953 part 3

I've got lots I could talk about here this week, but I guess I'll start with 953 stuff since I know there are quite a few people just checking for that. Here's the next round of pictures. The frame is actually finished now.

With the front triangle done and the dropouts in the chainstays, it's time to attach the rear triangle. I usually jig up the whole back end at one time, then tack it all. Chainstays to BB first, then seatstays to seatlug and seatstays to dropouts. The chainstays are very straightforward, seatstays take a little more time to jig up correctly. For this frame the customer wanted them fastbacked to the seatlug. The slant six seatlug has a lot of area on the backside perfect for this type of attachment. Mitering fastback seatstay can be tricky though. They're very time-consuming to do by hand and tough to get to match perfectly. It's easy to miter one stay to the tube, the hard part is making the other stay match in perfect symmetry. Fortunately for me, with my mitering arrangement I can miter the seatstays for fastback attachment on my horizontal mill and make them pretty much perfect on the first try, it's a huge timesaver over filing.

Here's how they looked mitered up. Sorry about the bad picture, it was taken with my phone, couldn't find the camera that day.


Once the seat-tube end is mitered up just right I make sure the dropout end is cut right and it's ready to tack. I tack everything in the jig to make sure the dropouts are in the right spot, then take it out, put it on the alignment table to measure it and once I'm sure it's dead on, braze everything up in a workstand.

Here's how it looks after removing the flux and hitting it with some 80 grit. There's virtually no way to file or sand between the stays, so you have to make sure you lay that silver in there perfectly with the torch. I kept the fillet as small as possible as I didn't want a large amount of silver showing around the seatlug (remember, no paint).

This is without a doubt the hardest brazing to pull off on the frame. The lug is brazed to the tubes with silver so you need to be very careful not to melt out that filler while brazing the seatstays onto the lug.

As you can see, I keep a uniform sized fillet all the way around the stays. That's not easy to do, but again, since there's no paint to hide anything I want it to look good. I want every detail of this frame to be as clean as possible and really show off the built.

And finally, here is how it looks after finishing up the seat-post clamping slot and cleaning up the seatlug.

One challenge that came up on a frame this size with compact geometry and 19mm seatstays is the length of the brake bridge. The rear end is very tight on this frame, 40.5cm chainstays and a sloping top-tube means the seatstays are quite short. When combined with the fastback attachment that makes a very tight area for the brake bridge.

The bridge that Reynolds sells with the tubing is great, perfectly machined, looks like it might be a Paragon Machine works bridge, but made from stainless. Unfortunately in this case I would have had to cut it down so much that it would be very difficult to braze it in without making a large fillet. I didn't want a lot of silver around the bridge because I felt it would detract from the look, so I made my own bridge that fit the bill better. I had to machine it from 1" round stainless stock, then mill off the faces to attaching the brake. Then I milled out the underside to keep it light. The nice part is I was able to machine it on my vertical mill to fit the stays perfectly, so when it's time to braze I was able to just sweat in silver and braze it in pace with virtually no exposed fillet. Very clean looking.

Here's the finished dropout treatment as well. I have to admit Reynolds did a nice job of sizing the dropout tabs to fit the tubes, I hardly had to file them at all to get to the finished shape shown here. The tabs match the OD of each tube exactly. I chose to file the tabs down to fit them inside the tube ends rather than my usual technique of slotting the tubing. This made for less exposed silver in each joint and a cleaner look.



Finally here's the fully built frame. I won't say it's finished because I still need to put the final finish on the stainless, but all brazing and filing are done. I'll have some pictures of the frame with the final finish in the next episode.


In other news....

I took yesterday afternoon off work, it was what will probably be the last really nice day of the fall. About 65 degrees and sunny with a forecast of 30 and windy the rest of the week. It was a moral imperative to go for a bike ride. So I broke out the fancy road bike and headed to Afton. Spectacular day for riding, wearing shorts and short sleeves felt great. I wish my legs felt as good, but they made it though and I felt really good at the end. Today it's 35 degrees out and windy as hell, glad I rode yesterday.

I also spent some time this weekend and yesterday working on the latest house project:

Yup, got a hot-tub. Never really thought I would, but the price was right, free. A huge thanks to my Sister-in-law's Dad who gave it to us. I had to put down a suitable pad to mount it on and I'll have to expand the deck slightly to give us a walkway. The pad went quickly but wiring it up has proven to be a challenge.

The thing has the craziest wiring I've seen. It comes stock set-up for 120v service, 20 amps. That's simple to hook-up, but it also limits the heater output and it can only run the pump or the heater, not both at the same time. So in an outdoor application the water would cool off pretty quick (especially in MN in the winter). So I followed the manufactures wiring diagram to convert it to 230v service. Well, they require a new bub-panel be installed in the vicinity of the tub, and that you have 2 GFCI breakers in that sub-panel, one of which is 120v, one is 240v. Very odd. To make it worse apparently every other hot-tub on earth just uses a single 50amp GFCI breaker in this sub-panel because they sell kits to accommodate that all over the place for pretty cheap. But the internal wiring in this baby is set up as two discrete circuits, a 20amp 120v and a 30amp 240v. None of the internal wiring is large enough to handle 50amps, so You're really stuck using this goofy set-up.

Of course no home-improvement type place actually stocks the required breakers to make this happen (you need a 30amp, 3 pole GFCI breaker!). So after calling every specialty electrical supply place in town I finally found 2. One was $168, the other $120. I opted for the $120 since they were identical part #'s. So hopefully tonight I'll be able to finish this up and start heating some water.

So between the $160 worth of wire needed to run the sub panel, the breakers, box, concrete pads,filters, etc... This "free" project is up to about $500. Oh well, it's still a great deal since the tub would have cost 10x that alone and most importantly it will make Beth really happy (and me too!).

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Achin'

Saturday morning I woke up about 7 am. It FE06 day.

For the non-Kenwoodies, that's Fall Enduro '06. Meaning a silly long mtb ride all over the cities, done once it gets too cold for a ride of this length to be a good idea. It was about 30 degrees when I rolled out of bed and ate my 4 waffles for breakfast. At least I had been smart enough to get my bike and gear all set the night before, so I just loaded up and headed over to Minneapolis after breakfast.

As regular readers know, my usual 29'er is currently serving 'cross duty and I didn't want to hassle with changing that. My shoulder is still far from good, so I knew a ride like this on the 'cross bike wouldn't be a good idea, so I pulled out 29'er #2. That one has one of those new-fangled squishy forks on it and (gasp!) more than one gear! I bet you didn't know I had a bike like that.

I decided to ride that one in an effort to keep my shoulder in check, and because on every other enduro I've been the only one on a singlespeed, which is usually fine but right now I'm not in shape to keep up with a bunch of fast guys on pavement riding gears. It felt weird. I had taken the bike out for a little shakedown just to make sure it was still working right, and everything worked flawlessly, but it just felt different. I think it's the suspension fork, I'm just so used to the rigid fork. It also felt heavy, even though it's not really. It's a 23 lb suspended, geared steel 29'er, but compared to my rigid single it felt like it weighed 100 lbs on every climb.

We left the coffee shop about 8:30 after waiting a little be for no-show-tree to not arrive. It was Stone, WW, Thorny, Billy and myself. Of course after all that bike changing, Thorny shows up on a singlespeed (dammit). We roll down to Minnehaha falls and start in on the singletrack. There's a lot of pretty technical stuff in there, and I was actually feeling better about the squishy fork and big tires in there. Man I forget how good tires other than The Crow's hook up!

As usual things fell apart in there. We got separated (happens every time) but eventually got back together at which point Billy decided I was still hurting from riding too many laps at Wirth the previous weekend (25 laps). So he pulled the pin and we were down to 4 riders.

We rode the usual route, down the dirt all the way to the riverbottoms, then across to Bloomington. About halfway across though Throny decides to heat it up and goes full time-trail pace to the Ferry Bridge. I shot off the back as I wasn't sure I'd even make it home riding that pace, much less be able to do the 'cross race the next day. We all hooked back up at the Ferry Bridge and prepared for the return trip. While we were waiting this guy on probably an '89-90 Giant mtb flys by wearing garp which coordinated with the age of his bike, black tights, white knit long sleeve top and neon green fannypack! He took off into the woods and we headed out a minute or so later. About 4 miles in we finally caught up to him and he picked up the pace. We weren't slacking off to begin with and honestly I think we were pushing it keeping up with him. We all finally had to stop at the raft to cross 9 mile creek, so we got to talk to him. Turns out he lived nearby but said he hadn't ever ridden those trails before nor really mtb'ed much. His bike was sporting what appeared to be the original Farmer-John tires with absolutely no tread left down the middle. This guy was ripping it up as fast as us having never ridden the trail and hardly ever ridden a bike off road and he was on bold tires! tough. He tagged along with us for the rest of the riverbottoms, rode behind us, but never really dropped off.

Time was clicking by faster than we figured and everyone was starting to feel the ride, so we decided to hit the asphalt back by the airport then down to Fort Snelling and in. Amazingly Thorny seemed as spry as usual. I don't know how that guy does it. I was in full cramp mode on the last stretch of paved path, and it looked like WW was close as well. We fumbled our way back to the coffee shop and clocked in 5 hours from our departure. Not bad for a cold day.

