Framebuilding Class, Part Deus

Day 4. Fitting seatstays, welding the rear triangle together.

In the morning we measured, bent, and mitered the rear seatstays one at a time. If you're good using the grinder this could be a relatively fast task and the files don't get too much play. The more difficult part for me was bending the seatstays. Just like with the chainstays if you bend them and not crimp (we crimped this time), it seems like it takes a few mess-ups or lots of practice to get it right. The tube-bender is a pretty cool tool, but it seems like there must a better method - or a bender that would give you more precise bends when bending two tubes to the same sweep. It'd be great to a set degree or something instead of trial and error which ends up you (me) bending the tube back in the vice a little or crimping it too much and hammering it back to round. Yeah, all those happened to me. Luckily steel is pretty tough.

Once the bottom of the seatstays have been cut to fit the dropout, and the tops have been cut to be equal but opposite on the seat tube, you're ready to tack weld them into place. This fixture didn't have something to hold the seatstays in place which would really have been helpful - to 'set' them before you weld them in. I really could've used three hands to do this part since not only do the tubes want to fall out of place, they want to rotate putting the bend in the wrong place (damned gravity) . To pull this off, you can vice grip the tubes together near where the future brake bosses and brake bridge will be (not recommended) or just hold them with your left hand and tack weld without using any filler rod by just melting the tubes into a bead. After tack-welding these into place, as well as them to the dropouts, the day was nearly over so I decided to leave and come back in the morning and weld the rear triangle together when the espresso is fresh in my bloodstream.

Day 5. Welding the rear triangle, and brazing the brake bosses, cable-stops and seat collar, and various touch up.

Here Chris shows me how in the hell to get the torch in between the seatstays just below the seat tube collar. That area is such a tight - steep angled area that i had some issues with making it work. This brings me back the part of TIG that I had the hardest part with - proper torch angle so you don't burn through the skinnier tube, and positioning the frame at the proper angle so you can succeed at the first by getting a good line of sight. More sleek welding masks would help! I was a freaking bumbling idiot at times here, knocking over the frame by hitting it with my mask, trying to lay the frame on this side, then the other, then in the bike stand...i just wasn't getting it.

After much advice, I finished the welding by noon Saturday. Now it was time for the brazing which i stupidly didn't get any pictures of. Right after lighting the torch and seeing the way heat and capillary action pull in the silver filler rod under the cable stops and seat collar, i was simply hooked. It was like being a kid at a birthday party and having that creepy magician pull a quarter out of your ear - it was freaking magic. Magic and BADASS at the same time - like you just witnessed the history and 'form' of what steel fabrication is all about, right there in front of your eyes. Without melting tubes, they just connect. I imagine lug and fillet brazing are the same way and I hope eventually to take a class for those types of frame fabrication too.

After the brazing, we used various 'boring' tools (no pun intended, seriously) to clean out the heat, seat, and bottom bracket tubes from any overheating that may have occurred inside or just from the tubes themselves not being the correct internal diameter. The heat can deform the tubes to make it so a seatpost can't fit into the seat tube, so you must use expensive Park tools to make sure all the cool components you buy fit into the actual frame. This is kinda important obviously but I bet sometimes forgotten. Then the filing begins on the outside of the frame to touch up any bad welds and clean up the excess silver filler on the brazes. Once you like what you see, you're finally DONE and the bike goes to the painter. As you can see, this is an labor intensive process, but I'm told experienced builders can finish a frame in a day if they have their shit together.

In the end, seeing the bike frame take form after being just a bunch of separate tubes was insanely cool and inspiring. Seeing the completed frame made the somewhat tedious parts worthwhile and even fun because you know that it's part of a bigger whole. I want to do it again, and do it better - much better. The result is now a utilitarian piece of steel; a frame you can ride for years, decades, and if done right your entire cycling life. (That can only be said of steel or titanium in my opinion.)

The bike is something I've known and loved for years, something that has changed my life in so many ways and given me unmeasurable joy. Someday, I hope to be able to share that with others by providing custom lifetime frames...we'll see how that goal takes shape though. It's a lot harder than I thought and will take a ton of time to master, and time is not something that I have in excess these days. But one can always dream.