It’s been a while in the making – but these bad boys will soon be ready to be released into the wild! They hold a frame on the wall through the BB shell – look very svelte and make the frame look like it’s floating off the wall.
Probably in the next couple of weeks these will be ready to ship. I’m really excited about seeing these in people’s spaces and the kind of bikes they’ll mount.
This is the second bike made at the incredible workshop space created by the Zenga Brothers – which I feel privileged to share. Toxik Harald did a lovely job as usual. This was the first that came out of my Alex Meade fixture. Was a real pleasure to use such nice tools.
More here
My process for building is the ‘joint at a time’ method. It suites my minimal tooling and my skill level – essentially I build sub assemblies and when they’ve ‘passed’ inspection I then combine them together. I have a little more control over discrete steps and then build off a solid foundation. This method is slow but enjoyable. I had thought that lug builders had to spend less time on a joint to make it strong and look good as opposed to fillet. I was totally off base – I think with lug prep, adjusting angles of lugs, and lug cleanup (not to mention carving …) make it a wash as compared to fillet that was laid down with average skill needing average amount of cleanup.
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I’ve built only fillet bikes until this point but felt a need to try a lugged bike. The Llewellyn castings are of such high quality – everything came together really nicely in this afternoon at the workshop.
Llewellyn Custodian lugs, Llewellyn dropouts and Reynolds tubes from Andy at Strawberry. I also got a neat little drill guide tool – has a v block on one side, sets up quick and no more skating tips when making holes.
Full set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/60240975@N02/sets/72157629499535520/
This one is bound for my good friend PJ.
In addition to having finished fitting stays and brake bridge the shop is really coming along nicely. The Zenga Brothers have done an amazing job putting together a very cool space that I feel privileged to be in.
Today was rear drop outs work – prepping the sockets and fixturing with the new awesome fixture for tack then post tack brazing. This was by far the easiest, anxiety free and best quality output results using this new process.
I finally got around to the shop with the new fixturing tool from Alex Meade and I’m so pleased I now have this high quality tooling to work with. With great tools you save time and increase accuracy. It was nice to pull the tack’d bb/st and check it on the Bringhelli table to find it measuring the best results I’ve had. Nice tools sure take out a lot of anxiety from my process. It was really enjoyable to use. I look forward to using the fixturing tools for the rest of the bike.
Thanks to Toxik Harald for the beautiful paint!
The full process end to end can be viewed in this set http://www.flickr.com/photos/60240975@N02/sets/72157628930549633/
While building frames is purely for personal development (Genie will focus on it’s retail efforts on two new Frame Storage designs for 2012), I’m still looking at ways to keep improving and building. To that end I landed on this fixture system from Alex Meade – a regular contributor the the google framebuilders list.
It’s versatile, flexible and transports/stores easily which is an important factor for me. I’ll continue my build in the previous post when this fixture arrives!