I slammed down a big burger and a brat and felt much better. Which was good because I still had a lot I wanted to do that day. One the way home I swung in by Tomac's house. He had recently completed a paver project similar to mine and had some extra sand left. I picked up those and headed home. It was about 2:30 when I got home which meant there should be enough daylight left to finish out the pavers, I just hoped my body had enough left to do it. So I took a quick shower to warm up and headed back out to rent the vibrating compactor I'd need and start laying the joint sand.

This part went pretty well, I pack all the pavers down and they got nice and flat, then started sweeping in the sand. The locking sand is unique, it's a polymeric sand which actually bonds to iteself and the pavers once it's wetted. So I made several passes, filling in sand then running over with with the compactor, vibrating the sand into each crevice. Once I was comfortable that all the gaps were full I'd move onto the next area. I worked until dark and then a little more, but I did get all the sand down and packed that night. I couldn't do the wetting part because it was too cold, so that had to wait for Sunday.

Getting up Sunday I still had a little shred of thought in me that I'd do the 'cross race. However my shoulder was completely worked over from the Enduro and running the compactor the night before (don't worry, the doc assures me I need to keep using it as much as possible and that I'm not hurting it any worse by doing this stuff). I decided maybe a test spin would be good to see how I felt. I grabbed the cross bike and headed down the road. I had my answer within seconds. No. My legs were actually alright, but my butt and shoulder were telling me no. So I stayed home and felt soft for not racing, but what can you do. I sprayed a frame and did a bunch more yardwork instead, lower impact stuff. I filled in a bunch of low spots in the front yard and raked some area's out. Then went in and did a little work in the shop. It was a good recuperation day. I made it to almost 9 that night before falling asleep on the couch.

More 953 pictures coming in the next edition.

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More 953

So I'm getting pretty excited for this first full stainless frame to be done. It's very close and it just keep looking better and better to me. Since it's not getting painted, it will show off every detail of the workmanship with no option for covering up mistakes. I actually think that's why I like it so much, it looks pure and clean to me, stripped down to the bare essentials and yet really good.

I finally downloaded the next wave of pictures, so here goes, I'll try to pick up where I left off with the last pictures.

I think we left it at the tubes being mitered. Once all those are done, I jig the frame up and test fit all the tubes in the lugs and check the geometry.

Once I confirm that everything is fitting as planned, I disassemble it, prep all the lugs and tube ends and then flux it all up. Stainless steel is far more fussy about cleanliness than regular steel and seeing how both the lugs and tubes are stainless here, I made sure everything was as clean as possible.



Here's how things look fluxed up. I used lots of flux, especially for stainless. Making sure there's no particles or anything else in the flux to contaminate it. Stainless is very different to braze because it behaves the same as regular steel during the heat-up phase, but once it's up to temp it can overheat instantly if you're not careful. There's far less margin of error than with regular steel.

I just use regular Gasflux brand type U white flux for stainless. I know many folks use black flux as it goes to a much higher temp, but I don't like it as much and I think it can encourage overheating on stainless. I personally feel that if you're brazing properly you shouldn't have any problems with type U flux on stainless. I use it for all my S & S couplers as well.

Below are the BB and the seatlug all fluxed up and ready to go.







Once everything if fluxed I start tacking the frame right in the jig. I braze one part of each lug. Once it's tacked, I pull it out, make sure it's aligned and then proceed to braze each joint fully.

Here's a picture taken while brazing. As you can see the flux gets all clear and watery, that's how you know it's up to temp. I get the whole lug up to this point at the same time, by heating it evenly over the entire surface. Once it's up to temp, I quickly add silver and work it through the lug with the heat of the torch. You can see the two locations I added silver from in this picture, near the bottom of the headtube band and on the underside of the downtube socket. I flow the silver through the rest of the lug from these points.

I used 50N silver on all these joints. It does seem to work slightly better on stainless, but it also tends to flash out farther than 56 silver. Meaning it gets on the lugs a little more, but so thin you can't feel it, and the flash cleans sands off easily.


After brazing the whole thing is soaked in water for a few hours to remove the flux, then I sandblast the joints to remove any residue and clean them up. At this point you can really see how you did on the brazing and if there's any cleanup work to be done.

This lug looks really clean, meaning I did my work well, so I can proceed to sand the lugs down a bit and smooth the finish.


Here's how things are looking after some sanding on the lugs. Notice all the lug edges are very clean, no excess silver, no gaps. Nothing but nice clean sharp edges. That's what I was talking about at the start of this entry!

I sand them down to make sure all the surface irregularities from casting are removed and to make them smooth and flowing.

If everything is done right, this is how it should all look, just a fine tiny line of silver at the lug edge, crisp edges all around and no material removed (sanded off) from the tubing at the lug edge (undercutting).

I clean up all the other lugs in the exact same manner and move on to the rear triangle, starting with the chainstays.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Reynolds has their own 953 dropouts. They are very well made and match the tubing diameters perfectly. So in this case I decided to just round the top and bottom of the dropout tab slightly to make it fit inside the chainstay rather than slot the stays. Same look, but this is probably a slightly stronger construction method.

The dropouts are actually made of 953 material, so they're strong, very strong. But they still file pretty darn well, I'm amazed at this material.


Again, I flux the heck out of everything and position the dropout correctly in the stay. One work of caution here. You really need to make sure the angle of the dropout and position are spot-on with the 953 dropouts. They're actually too strong to cold-set. I was unable to bend them at all without the aid of heat! I'd recommend a jig for installing them to make sure you have it right.

Again, since they're stainless, only silver filler will work. So I filled these with 50n silver, which is about the only thing that can fill a gap that big. Even at that, it's not the easiest braze.

Here's how it looks after brazing and soaking off the flux. Notice the natural fillet of the material, that's what you want since I'll be scalloping this area out in the next step.

The silver fills up the gap about all the way along the tab inside the dropout, so that chainstay is filled about 1-1.5cm back into it. With the current silver prices, that's probably $20 worth of filler in the dropouts!


Next step is what I consider one of the highlights of any well made frame. Scalloping the dropouts. This is the traditional way to finish dropouts and it takes some skill to make it look really sharp. The key here is the scallops should be even, vertical and not undercut at all into the actual dropout. I also prefer the look shown here where the top and bottom of the dropout tab seamlessly blend into the stay. I think this is able as clean a look as possible. It makes me really dig the shape on these Reynolds dropouts.

When using this technique, the driveside dropout needs to have the scallop ground further up into the stay for clearance to the cassette cogs. The amount of space needed is a function of how large the smallest cog is on the cassette.

But this means you need to plan ahead a little and be sure to fill in the inside of the drive side dropout with more silver, or start the fill further up the stay.

Again notice the dropout is angled in to make sure the axle camping face is perpendicular to the axle. My jig worked pretty well and things came out nearly spot on. Which is a good thing since I don't have much hope of cold-setting those dropouts now that they're brazed in. I guess one could use heat, but you risk melting out part of the braze if you're not careful. Better to do it right the first time!

Well, that's all I have time for right now. Look for the remainder of the build pictures to come soon.

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house keeping

A couple details I've been meaning to mention on here.

First, if there are folks who've tried to email me from a Comcast email account and had it bounce back I appologise. There seems to be some kind of issue between my web hosting company and comcast. If you have another email service try using that to forward me the returned mail message. Also if you've gotten a returned email to me from another domain and have a means of letting me know I'd appreciate it. I'm trying to figure out what's happening.

Secondly, I get people often submitting the same comment multiple times. I have to assume this is because you submit the comment, then don't see it appear, so you resubmit it. Well due to spam issues I moderate all the comments on here, so your comment won't appear until I go in and approve it, so be patient, it'll show up!

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'cross

This weekend had lots of bike-related stuff happening. Saturday I managed to spray a couple of frames earlier in the day, then wrap up the last of the sidewalk on the house. After that it was time to clean up for the Vitch's (John Coleman and Kate Carpenter) wedding reception.

What a great time that was. It was held at One-on-One bike studio in Mlps which was the perfect venue for this event. Amazing how well that place cleans up for a bike shop! All the usual Kenwoodies were there to celebrate and a few other friends I hadn't seen in quite a while. One thing is for sure, the Vitches sure have a lot of really great friends. A good time was had be all as far as I could tell.

Sunday was the Boom Island 'cross race. I really wasn't too sure about this. First off, a lot of us were at the wedding reception till about 1am or later and of those I think most were bound to be hungover. Secondly I hadn't actually ridden my bike at all since the Lake Rebecca race the week before and my shoulder was still questionable and quite sore. The doc had assured me though that it would be ok if I wanted to ride.
So I headed to Boom island still not certain if I'd race or just watch, but once I was there, I had to give 'em my $20 and put myself through some misery. I decided I was going to take it easy and not risk any crashes on an already injured shoulder, so I lined up near the back. Big mistake. The race had 78 people in it on a course that was appropriate for about 30. The first couple of barriers I literally had to stop and wait in line to get up them. By the time I got up the second run-up I could see the front of the pack was already a full half lap ahead of me. But I figured I'd just pick people off once it thinned out.
It never really thinned out much though. I can't recall any part of the race where I was riding alone, and I was passing folks almost constantly for the first 6 laps. That's a great morale booster. The course was really set-up quite well, especially for singlespeeding. There were three sets of barriers plus one run-up that you literally had to dismount and run. So 4 dismounts per lap. It was clear that I was outclassed fitness-wise, but I think I made up for it on all the dismounts and remounts. I seem to pass the most people during the couple of seconds I was off the bike rather than the times I was riding. Guess I ought to spent a little more time getting fit. I have no idea where I finished but I know it was a lot further ahead of where I started, so I'll call it a victory.

