Sunday, January 13, 2008

rack 'em

Yeah, I'm still building bikes, but in between I've been working on a side project for a local Mlps Architect. It's a fully lugged stainless steel bike rack. Not a rack to go on a bike, but rather a rack to hang bikes from indoors! Actually I'm making 2 of them and I'm pretty excited to see how they come out.

It kinda looks like some kind of odd long wheel-base recumbent in this shot, but eventually that'll be hanging on a wall.

Click on any of these for big. The lugs started out as mini-six stainless lugs, then I've been adding points on them all over and reshaping them. Adding material to stainless lugs adds a whole new challenge because I have to tig weld the extra material on instead of brazing it. Otherwise you'd see the silver line on the lug where the extra material was added.





It's also pretty thick tubing, .0625" wall, which makes silver brazing the much thinner lugs on a bit of a challenge too, but so far so good. I've got one of them mostly brazed up, but I've still got to clean it up and then make another one!

This rack project is taking it's tool on the shop, it's a mess. I've never spent so much time grinding with so many tools. I can't even see the bench through the grinding dust.



I've also been working on a another frame and a frame repair. Spent a little time this afternoon fancy-ing up these stainless steel dropouts by carving out the windows.
I've still got to polish 'em up and clean them, but I think they'll look pretty nice. These dropouts used to come with windows cast-in years ago, but they stopped doing that, so now I've got to cut them out by hand to make them look nice. Sigh, just more work....

bbbb

No comments: