.

On top is one of my 32H MA rims. It has the "Mountain" Mavic logo, which I consider very cool, although maybe isn't the best fit for a "classy" randonneur without any yellow or green in the colour scheme. Below it is one of my 36H MA2s. I really don't like that decal. In its attempt to be "modern" and "fun" it just ends up looking silly and awkward.

Since I liked the rims but didn't like the decal, I decided to remove it—and replace it with a reproduction of an old (1970s)-style Mavic MA2 decal. (I got these on eBay.) The rim on the bottom is one of my MA2s with the decal removed and replaced. Here's another look:

That's a gorgeous decal! I'm going to replace the "Mountain" logo on the front MA rim with one also (no "MA" decals were available; so it won't be entirely accurate.)

Now that it's built, this rear wheel will follow me in to the shop, where it will be used to make sure everything fits as it's supposed to...

Moving a Derailleur Tab, Etc.

2010-05-07T19:07:00.002-04:00

Now that I have finished my seat tube/bottom bracket, I need to tap and face the BB before proceeding to the next step. Except that I not have taps or facers—so I've ordered them, and things will proceed next week.

In the meantime, I thought I would move the tab on my Campagnolo horizontal dropouts, for Bike #3. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm doing this because I'm going to be using a Huret Jubilee derailleur and want to minimize chain gap.

Here is the dropout:

Here is the dropout with its tab cut off:

After this I filed the "recipient" area flat. Then I put the dropout and detached tab into a very crude fixture. I used a big C-clamp, with the surface touching the machined faces of both the dropout and the hanger tab, so that they would be in line. The C-clamp was a massive heat sink, but I just focused my flame on one small area and added a spot of brass.

Then I tacked the front of the tab. This time I used the C-clamp to keep the tab pressed up against the dropout. Here it is with both tacks:

With the tab tacked in place, I removed the heat-sinking C-clamp and brazed it together properly. It came out looking like this. It will file up nicely!

And here it is with the derailleur in place. (I tested it in a wheel, and yes, placing the axle all the way forward does drastically reduce chain gap—though I'll be lucky to get the derailleur to shift on to a 22-tooth large cog. Not a problem, really, since I'm planning on using something like a 13-21.)

I also did a few other things in the shop. I checked my TT miters for the thousandth time, and while there are still little gaps, I think all will be well. Here's a look at the head tube with the lugs in place:

I also trimmed the fork blades and started working on the dropouts. With roughly the right amount of rake in place, the next step is to stick everything in the fork jig and make sure it all fits together.

There's not too much to do until the taps and facer arrive in the mail. But I'm sure I'll manage to stay busy...

Seat Tube to Bottom Bracket

2010-05-04T18:12:00.001-04:00

The second time was the charm, I'm happy to report.

I was extremely careful about two things this time. Firstly, cleanliness of the joint. I sanded the joint with 80 grit shop cloth, then cleaned it out several times with methyl alcohol on a J-Cloth. I cleaned not just the surface of the joint itself but also the adjoining areas. I did the same to the tube, inside and out. Secondly, flux. I put it everywhere. On the tube, in the shell, inside the tube, on top of the shell.

(I didn't take any in-progress photos because I wanted no distractions of any kind!)

When it came time to braze the joint, I did a much slower preheat. I heated up the bottom of the shell first, then heated the tube well above the joint, then melted the flux, then slowly heated up my first quarter-section. This was the "trouble spot" from last time: the large area between the chainstays. Once everything was up to heat, the silver flowed extremely easily. As you can see in the photo above, this time I got it right: full penetration all the way around.

(I forgot to mention in my post about reaming out my stranded tube that, except for the area where no silver flowed, the silver was perfectly even everywhere else. I've heard that silver can be a bit uneven—that you can think you got silver everywhere since it flowed from top to bottom, but in fact there are gaps in between. That wasn't the case last time, and I'm sure it was as even this time.)