Shoulder felt fine while riding, but it's still pretty sore today. I guess I'll probably have to do a little PT as the doc recommended, but that's not too bad. Much better than what it could be.

In other news, Terry Bill From Reynolds tubing was kind enough to email me in response to my last posting about 953 weights. He's such a good guy to deal with, and explained that they're using brand new dies on the current batches of 953 which can lead to the thicker walls, but that as the dies wear in, the spec should also become closer to the advertised specs. For the meantime I'm going to keep measuring tubes and setting aside the thicker ones for frames that need a little more material, and using the light ones where appropriate. Thanks Terry.

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so much happening

I was hoping to do a second 953 update here, but I haven't gotten around to collecting all my photos again. So no pictures yet, but I did however get my next shipment of 953 which is from yet another manufacturing lot. That makes three manufacturing runs that I've received tubes from now and disappointingly this lot was virtually identical to the previous two. Most of the main tubes are over the spec for wall thickness and therefore weight. I did get one 31.7 tube that was nearly right on the spec though. Here's the average weights look now after measuring multiple samples of each:

Tube # Claimed weight Actual weight
SS4130 220g 245g
SS4120 245g 249g
SS4200 238g 290g
SS4210 267g 300g
SS4730 200g 225g
FS4520 (pair) 278g 310g
GS4602 (pair) 288g 267g (yes the stays are actually lighter than claimed)

Pretty much all the 31.7 tubes measure out about .6/.4/.6 butting. The 35mm tubes are thicker .7/.5/.7 or close even the ones that are supposed to be .55/.35/.55

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as I like tubes with these butt thicknesses, but I think it would be of great benefit to builders if a $600 tubeset actually met the spec. I'll continue to use it, but I just won't expect it to be as light as claimed. That actually makes it a much more versatile tubeset. I'll be curious to see how the Columbus XLR compares.

On to other news...

This weekend I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and try to finish up building the front sidewalk. I took Friday off to get a head start putting down the sand and leveling it for the pavers. I ended up hauling about a yard of sand in to get everything to final grade. Next I put down the first set of caps on the steps as those would determine the starting edge for the pavers. Then finally I started laying in pavers to form the walk. Here's how things looked at the bottom set of stairs (which is where I started).



I took a little break from the pavers Saturday morning to go over to my folks place and help them re-roof their shed. That went quick smoothly and we had it all wrapped up before noon. Then I headed back home to hit more pavers. Things went faster than expected and we managed to finish up most of the sidewalk. We really like how the cobbles go with the aged feel of the retaining wall and the stone on the house.

We just have to put the locking sand down between the cobbles and run the compactor over the whole thing and it'll be done.

Sunday... The Lake Rebecca 'cross race was Sunday and I was excited to start my 'cross season. I had missed the first two races due to being out of town, so this was going to be my first. I've always liked this course, it's a shorter loop, but with a nice run-up in the woods and a second grassy run-up that I tend to do well on. Both run-ups are long enough that those with gears usually remount and ride them, but I find it's faster for me to run them since I've only got one gear and it's big!
I registered for the B race since I haven't been training much, it seemed appropriate. It was raining at the start which also seemed appropriate, but made for a greasy course. We had gone about halfway around the first lap when things went awry. I was fairly close to the front and feeling good with my position when someone went down immediately in front of me. It was really, really early in the race so the pack was still very tight and I had no room nor time to find a line around him, so I ended up riding right into him. I pulled up as hard as I could, but my front tire got caught up in his bike and threw me right over the bars. While landing I felt a distinct pop in my shoulder and figured I was out of the race.
I got up really fast and felt ok, aside from a little soreness in the shoulder and some blood running down my leg, but I noticed the other guy wasn't up yet (probably partially due to me landing on him and his bike). I helped get his bike off him and asked him if he was ok, to which he replied yes, but he was still doubled over in pain so I hung around. Once he was upright enough to walk back I picked up my bike and began to finish out the lap.
Backing up a minute or so, after I immediately got up, I moved my bike out of the main line in the trail. Despite that someone else got tangled up in it. They didn't crash, but nearly tore my front wheel off by yanking on their bike while their pedal was in my spokes. Nice. Then I finally yelled at him to stop because his pedal was stuck in my wheel, I removed his pedal from the spokes and he yanked the bike hard, scraping his pedal all the way down my fork, tearing off about 6" of paint with it. Bonehead. That part pissed me off.

Anyways.... I finished out the lap, and pulled in at the start line to tell them everyone was alright and to get some tools as my stem was turned and my brakes we messed up. I spent a couple minutes fixing the bike and decided I didn't feel too bad, so I went back out and raced. Of course this all happened on the first lap, so when I headed back out I was really far off the back, but who cares. I just rode hard picked up places where I could and finished out the race near the back. I still felt good for finishing.

Later that night though I really started feeling some pain in the shoulder. I iced it and took some advil and tried to sleep that night. Still hurt a lot in the morning so I went to the doc. He said it was probably pulled out of joint partially during the crash and is just really inflamed, so I'm on big anti-inflammatories for the next few weeks. As long as I didn't tear any of the rotator cuff he says I should be back to racing in a week or two. Here's hoping.
unfortunately the guy I ran into didn't fare as well. He walked out and looked fine at the finish, but it turns out he broke a rib and I'm sure is far more sore than me.

So I'm laying low this week, taking it a bit easier trying to heal up so I can still get in a couple more races before the season ends in November.

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Reynolds 953

I finally got around to downloading my first round of pictures of this 953 build. Since there doesn't seem to be much information out there yet about 953 or working with it, I'll try to be as descriptive as possible on my experience. But first, a warning.... new builders are always eager to try new materials. This stuff isn't easy to use and it's really thin, I really don't recommend using it unless you've got a good number of frames under your belt and you've brazed a lot of stainless.

But hey, look at the sparkly tubing decal!

Ok, down to business.
Here is the complete tubeset that I'm using for this frame. Ignore the appearance of the curve in the tubes, that's simply my bad photography skills shining through. The tubing is very straight actually which is even more impressive since this is the Aged (heat-treated) tubeset. Reynolds offers several options in the tubing in 28.6, 31.8, and 35mm tubes. Put simply, they have 2 wall thickness profiles and 2 butt length options to chose from in each diameter. Most of the tubes are on the long side, so for smaller frames, you almost have to use the long-butt tubes and cut off a good chunk of length. For this frame I chose the thin-wall, long butt tubes in 31.8mm top and seat tubes and 35mm downtube (to fit the slant six lugset). The raw tubing has a very good surface finish and as I said is very straight, however it's not very round, especially in the thin portions of the butts. Both the top and seat-tube were about .025-.035" out of round in the center section. The wall thickness is consistent (I measured both ID and OD and had identical out of round values) so it shouldn't affect the strength of the frame, but it's a little annoying to deal with. The downtube was closer, it was only .010" out. I suspect this may be due to the aged tubeset, that the distortion occurs during the heat treatment which is good for me, I'd rather deal with this disortion now before the frame is built than afterwards which could happend with tig-welded frames. Also the wall thickness was slightly thicker than claimed, but that can be a function of die wear at the manufacturing facility.

I ordered the whole Reynolds Happy-meal package with this one, so that includes a set of 953 dropouts and a really well made stainless brake bridge. The dropouts are nice, basically the same shape as the Paragon dropouts, but made from 953 material then heat-treated. I'm using these because the 953 chainstays have a larger diameter at the dropout end than a traditional chainstay. They won't fit Henry James plug style stainless dropouts without addin a machined sleeve over the plug and I don't know fo any socket style dropouts that will fit. I prefer plate dropouts like this anyways, but these are really expensive (3x more than Hank!). Reynolds also lists the same dropout but in 901 stainless for a fraction of the cost, but they were out of stock. I've already seen quite a few new flat plate stainless dropouts coming to market presumably to fill this niche.

Lugs were the next challenge. This frame is going to be 100% stainless so it won't need paint. There are actually lots of stainless lug option out there these days, which is good. However with the very thin-walled tubing I don't feel using traditional oversize diameter tubes would provide a very stiff frame, so I wanted bigger. That left me with Kirk's slant six lugs which are absolutely perfect for this application. The drawback is that there was not stainless BB shell to match. I searched high and low, but nothing came up. In the end I had a small batch of them custom cast at Long-Shen, so I suspect I've got the only shells to make this work with the Slant Six lugs. All the frame fittings and braze-ons have to be stainless as well.

The keen observer will notice in the tubeset picture above that there was no headtube. Reynolds does not offer one, if you want a stainless headtube you have to make it yourself. Again, I searched for 36mm OD headtube stock, but didn't find anything easily available, so I turned my own. I had to start with 1.5" x 11g 316 tubing, then turned the OD down to 36mm and then bored the tube to 33.2mm ID.



Then while I had the tube on the lathe, I bored the ends down to 33.6mm so that after brazing the leadlugs, reaming the headtube would be easier (less material to remove). The stainless is harder to cut in general, so I want every advantage I can get for the final facing and reaming operation.

This was a lot of work to go through just to get a headtube, I'd vertainly prefer to find a source for 36mm OD stainless tubing in the future, but for this one I got an exceptionally round and well toleranced headtube since it was fully machined!

Mitering the tubing was not as bad as I was expecting. The aged tubeset is very hard stuff and Reynolds has warnings all over their website about how difficult it can be to work with. After doing some work with it, I can say it is tough, but not uncutable (like 853 after welding/brazing).
You really need a solid, heavy, rigid cutting set-up though don't try this on your joint-jigger running on a drillpress. In this picture is appears that the cutter is turning fast, but it's not, about 100 rpm actually and I'm feeding the tube exceptionally slowly (about 3x slower than I would with 4130). But as you can see, the hole-saw does cut it just fine as long as you use the right arrangment.

To give you an idea of how rigid things need to be, here's a picture of my tube-holding arrangement and the cutter arrangment. That's a 6" wide tube vise that weighs about 75 lbs mounted on a 15" rotary table on my horizontal mill. The cutter is held in a 1.5" diameter collet which is directly attached to the 40 taper drive of the machine. This thing has a lot of mass behind it (2200 lbs) and have no chatter whatsoever. I think this is about the minimum I would want to use to cut this stuff and not risk tearing or chipping the tubing.

Here's a sample cut, this happens to be the bottom of the seat-tube. You can see the cut is very clean, it just took a little longer to make it.

One other nice note, Reynolds was kind enough to mark each main tube with the tube part # right on it as they do with all their steel tubing. Really makes it nice to know which tube is which without measuring all the butts. I wish other manufactures would follow suit.

That's about all I have time for right now. I'll post more pictures when I have time. The front triangle is all mitered up and ready to go, I just need to get all those pictures together.

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lots to mention, little time

I know it's been a while since I updated. I've just been cranking on the house and shop projects lately, so I haven't been taking the time to write much. I even took a bunch of pictures of house progress, but of course haven't bothered to download them off the camera, so you'll have to wait will next time for photos of finished work.

Since last we spoke, I started tackling the soon-to-be sidewalk in front of the yard. That meant a lot of digging. I had to remove all the dirt where the sidewalk would go and replace it with a 6" base of packed class 5 material. I also needed to dig out the extremely hard-packed earth at the end of our driveway inorder to prep that area for concrete to form our new driveway apron. So I splurged and rented a Dingo. This thing was great. It's basically a walk-behind bobcat with a smaller bucket, which makes it much more maneuverable and less damaging to lawns.
So I spent a full day running this thing and filling up trailerloads of earth, then hauling them to the back yard and unloading. I think I did about a dozen trailerloads in the end between the sidewalk and the driveway. We were able to really regrade the north side of the house well with all that dirt, should be much better for drainage.

Here's how the sidewalk area's looked after gettin' the dingo treatment. I took out about 6" of dirt, then the following weekend went back and filled it back in with class 5 filler and compacted it. So if I had a picture of how this looked now, it would be flat and hard and ready for some pavers!

Here is the driveway apron all formed up. This was the real reason for getting the Dingo. We had been driving over the dirt that was here for a year now, you can imagine how hard it was. I attempted to dig it out by hand twice. Both times I was out there with a pick-axe for several hours and made a total dent of about 3 cubic feet! The Dingo was well worth the cost just for this. After this picture was taken, I added the re-mesh and some expansion joints, then it proceeded to rain for about a week straight. Once the rain finally subsided, I dug out all the silt that had washed in and we poured it yesterday (pictures to come).

On the shop front, I've been busy too. I got a new toy, a pantograph engraver, which I have yet to even play with. Sometime soon I hope to be able to start learning how to use it, but I should be able to engrave frame parts now, fork crowns, BB shells, dropouts, etc... I'm pretty excited about that.

Cranked out a couple of S & S retrofits and misc projects, but my big exciting news is that I'm finally working on my first Reynolds 953 frame. I'd been waiting for months for this tubeset to arrive and the first one is here, with a second on the way. For those who are not familiar, 953 is Reynolds new super-high strength stainless steel. Currently it's only available in very thin dimensions geared towards racing frames. Columbus also just announced this week that it will be debuting a similar stainless tubeset at Interbike this year, undoubtedly to compete with 953.

Seeing that this is stainless, that opens up some options. The frame I'm working on will be completely stainless steel, all lugs, fittings, tubes! That means it won't require paint. The material is really designed to be competing with Titanium on all accounts (strength, weight, finish, etc).

I had some concerns about the material prior to ordering it. It's incredibly strong, which generally means very hard to cut or work with. They sell it in two forms, a standard version which is designed for tig welded frames and requires a post-weld heat treatment, and an Aged version which is already heat-treated to bring it to full strength (250,000-300,000 psi!!!). The aged version is designed for lugged construction since silver brazing will not heat the material up enough to damage the heat-treatment (which welding would destroy). But it's also fully hardened, so I expected to only be able to miter it by abrasive means. However upon working with it a bit now I've discovered I can miter it on my horizontal mill with a holesaw just like I do with any other tubing. The key is that I have an exceptionally rigid mitering arrangement and I have to feed the tubing much slower than regular 4130. It's definitely hard stuff, but not as bad as Aeremet was.

I have been taking pictures of my progress along the way on this frame, just haven't uploaded there here yet, but I will so watch for lots to come. There aren't a whole lot of 953 frames out there yet and even fewer lugged ones so stay tuned.

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'cross dresser

Yup, it's September and it was cold and damp this weekend. That can only mean cyclocross!!!

In preparation for the greatest sport ever, I've put phase 2 of my rigid 29'er plan into effect

A little shorter stem, drop bars and some skinnier tires and presto: Cross bike! This was part of my original design actually. When I was designing the geometry for this mountain bike I realized that it was nearly exactly the same as my 'cross bike, just with more tire clearance. 72 degree head angle, 75mm drop. Really the only thing I'd do differently for a dedicated 'cross bike would be a slightly shorter top-tube (but the 90mm stem makes this one acceptable) and a little shorter chainstay. Think of it as a 'cross bike with lots of mud room.

I threw the Cane Creek wheels on there, but I'm actually thinking about running the Stans rims and these tires without tubes. I just didn't feel like changing out the Crows that are currently on the Stan's rims. The King/Stans wheelset weighs pretty much exactly the same as these Cane-Creek wheels, but they are wider and might give me a little more meat on the ground for traction. Either way, I'll be going tubeless with the Stan's sealant for 'cross this year. I'll give a full report after a few races.

I did a short shake-down ride in Battle Creek on it last week, fine tuned the saddle height and angle to fit the drop bar position better. Then took it out Saturday for a real ride with Tommy Mac. We started at his place in Mlps, then headed down to Lebanon hills, did 2 laps there then high-tailed it back to his place. Turned out to be 4 hours, which was about 3 more than I'm in shape for. But the bike was good. I stuck with the 34:14 gear which feels pretty good all around. It's a little bigger gear than my usual 42:18 'cross gearing, but this bike is light and quick and it feels ok, think I'll stick with it.

In other news, I spent Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday finishing up the shed. It's done though with the exception of paint (which is about 1/2 done thanks to Beth). The trim took me a little longer than I expected, but it came out good and matches the house perfectly (it's really important that your shed matches your house exactly!). Sunday it drizzled all day, kind of right between drizzle and actual rain, which combined with 50 degree temps made for a mildly miserable day to work outside, but I really wanted to finish it up so I persevered.

Finally some good news (at least for my pocketbook): the Jetta is back and shifting great. After a week of bleeding the new slave cylinder every night, I finally gave in. I figured there was something else wrong that I wouldn't be able to diagnose, so I took it to a transmission/clutch shop. Had to drive it there in 2nd gear since I couldn't shift it at all while the motor is running. Once I finally got there, I told them my whole story, what had been leaking, what I'd replaced and what it was doing now. They were a little baffled, but thought I was on the right track. They said they'd start by just re-bleeding the system. When they called me back about 5 hours later, the guy said "we bled it, bled it, and bled it, then left it sit an hour and bled it and bled it and bled it again." Finally after several tried they got all the air out and it was shifting as smooth as silk. The only charge was for an hour's labor which was much better than the thousand dollar charge for dropping the transaxle to replace the clutch that I was envisioning. He hoped this was all it needed, and so far it seems to be working. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

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Laboring

Labor day weekend, the name says it all. This weekend's mission was to build a new shed in our back yard. I had reinforcements, well one anyways. Beth's parents came to town along with another couple who are friends of the family. So while all of them went out shopping, Beth's Dad (Bob) and I worked.

I had a pretty good plan layed out or so I thought. We wanted to put the shed next to the house, in a narrow strip of land that's pretty much useless. Unfortunately with all the Phone line work Qwest has been doing in our yard, they added an above ground junction box back there and dug in new lines through the area I wanted to use. Then I found out one of the neighbors still doesn't have working phone service off that line, so it's a sure thing Qwest will be back showing us their spirit of service by digging up our backyard again.

Therefore we decided to relocate the shed rather than have to move it when Qwest decides they messed up again. We moved it to the Northeast corner of our lot, tucked back in the trees. It's actually a great spot for a shed, fairly out of the way, and it blocks out some ugly parts of the neighboring yard. Downside is that it's on a hill, a short but steeply sloped hill which required some digging. So before we even started we were behind schedule since we now had to dig out a big chunk of earth.