I was a little less successful with my shorelines. They're a bit bubbly, and there is one miniscule gap on the non-driveside. But really, it's very good, and this isn't an area where I demand absolute perfection. If it was one of the headlugs or the seatlug, I'd go in and add some more silver and make the shorelines perfect. In this case, I'll leave it! (I do need to work on my tacking, however. I always cause a mess in that step. I have a fair amount of silver to file off the top of the lug...)

So "Adam Jr." is underway! I'm excited for the next step—cleaning up this joint, tapping and facing the shell, and then I guess tacking the rest of the front triangle...

Parts

2010-05-02T12:57:00.003-04:00

Part of being a good "constructeur," I should think, is always thinking about which parts to use before your bike has been built. So without yet mentioning the overall "theme" of Bike #3, here are some of its parts, and the thought behind them.

Cranks

This will be a race bike, so I wanted something like a 52-40 gearing. Since one of the objectives of the bike is to make it as light as reasonably possible, I naturally wanted to use TA Pro 5 Vis cranks. I found the above crankset on eBay France for a very good price. It was configured as a 52-40-32 triple. One of the many nice things about the TA cranks is that the same arms can be used in a single, double, triple, quadruple, etc. I'm going to keep the 32 as a spare for my 48-32 randonneur gearing and run this as a double. These cranks came to me with a pretty dull finish, but a few minutes with Simichrome and they were shining like new.

Also photographed, since they're also polished aluminum, as the Huret Jubilee derailleur that will be used on this bike, and the Shimano Deore DX hub I polished.

Wheels

This wheelset presents possibly the first ever combined use of Mavic SSC tubular rims and Deore DX hubs. They're nice hubs, which I have fanatically polished, and everything looks nice together. 32 hole, 130-spaced, with a freehub body that accepts 6- or 7-speed, Hyperglide or Uniglide cassettes. I used 2.0/1.8 double-butted spokes on the driveside and 1.8/1.6 on the non-driveside. I just kept tensioning and tensioning and the rims wouldn't go out of true; this will be a strong wheelset! The front wheel will be laced radially, which will be fun! Challenge Paris-Roubaix or Veloflex Roubaix tubulars to be added.

Saddle

I've been experimenting this season riding a Selle Italia Flite. Last year, during the 100km "Hell of the North" race, I was surprised to find my Flite was very comfortable. Since it's half the weight of a Brooks Pro, can be set back much further on the seatpost, and is nice and long for a variety of positions, I thought I would see if it was as comfortable on long rides. On the couple of 160km rides I've done this year, it seems to be only slightly less comfortable than the Brooks. Since I saw that Selle Italia had recently reissued what they call the "1990 Flite," I bought two from All Terrain Cycles in the UK. At $70 Canadian each, this was a serious bargain compared to a Titanium-railed Brooks Pro, for example.

The Flite came in several slightly different colour/logo configurations, but the reissue has the original red/white/yellow setup, which is probably the nicest.

Front Derailleur

Even though Olivier's rod-operated front derailleur remains the nicest one I've seen, there is still a place for lever-operated ones! With a 52/40, I'll want to be making front changes often enough, so I'll use a regular derailleur. Olivier and I have talked about why builders use brazed-on derailleur tabs, and we can't figure it out. I once saw a Mariposa frame whose seat tube had cracked at the derailleur tab; it's on the thinnest butt on the bike, and seems a perfect spot for a stress riser. I've never had a clamp-on FD come loose, so that doesn't seem like a good reason for picking a braze-on. The worst reason of all is weight: the Dura Ace 7700 clamp-on weighs 6 grams more than the braze-on version. The actual steel braze on weights at least that much, and probably more.

So, what is the nicest clamp-on 28.6 front derailleur out there? The aforementioned Dura Ace 7700, I think, followed closely by the 7410. With the dominance of carbon frames, it's tricky to find 28.6 clamp-on FDs these days. But apparently the French, so wise in other bike matters, have more than enough 7700 and 7410 FD on their hands, and just want to get rid of them. Olivier and I have been snapping up several very cheap, new in box Dura Ace FDs over the last couple of weeks, for an average cost of around $25. Some of the booty:

Brake Lever Hoods

For reasons I will disclose in a future post, I want to use clear hoods for Bike #3. I had no idea such things existed—but they do, and they're incredible! Behold:

These might not be for everyone, but for me, they're about as good as it gets. They're Modolo 919 Anatomic hoods (my favourite!) through which are visible the lovely insides of these Super Record brake levers.

These levers came to me somewhat beat up on a used bike I bought some time ago. They had Shimano clamp bands on them, which just seemed wrong, so I swapped these in from a pair of Triomphe levers. If only I had clear bar tape, and could actually see these!

Dropouts

Finally, more a frame part than a part-part, but worthy of mention here anyway. Since I'm using a Huret Jubilee, and since I want it to actually shift well and not just be phenomenally light, I have to be careful about my dropout choice. First issue: do I need to use a special Huret dropout, with its unusual hanger tab? No: thankfully, my Jubilee is made for normal Campagnolo tabs. Second issue: how to minimize chain gap by getting the upper pivot considerably behind the axle? I think what I will do is use the above Campagnolo 1010 long horizontal dropout, but actually cut off the tab and move it to the centre of the dropout. (Why did they place the tab all the way at the front, anyway? It only allows adjusting in one direction!)

So this week I promise posts on my second attempt at brazing the ST/BB, and also a post on Bike #3, which I may as well reveal right now will be named Greg Curnoe.

Dropout Filing and Reaming Out the Seat Tube/Bottom Bracket

2010-05-01T23:06:00.005-04:00

I have been busy once again in the shop, with two tasks.

The first—a pleasant one—was filing scallops into the dropouts I recently brazed on to the chainstays. Below is the driveside dropout. I had to file the dropout so that it met the chainstay flush, and I think it looks very nice indeed.

There are always a few pinholes in the brass, to which you need to add a bit of silver if you want to be a perfectionist—which I always do. There were only two such holes this time, one on the outside of the non-driveside dropout in the scallop, and one in the "I" of Ritchey on the same dropout. Here it is with the added silver:

And here all finished up:

The second task—less pleasant—was dealing with my screwed-up seat tube/bottom bracket joint. After my unsuccessful attempt to un-braze the joint, I ended up cutting the tube out of the BB. Here is what remained, thoughfully sandblasted (it was filthy!) by Olivier.

The only kind thing I have to say about it is that the removed tube left a shape resembling a heart.

At first I was quite upset (disheartened) at having to "waste" a tube. But in fact I did no such thing. I had left the entire butt at the end of the tube, since I wanted its whole length for my 64cm frame. So I can reuse the tube on a smaller bike. Below is the new tube meeting the old tube. They're more or less the same size. And it was inadvertently clever of me to cut that heart-shape; I preserved more of the tube... This picture has a gloomy, Ingmar Bergman feel, but in fact contains good news:

Then came the actual business of reaming the brazed-in portion of the tube out of the BB shell. I wasted about three hours of my day yesterday trying to do this with hand files. Because there is nowhere for the file to "exit" the closed BB shell, it's very tricky to maintain a straight file stroke. I would get the front and the back of the area I was trying to remove cut down, but the middle was still at full thickness.

Then I pulled out my "King Canada" fake Dremel. God bless this tool! I had bought it a few years ago to cut and finish aluminum fender stays, but never used it verymuch. It came in extremely handy for this job! There was a bit of a learning curve, but before long I had figured out how to get things quite even. It probably saved me twenty hours of hand filing.

This process revealed the area that didn't initially fill with silver. It was about 3mm long at the very bottom of the bottom of the backside of the socket, between the chainstays. This is conceivably big enough to cause a problem, so I guess I'm happy to took it out. In any case, I learned how to use my fake Dremel, and that's a good thing.

Here is the border of the black, unbrazed area. The black stuff is the "bad stuff"—presumably burnt flux? The little semi-circle above it is more or less the area that didn't fill. The only way this would have caused issues it if it has begun to rust out from the inside—which it may have.

Below is the reamed-out socket. You can still see a bit of silver left over from the initial brazing process. The new seat tube (which has been mitered and is ready to go!) fits in properly.