Thankfully Pat (my contractor that did the addition) was working next door that day and he had his Bobcat there. It didn't take much to convince him to bring it in the back yard and do the digging for us. That alone saved us about 6 hours of digging through tree-roots trying to level the ground. What a guy.

Once he had worked his magic, we assessed the situation and decided we needed some kind of retaining wall to hold back the slope now. Fortunately it would be completely behind the shed, so it didn't need to be anything fancy, a few left over 2x8's and a couple posts worked fine. The first day we got the ground all leveled, placed and leveled the concrete blocks that would support the structure and built the entire base-frame of the shed. We wrapped that up by about 3pm and headed off to Menards to purchase the lumber we'd need to frame up the walls and roof the next day. That turned into it's own adventure.

We took my car (jetta wagon) with my trailer, same as I'd done about a hundred times throughout this project. Got to the store fine, and made our order at the lumber desk. Now, I had been having an intermittent issue with the clutch on the car about a month ago. Somehow the Hydraulic clutch had gotten some air in the line and wasn't releasing fully, making it exceedingly difficult to shift. I bled the clutch and the problem was fixed, or so I thought.

The car wasn't shifting very smooth on the way to the store, which has me mildly concerned, but not worried. But when I pulled it into the lumber yard to load up, it wouldn't shift at all. I could shift it fine with the engine off, but as soon as I started it, I was locked in a gear and the clutch wasn't releasing much at all, so stopping didn't work so well either. We continued loading lumber since it was all paid for and I figured I could get home. We had about 1000 lbs of wood on the trailer I'd guess and I came to the rationalization that I was going to have to drive home in second gear and not stop.

So we took back streets home, with flashers on the whole way. I could get the car to shift from 1st to 2nd with a bit of coaxing, but it was more like a powershift, which doesn't actually work well with this transmission. I'm not sure how Volkswagen designs their transmission, but there's no grinding or clunking when trying to force a shift, you simply can't move the shifter into position. period. Clever in that you don't tear up the syncros, but virtually impossible to shift if the clutch goes out, unless you have divine intervention to line up the gears just right as you're trying to jam the lever around. less than ideal.

So I left it in 2nd gear all the way home. I avoided stopping at all costs since I had to turn off the engine to actually come to a complete stop since I couldn't get the clutch to release much at all anymore. But eventually we made it home.

The next day we started off by bleeding the clutch again, I figured that would fix it for another week or so until I could figure out where the leak is. No dice. No amount of bleeding will get this thing to release. But during the process I could see a small amount of fluid coming from the slave cylinder bleed screw area. Got the car down to the garage and left it there, too much shed work to do, the car would have to wait.

We framed up all the walls pretty quick, then got going on the trusses. Once we figured out the angles for all the cuts, those went up quickly too. After that, we started on the siding, which really started making it look like a shed. We got about 80% of the siding up and were beat, so it was time to call it a night and get some dinner.

Sunday, Beth's Folks decided to leave town early to avoid traffic, so they were up at 5:30 to hit the road. We saw them off and promptly went back to sleep. I was still beat. Once I got up at 9, I headed out to see what I could get done. Unfortunately it was wet and the forecast was for more rain. I managed to get the last 2 sheets of siding up, but that was about it. The rain came and didn't let up all day and night.

I headed to the shop to finish up some indoor work that I had wanted to get done. I machined a neat little fix for a custom trike with a softride beam. The bike had the old clamp-on beam mount and the rider had crashed and broken the mount. Softride hasn't sold these for years, so I had to come up with a more robust fix. I debated brazing the right fixture on the frame, but that would damage the paint and still require me to make the fixture, so instead I machined out a new beefier clamp-on mount. This one should hold up for years!

It was kind of fun to make too, a nice machining project. Not to mention it'll get the owner back out on the road quickly, which was my main concern since this trike belongs to a woman with Muscular dystrophy and this is really her main transportation. It's a neat bike, upright trick with the beam, with a special mount out front specifically designed to hold a milk-crate nice and low where it's easy to load. I haven't heard of the maker before, the only decals say "Rain City" and it was supposedly custom made for this woman. Anyone heard of it?

Monday the skies cleared and I headed back outside to work on the shed again. I managed to get all the roofing up. That ended up taking far longer that I thought, but that wasn't due to the roofing, but rather the crappy 2x2 boards I had used to fasten the roofing to. I tried this new stuff called Endura roofing. It's a corrugated asphalt product that comes in 48" x 79" sheets. You simply need 18" spaced purlins to nail it to, no plywood to shingles required. I thought it would be a big time saver to install and it would have if I had made the purlins a bit more stout. As I was I ended up fixing or replacing about 1/3 of the purlins as I nailed roofing on. Frustrating, but in the end, It's all up and it feels pretty darn secure. I think it looks pretty good too.
The green on the siding is just primer, not finished color. Eventually it will match the house, which is a much darker green. Hopefully between the green paint and brown roof it will blend in pretty well with the trees.

I've still got to finish the siding on the peaks, build the doors, put up the trim and install the window. It sounds like a lot, but I think it should take one more solid day then it should be ready for final paint.

Now I have to go figure out what to do with my car....

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update

As usual there's been a awful lot going on and I haven't had any time to write about it! First, I got around to snapping a couple of pictures of the finished trim in the house and the new bed:

They really came out great I think. The Maple looks nice against the darker orange walls, and the pine windows came out really close in color to the Maple trim once it was stained white.

Here's the Bed:














Again, I'm thrilled with how this came out. It was a great chance to brush up my welding skills. Since I only braze bikes these days, I haven't been using my welding as much, so I had to do a few practice beads to get going. Especially since I was using a mig machine for this and I'm really more used to Tig or stick welding. The mig is so easy though that it came back quickly and I cranked this out in about a day. The frame is 14g 2" x 2" tubing, I had to make caps for the ends that would have been open, weld 'em on then grind it down to look like there's no cap as shown on the picture to the right.
To finish it off, I used a metal darkening agent to stain it but keep the bare-metal sheen, then I cleared it with lacquer. Overall, a very fun project, I'd do it again. It also made me anxious to get going on the new entertainment center we've been wanting.

Onto other topics, Saturday was the second annual Twin Cities Amazing Race (TCAR). Some of you may remember my report from last year when my 3 person team won the 7 hour race by less than a minute. Well this year the race took about 6 hours and we ended up second by about a minute! Unbelievable how close these have been considering the overall length and the fact that all the teams on on their own.
The format changed this year inorder to make it a bit easier to organize (a worthwhile goal). We were given all the clues right up front at the start and got to try and figure them out to determine all the destinations right away. They we plotted a route and hit each one. There was a team challenge of some kind at each station this year, which took some time and skill.
The clues were much more difficult this year and I think that ended up being out main shortcoming. We were the last team to leave the start by quite a bit and still didn't have one of the clues figured out! We certainly were not the brightest team, so we knew our riding would have to make up for it. Unfortunately for the rest of my team, they had me, so our riding was limited to how fast I could struggle along.
We chose a little bit different strategy from all the other teams, and plotted our course basically backwards of everyone else, and that part worked really well. We didn't have to wait in any lines at any of the skill stops which saved us a lot of time over a few of the teams (some teams waited up to 45 minutes for one station). However we made a fairly critical mistake in leaving without solving that one last clue because as it turned out that station should have been our first stop, but we ride right by it!
So in the end we had to go past the finish, hit the last station and ride back to the finish, unfortunately that delay was enough to cost us the win, another team rolled in a couple minutes ahead of us. Oh well, next year.

Sunday I spent the day working on the house again. Beth's folks and a few friends are coming next weekend, so we're madly trying to get the house inhabitable by other humans! This is actually a good thing because the clutter was taking over ever since construction was finished, and this is forcing us to clean it up. I for one am really, really tired of living in a house full of clutter and mess and I'm pretty sure Beth is too. So yesterday I cleaned a lot, painted a wall, caulked 2 showers, bought a new mattress for our new bed (and moved the old one into our guest bedroom) moved furniture and built shelves in a couple of closets.

My next mission is to start designing the shed Beth's Dad and I hope to build this weekend. It sounded like the big plan of action for the weekend was to shop and Bob (Beth's Dad) and I hold roughly the same views on shopping: if it doesn't involve tools, it's not worth it. So we're going to do something that sounds much more fun to me, build a shed.

That's about all I have time for now, write at you later.

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on the road

Well it happened again, I spent all of last week out of town. Traveling for work again, out east this time, which is better than down south but is still out of town which means I'm not here working.

But somehow I still feel like things are getting done here. I've been hitting the housework pretty hard. Beth's folks and a couple of family friends are heading here over labor day weekend. Therefore we need to have the house habitable for humans other than Beth and I. This weekend I finally finished up the trim inside the new addition. Man is that a great feeling since it was really the last big indoor item keeping us from claiming we're "done". Pictures coming soon.