Tomorrow, one of my "shopping blog" posts will follow. My new tubular wheels, my Flite 1990 reissue saddles, and lots of Dura Ace front derailleurs...

ps: The below photo of me reinforcing the binder on my seat lug—from Olivier's blog—is totally my favourite "glory shot" from the shop so far. My lug! Lots of fire! A $1 lug vise! My precariously dangling sweatshirt hood ties! This is what framebuilding is all about!

Mavic SSC No 4 Cr.D Rims

2010-04-29T20:08:00.003-04:00

I would much rather be posting about my successful un-brazing of the seat tube from the bottom bracket. But unfortunately that particular operation did not come off at all as I expected. I got everything very evenly heated, but no dice—it didn't move! So I chopped out the tube, and now it's time to ream it out from the inside! Uggh.

In better news, the rims I recently ordered for Bike #3 (counting from Niles) arrived today from France. They are New Old Stock Mavic SSC No. 4 Cr.Ds from the early 1990s. I could find no information about them online. Having now seen them in the flesh, I think I get how they differ from the legendary Paris-Roubaix SSC rims.

They look exactly like the P-R rims. Unlike the Argent and Bleu SSCs, which are, as their names suggest, respectively silver and blue, the P-Rs are hard anodized and black. The No. 4 Cr.D look like they're hard anodized... but they're not! They are in fact just silver rims that have been painted black—presumably to make them look like the P-Rs. Jobst Brandt would be so pleased!

They are thus pretty much perfect rims. The best, "mountain"-era Mavic decals; the painted-on SSC Mavic logo; double eyelets; incredibly light; incredibly strong; non-hard-anodized; and exactly resembling the coolest rims of all time, the P-R SSCs. Now I just need to visit Mike Barry and pick up some Challenge Paris-Roubaix 27mm tubulars. And build the bike, of course...

The inside of the rim is silver, not black, as are the sidewalls. Not hard-anodized! (I wonder what "Cr.D" stands for. Couche dûre is French for "hard anodized." That lower-case "r" seems to indicate the opposite!)

The incredible painted-on SSC Mavic logo.

Fixed Top Tube, Seat Tube to Bottom Bracket

2010-04-24T17:32:00.001-04:00

In a brazen display of bravado, I decided today to braze my first silver joint in two years—the very important seat tube/bottom bracket—without having first practiced. Such was my confidence in my brazing ("brazen'") skills. Alas, it didn't turn out all that well. But first, the top tube miter.

My TT/ST miter was off my precisely this much. I marked the TubeNotcher+ cutout (note to fellow users of this program, always add about 0.2mm to the tube diameter to make up for the width of the paper—I used 25.6 rather than 25.4 for this 1" TT and it worked well), roughed it in to that outline, and then did a visual inspection for light gaps.

It now more or less fits. There are tiny gaps, and pressing gently on any of the tube is sufficient to change the appearance of things dramatically, but I think it's now absolutely within the margin of error. (Remember Richard Sachs's motto: Imperfection is Perfection!)

The above lug is now very impatient to be brazed.

Speaking of impatience and brazing: here is my effort to braze my seat tube to the bottom bracket. (I asked Olivier to help me out rather than photograph things, so there are no pictures of the process.)

Let's begin with the good stuff. That shoreline is pretty nice! The little blob of silver on the tube and the shell will be very easy to file/sand away.

The shoreline is nice and the penetration is excellent here at the front side of the socket. (The little blob is a leftover from the tack; similarly easy to file off).

But now the bad stuff:

No matter how I tried, I couldn't draw the silver down between the chainstay sockets. Three quarters of the way around, the penetration is exemplary. But at the back here, not so. I did add a lot of silver, so it must be almost up to that lip—but it sure would be nice to know for sure. This is an important spot to get right—this page from Little Fish Bicycles immediately sprang to mind. I'm pretty much sure the penetration is sufficient. But that "pretty much" is certainly on my mind...

In this picture of the fluxed joint pre-brazing, you can see that not a lot of flux appears to have made it through to the "affected area." It was certainly clean. And I think it had the proper sloppy fit. So likely a flux issue...

Quoi faire?!