I've been following the President's lead too lately and have declared war. War on the weeds in the new grass out front. We seeded the front yard this spring and the grass really is taking off great. However in one of my reseeding efforts it appears that a batch of seed I used was tainted with quackgrass and crabgrass. It's everywhere I seeded on the last go-round. Unfortunately it seems that there's not much you can do about this stuff until the first frost, but I knew my tender grass seedlings wouldn't make it that long, the weeds were choking them out too fast. So I took matters into my own hands, literally. I've been weeding the yard by hand as a way to end my day, which actually isn't too bad of a way to end off a hard day. In three days of about 1 hour per day I've managed to rid the whole newly seeded area of weeds, and amazingly it seems to be holding. If I see something sprouting, I pull it, but there's not much out there and the grass is back to taking over. Ironically I've never been much of a person to care about their lawn (just ask my neighbors!). In this cast it's more of a matter of me wanting to win by being able to get this seed to grow than some deep seeded (sorry) desire to have a lush green lawn.

I finally finished up another bike. This frame had been done for a while, but was waiting for a few hard-to-find parts to arrive. Nathan (the new owner) has a bunch of pics of it up on his blog. The chainguard was definitely the hardest part of the whole thing. I made it up from scratch and ended up making 2 of them as the first wasn't quite how I wanted it.

I also cranked out some furniture this week. I made a new steel bed-frame for our room. With the upcoming visitors we needed another bed and we had been wanting a new platform bed in our room. So I spent some time behind the welder this week. The frame is basically a modified version of a Room and Board bed frame, but it cost me $600 less. I mig welded the frame up, couldn't talk Beth in how incredibly cool a fully lugged bed frame would have been. Oh well, the welded frame looks great and is almost done. I just need to finish staining the metal and clearcoating it. I'll post a few pictures once it's in it's finished form.

well, it's bedtime

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The bad and the good

It's been a bit of a strange past 7 days. Last week we lost electric in 3 circuits of the house, but none of the breakers tripped! When I went down to the breaker panel to start working on figuring out what happened, I realized the carpet under my feet was squishing. We had a big rain/storm last Tuesday and one of our gutters fell down and just happened to pour all the water coming off the roof into one of the basement window-wells, which filled up and ran in the window into the basement. So I tore out all the carpet in that end of the basement and dried it out.

Meanwhile that electric problem didn't fix itself, so the next night after work I tackled it. Things just didn't make sense, wall switches were turning on lights that they weren't connected to, and I had one outlet measuring 240v! After removing many switchplate covers I found a bad wire junction. It was an aluminum to copper wire junction and somehow it wasn't properly insulated with the slimy goop you put on those kind of junctions, so the copper wire had corroded and broke. Also unfortunately this part of the wiring was from back when it was up to code to not only have aluminum wire, but to have more than one circuit feed wire share a common return wire. My whole house is wired this way (well except for the new addition, which is up to modern codes). So when that junction broke, the returns from multiple circuits were combined and sent enough voltage through one circuit to actually pass through the closed wall switches! not good.
I fixed that one up quickly.

Then this weekend the phone line went out. So if you've been trying to reach me at the shop phone # and the line just kept ringing, it's not that I don't want to talk to you, it's that we don't have a phone line. I knew this one was outside the house so I had to call Qwest to come out. They've run a temporary line, but still need to replace the whole underground line to the house. Honestly we've had nothing but problems with this phone line for the last couple of years, hence I've decided to officially change my business phone line to a cell line. So from this day forward the new Bob Brown Cycles Phone # is 651-247-1851. The website has been updated to reflect this. I'll be keeping the old number active for a while though since I've got a lot of business cards and information out there with that number.

Now onto the good stuff.


This weekend is the Bike-in at the Bell, a bike-centric event held at the Bell Museum on the U of M campus. Not only will my band, Derailleur, be playing the event, but I'll also have a booth set up. I'm putting together a booth to promote local framebuilding in general. Eric from Peacock Groove is going to be there with me showing off some of his wares and methods as well. I think it'll be a great event, so if you're free Saturday night, roll on over and say hi.

There is an entry fee to cover the entertainment costs, but it's discounted if you bike in, click on the image for full details.

In other news, I'm just about caught back up on shop work, finished up another frame and a few paint jobs this week. I also just got word that my first shipment of Reynolds 953 tubing should be on it's way very soon along with a few related goodies, so keep your eyes peeled for pic's sometime here. I've also completed the design and ordered materials for the first prototypes of my new semi-stock 29'er frames which will hopefully be sold a few select stores by the end of the year. I'll talk more about those later.


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Feelin' the heat

For those of you that read this from afar, the twin cities has been living in a heat wave for the last week which seemed to peak this weekend. It's been in the upper 90's in temp and humidity which makes for some sweltering days. Yesterday it cracked 100 degrees for the first time in 10 years.

Saturday we planned to beat the heat by heading up north a little to the waterpark at Wild Mountain. Being me, I decided I would ride my bike up there and meet Beth and our friends at the park. It seemed like a great idea, and I planned on getting up early to get on the road before the day got hot. I awoke at 6am Saturday and first thing I did was go outside to check the conditions, which seemed to have not changed at all overnight. It was 80 degrees and about 90% humidity at 6am, probably not a good sign, but I'm not very good at reading signs like that.

So I get my bike all set to go, mount up some new tires that I'd been meaning to install for a while, fill up three bottles and hit the road. It didn't seem too bad actually, as I left the city and got closer to the river the temp was dropping. By the time I rolled into Stillwater, it was 75 degrees, but still oppressively humid. I was soaking wet with sweat and the couple of times I had stopped to make a few small adjustments on my bike, I could hardly see from the sweat rolling into my eyes.

I figured Stillwater might be my last stop until Taylor's Falls where I could get Gatoraid, so I stopped and refilled my bottles at a gas station. I rested for a few minutes and ate a powerbar, hoping I'd cool down and stop sweating, but no such luck. I decided the only way I could feel cooler was to keep moving and have some wind on my skin, so I pressed northward up Hwy 95.
95 is actually a really nice ride north, some smaller rolling hills, nice changing scenery and not too many cars once you're out of town. Things were feeling better now, I was hydrated and rolling at a good clip, then about 15 miles out of Taylors the rain started. It wasn't much of a rain, just enough to be miserable but not enough to break the humidity. It actually felt more like I was riding through 100 % humidity and the water was simply condensing on my body.

The roads were wet and since it had been weeks since our last rain there was a lot of sand and grit on them. However it just wouldn't rain hard enough to was the road spray off me, so I just got covered in sand and grit clinging to my sweaty body like velcro. Great.

I had been looking forward to the descent into Taylors Falls on Hwy 8 all morning, but by the time I got there, it was raining, the roads were wet and slick, the sky's were dark which made for bad visibility and there was a ton of traffic on the Hwy. I quickly started dreading this 3 mile drop into town which I had been looking forward to all morning. I was secretly hoping Beth and the others would drive by me soon and give me a lift into town so I didn't have to deal with the traffic in the rain, but unbeknownst to me, they were about a half hour behind me yet. I pressed on.

I got lucky and found a break in the traffic and jumped into the lane for most of the ride down to town, so it really wasn't as bad as expected. Once in town I decided I should call Beth and find out where they were at, but she beat me to it. As I was getting out the phone is started ringing and I was informed that they were still behind me. They offered to pick my up in Taylors, but I was only 7 miles away now and I figured I'd be more comfortable riding in the rain than sitting around town in the rain, so I finished it off and waited at Wild Mountain for them to arrive. Ironically, once they got there I was chilled from the rain and had to warm up before I was ready for the waterpark!

The rest of the afternoon was spent frolicking in the water on the same three slides that have been at Wild as long as I can remember. The place could really use some updating and cleaning, but judging by how packed it was, they're still making money in it's current condition so I suspect nothing will change... By late afternoon we were all pretty well beat and headed home with a longer than planned stop in Marine on the St. Croix for dinner at a place with horrible service.

That night I slept well!

Sunday I thought I'd relax, but then the side of my that can't relax got the better of me. I decided to once again fight the heat and set-out to cut down the rest of the tree that had a large limb break off last week. It was a medium size Ash tree, probably about 40' tall, 14" diameter trunk and of course placed in an area where there was no hope of falling the whole thing in one shot. So I spent several hours on the extension ladder working some chainsaw artistry while Beth stayed near the phone ready to call 911. It all came down safely and without any real damage to our garden, the neighbors rotting fence and myself. Several more hours of cutting it up and hauling it off and we were down one less tree in the back yard. I'm hoping to take at least one more down this year yet when the neighbors tear down their rotting fence.

Again, Sunday night I was quite beat.

Monday: last chance to fight the heat. The big heatwave peaked on Monday and is supposed to be pretty much ended after the rain/storms we're supposed to get all day today. So naturally we had to prove that Kenwoodies aren't that smart, so we had our Monday night ride. Thorny had gratiously offered to have us over to his place afterwards for some Brats and High-lifes, so we had to have the ride. Both Freidells and myself met at Thorny's house and rolled from there. We hooked up with WW, Billy and the Chef (yes, the Chef rode his bike!) at the site of the old Shoppe. The ride was hot, really hot. As I mentioned earlier, it broke 100 degrees that afternoon and was still humid as hell. I was expecting to put in a lap at Wirth and call it, but then we did a second, and then a third. By the third lap, it was all I could do to just stay on the trail, I was cooked. Somehow WW pulled off a fourth lap, that man is a machine.

I did learn that I don't think the Crow's are the right tire for the heat, they seemed to have some issues. The pressure was normal, but the sidewalls were so soft, I felt like I was continually rolling the rear tire off the rim. It never came off or lost any pressure, but it was super-squirrelly. Oh well, made it back to Thorny's and feasted on Brats.

Monday night, I really slept well.

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Epic

Yesterday was truly an epic day. It was Saturday, the 23rd of July 2006, the day which hosted the Kenwood Racing Super-Enduro. What is the Super-Enduro you ask? Well, it's basically a mtb ride to cover all mountain biking areas in the metro area. Sure, we've done numerous enduro's in the past few years, but none that were this complete nor this long.

The event was (very well) organized by Stone, so we started near his place in Longfellow, at Minnehaha Coffee. I opted to drive over to his house, and start from there since riding from St. Paul would have moved this event from Epic to Stupid. Billy and Stone were waiting at Stone's place, pretty much all set to go, so I unloaded the bike and we rolled off to the coffee shop. 2 blocks down we ran into Freeride and Thorny who were already lost and going the wrong way, so they jumped in and we all headed to the coffee shop.

Once there, I was shocked to find a full bike rack and a whole lotta people waiting. Wallace and KK were the Kenwoodies there, but in addition there were 4 Penn boys and Chuck from H-wood racing. So 11 people in total, which is huge for a ride like this. We all went in and got fueled up for the day, then sat around outside for a few minutes eating and drinking. I think my favorite part of the ride occurred just as we were getting ready to leave. I'm pulling my new bike out of the rack and Chuck comes over to look at it 'cause he obviously had no idea what to make of this thing. His first question was "is that some really old bike?" to which I simply replied "nope, brand new, this is my 4th ride on it." To which he followed with "that thing's a singlespeed, you're gonna get dropped!" A point which he seemed adamant about, so I didn't even reply. Chuck's a plenty nice guy and you'd think he'd have ridden enough with me by now to know what kind of bike I would be on. I was pretty surprised that I ended up being the only person on a single for the ride. Tomac was supposed to be there on a single, but some family obligations kept him from making it at the last minute, so I was on my own.

I knew this was going to be a long day with a lot of road riding between off-road areas, so I had at least planned ahead. I knew the 34:17 gear I had on there wouldn't be cutting it on the roads and the front chainring is a spiderless XTR set-up so that size is locked in and I didn't have any smaller cogs in back. Fortunately One on One came to my rescue with a 14t cog at the last minute. I was thinking a 15t would have been perfect, but 14 was close enough and certainly better than 17. I put both the 14 and 17 on the bike figuring I'd just switch between gears as we went from pavement to dirt, seemed like a fine plan.

So the ride starts of and we head down to Minnehaha falls and hit some of the single track in there. I didn't get a good feeling since We basically just rode from pavement straight into trails with no break, I was stuck in the 34:14. It was a short section though, and I made it through fine. We returned to pavement to head down the path and towards St. Paul. At fort Snelling, there is a very steep paved hill you have to climb up to get to the bridge with will take you to the promised land (St. Paul). This hill is usually the site of big-ring sprints and heroic climbing efforts to race up it. Yesterday it almost ended the ride for 2 of us in the first half hour. Freeride was in front of me going up it, and I was cranking with everything I had (big gear). Suddenly Freeride shifts his front chainring and drop's the chain while pedaling really hard, his foot drops underneath him and his bike is instantly sideways, while I'm instantly running into him. I jambed on the brakes but couldn't stop fast enough, so I tried to steer around him, but I ended up riding over his rear wheel, then endo'ing for what seemed like forever. I balanced on my front wheel long enough to have the thought to unclip, which I did and landed on my feet. Freeride had somehow done the same, neither one of us hit the pavement, but both bikes did. I looked back to see my brand new bike bounce in the air, then land on it's side. Miraculously not mark on the fresh paint. I landed on the handlebar and pedal. We both pressed on.

We got over to St. Paul and headed to St. Croix Farms for a few hot laps. By the time we got there, I was figuring out there were a few repercussions from the crash, and I had to stop to make adjustments. The others took in a short lap while I readjusted my front brakes and straightened out my stem and bars then hooked back up with the group. At this point, Chuck, the guy who was full of sage advise at the start bailed out and went home. No comment on how appropriate it is that he's an H-wood rider!

After St. Croix falls, we headed across the river on the new 35e ped bridge and over to Salem hills. I hadn't been to Salem hills yet and wasn't sure what to expect. The trail was actually pretty fun. It's not a hard trail, it's rated as beginner, but it's well laid out and can be ridden pretty fast. The 34:14 wasn't much of a problem here. K-racer Miriam also showed up here and rode with us for a little while, and another Penn guy jumped in as well. So we rode off from here with 11 people again and began a longer road section south to Lebanon hills. The Penn boyz that showed up were all really fast and one or two were a little too eager to hit thing hard, so we ended up time-trailing it down there at about 20 mph for most of the way. I kept thinking I'd get shot out the back since my gear was now on the low side but I managed to hang in there. We finally hit Lebanon and all the Penn guys were starting to complain how out of gas they were. I thought that was funny since I was actually feeling alright, and they were the one's going far too hard on the ride so far.

Unfortunately KK had to turn around and head home due to prior obligations just as we got to Lebanon hills, down to 10 people again. We put in a good lap at on all the trails and regrouped in the parking lot to head to lunch at a nearby Bruegger's. Stone and Wallace were feeling fiesty though and wanted a second lap, I knew we had a long day ahead yet, so I opted out. The rest of us headed to lunch and to sit around inside the air-conditioned bagel shop.

Lunch felt good, I mean really good. We all had sandwiches and refilled out bottles, then headed out. Terrace oaks was next, as it was only a couple miles away. But before we got there, 2 more Penn Boyz bailed out and headed home. Down to 8.

Terrace oaks was a blast for me. I hadn't been there in years and it brought back all the good memories of when I worked at BJ's in College, since we'd go down there once a week to ride. The trail is nearly the same as it always has been, but since Lebanon is so closeby hardly anyone appears to ride terrace anymore. All the better for us, in fact I like that trail far more than Lebanon since it's more grown in and feels like a real "trail".

From Lebanon it was time to see what we were made of. Headed down to the Riverbottoms trail and since we were on the south side of the river, that meant riding the Nettles to get to the trail. The two Penns boys that were left were adamant that they would not ride the nettles. sissies. So they pulled out once we crossed the cedar bridge. Down to 6.

We crossed the Nettles, and they actually were not anywhere near as bad as they can be. Got to the riverbottoms trail and proceeded west. We hit the raft crossing of 9 mile creek on the trail and all 6 piled onto the raft. The sucker was stuck, wouldn't budge to move across, and just by looking down we could tell the water was low. Thorny slowly and gingerly lowered one foot down into what we thought would be about a foot of muck to try and pull us across. When he jumped down with both feet and the water wasn't even over his ankles we all just about fell over laughing and proceeded to walk across the creek and up the other side. Keep heading west...

Hit the west end of the trail at the Bloomington Ferry bridge and stopped to take a little water break and discuss how we didn't want to climb the steep road up from the parking lot. Eventually we had to head up though. Since I still had not changed to my lower gear, I was rocking the big gear up the hill, so I had no choice but to go hard. Full sprint up and I found myself alone at the top, so I just headed out to the convienence store we had agreed to stop at for more Gatoraid. Regroup at the store and hang out for a few minutes. Things are starting to seem more somber, and I think people were really starting to feel the hours of saddle time we've put in. Amazingly I'm feeling pretty good yet and I don't know why. I have no right to feel good, I haven't trained at all and I'm probably in the worst shape of the group. I'll credit the bike and the Cliff-Shot-Blocks that I've been eating all day. I got a bunch of those as free samples and was pretty skeptical, but man they really seem to help.

From there it was due north up to the Gravel Grinder. Most folks don't know the Gravel Grinder, it's a short (probably about a mile long) trail just north of 494 in Edina. It's all loose gravel and it's all either straight up or straight down. Honestly I think this thing is the hardest trail on the whole ride just due to the climbing. I'm still rockin' the 34:14 so I know there are only 2 options: go hard or walk. The latter would have been the smarter option, but I chose the first. I hit the gravel standing up and never sit till the top. Wallace is right on me, but there's nobody after that. I had made it about 15' from the top when I spun my back tire a bit. Not enough for me to stop, but enough for Wallace to seize the moment and pass me. So I followed him down the other side, sketchily since the Crow tires aren't exactly good on this kind of stuff. The two of us popped out the other side and there was nothing doing behind us. We rode on, but they decided to turn back to make sure everyone was coming. We finally all met back up and consoled each other on the pain we were feeling. Unfortunately these was worse to come.

The Euro-climb was just ahead and I had forgotten about it. Damn. That's a paved climb through some residential neighborhoods, very curvy, very steep and very unrelenting. I popped about half way up and had to back off. It took some time, but I think the big gear had finally gotten the better of me, I just watched in envy as the others downshifted into lower gears to make the climb. I suffered my way up the rest of the climb and regrouped with the others down the road. It was time for some caffeinated GU.

We were rapidly nearing Minneapolis so discussion turned to what to do next. Freeride was going to head off at an upcoming intersection since we were almost to his house. Thorny was planning on riding back home too, but his route would be further north along ours. Stone and Billy were losing motivation to hit Wirth and were thinking about just heading back to Stone's place to start the BBQ festivities early. Wallace and I were unsure, so we all kept riding.