Update: The answer to the above question is, take it apart and see what happened! Doug thinks likely the only problem was that the very bottom of the tube got cooked, and that I didn't put flux there so I couldn't get the silver to flow out. But I may as well take it apart and see for myself... Should be fun!

Dropouts to Chainstay

2010-04-24T10:34:00.001-04:00

Yesterday saw the completion of the first actual joint on the bike I am working on (codenamed Adam Jr.) I attached the dropouts to the chainstays.

Most people "slot" dropouts, but the way I learned it from Doug Fattic was just to plop them on top the the un-slotted stay and fill the gap with brass, then make a fillet above the stay to later file into a nice scallop. I don't see any downsides to this method.

There are upsides, though. For instance, it's incredible easy to "jig," and the jigging is foolproof. First, you take any old axle, space the bolts at the desired width (in my case 130mm, measured with calipers to the nearest 0.1mm), and then make sure they're in line by doing a "four point check" (i.e., treating the dropouts on the axle like the legs of a chair, and making sure all the tabs hit a flat surface together, without wobbling)—and then tightening like mad.

Then you put the bottom bracket in the vise, the chainstays in the bottom bracket, and lay the tabs of the dropouts in the chainstays. You can see this going on (and the gleaming filled-in Ritchey logo) in the photo up top, which is quite beautiful and was taken by Olivier.

That's me working on the more awkward inside face of the dropout, seen through the shop window, and also beautifully captured by Olivier!

And that's what it looked like when I was done. This is the inside of the drive side dropout, where you need extra clearance for the small cog on the cassette. It's pretty easy to offset the dropout with the "Fattic method": you just make sure the dropout tab is all the way to one side in the chainstay before brazing.

Above you can see how the chainstay is offset. You can also see that once I've filed things up, there will be (actually, already is; this photo is a bit deceptive) plenty of clearance for the 13-tooth cog in that freewheel (which is not, alas, the exact one I'll be using—though similar).

It wasn't all great news yesterday! I needed a "mitered top tube" to finish setting up the v-blocks on the Fattic design fixture. This I did, but unfortunately with the properly adjusted v-blocks, I discovered that my top tube miters were a bit off. I actually left my ST angle at 72.67 degrees just in case I screwed up the miter a bit; and since I did, I can now do a 73 degree miter a few milimeters in, and all should be well. I like 73 parallel anyway!

So I'm off to the shop to re-do that miter, file the dropout attachment, and also hopefully braze the seat tube to the bottom bracket. Yikes!

Another postscript: Without realizing what I was doing, I spelt "miter" in the American way in this post. I'll take it as a lesson: stick to your roots. "Miter" it shall be from henceforth, as a reminder of Doug Fattic and Niles, Michigan.

Mitres

2010-04-22T15:08:00.002-04:00

To all appearances, the mitres for my bike are now complete. I brought the camera in to the shop today, and here is what I did.

To make sure that the top tube mitres were indeed right, I needed to have all the tubes in place. This meant mitring the down tube at the bottom bracket, to let the seat tube in. I did this by inserting the ST into the BB and tracing lines with a Sharpie. (This also gives you a much better look at the carving I did for the BB.)

With the lines drawn on, the tube—whose "REYNOLDS 531" marking you can see if you squint—now looked like this:

First I took my biggest file, which produces a round shape with a 1 3/8" radius, equal to the inside of the BB shell. This left things looking like this:

That last outline corresponds to the place where the down tube meets the seat tube in the BB shell. I filed that out (with a smaller file whose shape corresponded to 28.6mm), and then stuck the tube in the BB shell to check if things fit. And they did, though I did very slightly mess up the back of the DT/BB joint. About a milimeter too much material taken off, so I won't worry. The fit was thus:

And thus:

Then I returned to the fixture to try to stick all the tubes in place. The ST and HT still interfere a bit in the BB, but I'll take care of this once the ST is brazed to the BB. Here's how things look:

With all the tubes in place, everything mercifully fit together. Here's a poor photo of the fixture with all the tubes in place. (I had to hang off the wall even to get this bad shot; I need a wide-angle lens!)