At France Ave we had to make the critical decision. Billy and Stone were set of calling it a ride, so they were heading back to Stone's place. Thorny was heading north from here to his house. Wallace and I conferred and while we both didn't feel great, we felt like we still had a little gas and I felt like I would be disappointed if we didn't do Wirth, afterall this is the Super-enduro!

So Thorny, Wallace and myself headed north (3 left). Throny was in a trance, just riding, just trying to get home. He was way in front of us and was still pointing out road obstacles as if he thought we were right behind him. He peeled off at Glenwood Ave (2 left) and Wallace and I began our last dirt-ride of the day, Wirth. It was actually a really great ride I thought. The trails were great, not too many folks out and I felt like we had truly made it a super-enduro. Once the lap was complete, we headed back south to the Greenway and rode that over to Stone's house. Perfect timing since Stone and Tomac were just out picking up the dinner. We each took a quick shower, then gorged on BBQ. Awesome.

My hat's off to Stone for organizing such a great day. Wallace thanks for making it a super-enduro with me! I think the mac-daddy mileage prize has to go to Wallace for sure though as he put in the bonus lap at Lebanon hills. That guy is tough.

The new bike was great for the ride too. Honestly I've never been so comfortable on a ride of this length as I was yesterday. The singlespeed turned out to be not too bad and I just might recover from this one in time to ride it again next year.

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the buck stops here.

Yup, last night was the last Buck Hill race. Earlier in the season we were lead to believe it would be the last buck hill race forever, but they announced last night that they will be back there next year. So I guess the development didn't kill all the trails.
It was a sad buck hill season for me, I made it to the first race and the last race, that's it. My schedule just wasn't working out well, and I was out of town on a lot of Thursdays. Not to mention the "incident" the first race soured me a little and I didn't really feel like racing for a while.

Last night was great though. Perfect weather, lots of people and me on a brand new 29'er. I knew I wasn't going to be doing anything special in terms of actually riding fast, so I started back a bit and went out at a pretty reasonable pace. I hooked up with the Freidell bro's for a lap, then once it thinned out I decided I couldn't stand riding behind Gary's bright green IF spandex shorts, so I picked it up on the climb. Next I got in with Deanwood. We rode most of the race together and I was feeling pretty good. Unfortunately my seatpost wasn't quite tight and I could feel it slipping starting on the second lap. I thought I'd just ride it out, but man was it getting low by the third lap. Deanwood was kind enough to offer a wrench (since I hadn't brought any tools) and I stopped to make a quick adjustment halfway through lap 3. It had dropped about 2", so I made the corrections and was on my way about a minute back from where I was. I could see Deanwood in front of me, but just didn't have much left to bridge the gap, so I decided to just keep things comfortable and finish out the race without killing myself (which I did just fine). All in all a good race.

It was only me second real ride on the new 29'er and I wasn't totally sure how those tires were going to like buck. I've got the Crow's from stans on there and they're crazy light. Super fast on the climbs and accelerations, but how would their baldness they take the sandy singletrack? Turns out, not too bad. Yes, they'll drift in sand and on high-speed corners, but for the most part they hooked up very well at the 30 psi I was running. Don't think I'd want to ride really rough stuff with them, but for the relatively smooth stuff they're grrrrrreat!

In other news, we were out of town for the past week out in Oregon (my apologies for anyone trying to contact me recently). We drove out with a couple of friends, which made for a lot of car-time. 27 hours each way roughly. The friends we traveled with were heading to a wedding out on the coast and we wanted to visit two sets of friends in the Corvallis area. We all spent a day or so in Portland, which was fun since Beth hadn't seen the city before. Then we headed down the coast and eventually our friends dropped us off in Corvallis for a few days.
It was great catching up with our friends out there all of which we hadn't seen since our wedding. Both sets of friends had new babies within the last 4 weeks, so there were new faces to meet as well!
We happened to be traveling though the same weekend as the Davinci days festival in Corvallis, so we had to check it out. The main focus of the festival is what they call Kinetic Sculpture Racing. Basically people build crazy human powered vehicles that have to complete in 4 stages of racing: a 10 mile road race, a sand pile climb, a mud bog run, and a 1 mile journey down the river! Not only do these vehicles have to traverse all these things, they have to do it with style, there's an artistic portion to the judging as well. Some of these contractions obviously had massive amounts of labor put into them, probably years of work, they were impressive to say the lease. Others needed some improvement, but at least the people operating them were having fun!
The one thing that was evident is that I must partake in this event in the near future. I was chock full 'o ideas all weekend of what I could do really make one of these thing fly, I won't say any more though, as I don't want to spoil it!

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show and tell

Good weekend, I got a lot done. I like that.

House first: Sunday I finally got around to filling in the grout around all the stone blocks I had applied to the foundation of the house. This was one tedious job. You mix up mortar in small quantities, then pour some in a large cloth funnel bag (think cake-decorating bag), then squeeze the runny mortar into the gaps between the blocks. Sounds easy enough, but when half your work is above your head that means you're holding a bag of concrete overhead for hours. It took me about half of the mortaring to finally get the hang of it and get the mix consistence just right. I'd say the first half of the project took about 4 hours and the second half 2 hours.

Once you get the mortar in place, then you have to smooth it in the gaps and make it look good. Unfortunately with stones that are all irregular all the gaps are different sizes and shapes. Therefore there is no tool you can use to get in all the gaps, it's a finger job. I think I wore off all the fingerprints on my right hand doing this, but I managed to get it all in there and smooth, but the concrete mortar just sucks all the moisture out of your skin.

Here's the final result though, I think it looks pretty good. And now we can finish up the garage door trim and paint.

Now onto more important things, bikes. After far more painting than I had planned, I was finally able to build up the new lugged 29'er this weekend. I experimented with some new paint on the lugs, chrome paint! The lugs on the frame were actually stainless since I was planning on polishing them out, but then when I decided to use the bridgestone fork crown, I had a dilemma. The crown wasn't stainless and I couldn't make it match the polished stainless lugs. I didn't like the idea of just painting it and polishing the rest, so I decided to try something new.

Different chrome paints have been around, but none of them have historically been any good. But I came across this stuff that was terribly expensive, but of a quality that was on par with the other paints I use. I decided to try it. I learned a lot during the process of painting this one and I think future projects will go much faster because of it, but the reality is this paint job took as much time as at least three regular paint jobs combined! Was it worth the time?

I think so.

The paint is really unique. I'm not sure that I'd exactly call it chrome, but more like polished aluminum, very metal-like though. I suspect part of tha is due to my base prep, I think I can get it darker to look more like chrome with a darker base prep.

I absolutely love how the fork crown came out though. The blue coming through the windows inside the crown and the long points are just stunning. That crown really makes the bike in my opinion.

I tried another new method on this paint job, liquid masking agent. I did about 75% of the masking with a brush on masking agent. You let it dry, then cut it out with an xacto knife. It was much easier to work with than I thought, and really left some nice crisp edges. I think I'll be using it more.

Here's the whole front end. What's a lugged mtb without a matching lugged stem? Really? I jus had to do it. That's one of Darrel McCulloch's lugged stem kits, but I turned around the back lug to give it a rise and then reshaped all the points to match the frame. You can't see it in this picture, but the headtube is finished off with a sterling silver Bob Brown Cycles logo, the finishing touch!

These stems are pretty well thought out, the steerer clamp is 28.6mm (so this one has a shim, but you can't tell) and the bar clamp is 31.8 so it can fit pretty much any size or type of bar (with a shim if needed). The lugs can be flipped to give different angles and the castings were left with extra material for shaping in the right places. Well done Darrel. Finished product is under 200g for a 135mm length!

The seatlug is pretty straightforward, but I like this picture because it gives you an idea of the depth of color on the blue. That's actually a candy blue finish, the frame is painted silver, all the blue color is in the clearcoat, so it looks really deep. Again, more labor on the paint, but worth it in the end. Candy colors are a pretty neat effect that can be very subtle or quite dramatic. I'm going to be experimenting more with them.

The dropouts are real chrome. These are Campy 1010b's with the deraileur hanger removed (since this is a singlespeed) I was going to use track dropouts, but I just don't think they ever look as classy as road horizontals, especially these horizontals and this bike is about class. There's really no reason to use track dropouts in a frame like this over a forward facing dropout, the wheels hold fine, especially with those huge "fun-bolts" on the King hub. I love the really big window on these too, they really knew how to make a nice looking dropout back when these were made. I've got a few sets left, so lemme know if you want them on your frame!

Finally, here's the whole thing built up. You had to figure out by now where those super-shiny polished XTR cranks were headed right? Polished is the theme of the bike, that along with lightweight. The whole thing comes in about 18 lbs, pretty darn good for a steel 29'er I think. The Stan's no-tubes /Chris King wheels are the main culprit in saving weight, but all the parts are reasonably light.

My only big concern with this bike is the Stan's rims/tires. I'm somewhat skeptical about their long term durability, but time will tell. They're really light, but you can also feel the large de-tensioning of the spokes when you inflate the tire to 40psi, the rims are that thin! I also spent far more time than I think it should have taken trying to get the tires to seal up to the rims. we'll see....

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