The down tube/head tube mitre:

The top tube/head tube mitre:

And the seat lug, holding things in place. (I am very sure that, beneath this lug, the mitre is where it ought to be!)

Since I was on a mitring roll, I decided to try mitring the chainring bolt I intend to use as a braze-on to mount a taillight on the seat tube. Its diameter is 10mm, the tube is 28.6, and the angle 62.67. I pushed my mitring system to the logical limit and printed off a TubeNotcher+ mitre.

It was extremely hard to hold the little guy in the vise securely enough to get a good grip, but eventually the mitre was more or less made. Olivier's little clamps seem like they'll work to keep it in place for tacking. I'll need to file off that chrome plating first, though...

The next step: brazing the seat tube to the bottom bracket!

Postscript: Reader johnb very helpfully pointed out that I was using the American spelling, "miter," in the first version of this post. No doubt this is because I learned to build bikes in Niles, Michigan. In deference to my generally European leanings—and with no disrespect whatsoever to Niles or to Michigan—I have altered this.

His comment led me to look up the origin of the word "mitre"/"miter." The main sense of the noun in the Oxford English Dictionary refers to a hat, specifically the ornate headdress of a bishop. The second sense, "A usually right-angled joint in wood or other material in which the angle made by the joined pieces is bisected by the line or plane of junction," apparently derives from the first. According to the editors of the OED, "the early form of the episcopal mitre [...] had a vertical band bisecting the angle at the top." I shall keep the bishop's hat in mind the next time I miter—nay, mitre!—a joint.

A Good Cycling Day... and Lots More Stuff for Sale

2010-04-21T20:04:00.002-04:00

Today was one of my best all-round days as a cyclist. I woke up early and rode with Noah (of Velocolour) to the start of Mike Barry's (of Mariposa) weekly ride to Goodwood. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and Noah and I had a good time challenging one another for the sprints for town signs. "Shop-partner" Olivier (of Cyclops) was along as well, and discovered that for fast group rides a big ring bigger than 46 can be very useful! (I was on my Santé-equipped Marinoni, which acquitted itself well among the carbon 10-speed bikes in the company.) With the ride to the start point and back, Noah and I had a 160km day.

After finishing the ride I headed in to the shop and finished my top tube miter. The TT miter is especially tricky since both ends are mitered, and since not only do the angles need to be just right, but the distance between them also needs to be spot on. I forgot to bring my camera in, but the above photo shows some of the leftovers of the process. The two short lengths of tubing are what I cut away from the ends of the TT. The butts on my Reynolds .8/.5/.8 top tube are even on both ends, so I cut off roughly the same from each side. The green tape is there to guide my rough cuts with the hacksaw—I'm still awful with a hacksaw. The v-shaped piece is a rough cut into the deep end of the miter. The white sheet is a printout from TubeNotcher+ that I followed with my file. I cut the printout along the miter line, stuck it on the tube, and traced the curve with a Sharpie. It's a good system. The two miters on the top tube appear to have been at the right angles, and well-spaced; the TT slid right in to the fixture. Or seemed to. We'll see how it all works once all the miters are finished.

My frame is really coming along now. I just need to miter the down tube at the bottom bracket shell (an easy miter) and I can start brazing.

I'm also selling lots of stuff in a continuing effort to finance all this framebuilding. I'm selling no fewer than 27 items on eBay. Follow this link to see 10-speed Chorus stuff, a Schmidt SON28 hub, lots of brake levers, some Campagnolo Triomphe stuff, some chainrings, some white World-Champion-striped SIDI shoes, etc., etc.

On Toronto Craigslist I've also listed my Gardin city bike, pictured at right. I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into this bike, and learned a lot from the process. But I don't ride it very much. As much as I like city bikes with swept-back bars, I prefer riding bikes with drop bars, and I find I rarely carry very heavy loads. In any case, I'm asking $1000 for it. If I can't sell it complete (which would be a shame!) I'll begin parting it out in a month or so. (Come to think of it, I could put those MA40 rims, Belleri bars, and Stronglight cranks to good use... Hmm!)

More updates soon!