Project Christmas - day 1

Fridays, I have off and don't have to weld and fab for Uncle Sam's Labs and Clorox. So today I decided to start a little project or maybe a larger sized one, of building my dad a bicycle for Christmas. shhhhhh..... Don't tell him, its a surprise, he won't find out...............

Long story short, every year I build my dad a bike and never give it to him because I fall in love with it or like last years cargo bike experience, I broke it in half in Hollywood from over loading it with about 500 pounds of building supplies. ( see my older post for the electric cargo bike ).

So this year I decided to start about the same time as every year, building my dad a bike, but this time I HAVE to give it to him..........

The plan.............

Well maybe I won't tell you, and just leave you to come back as I build it for the next few posts

sorry I didn't take many pictures while I was building, I was so pumped while I was building!!  I took a step back after 8 hours today from when I started and realized I didn't even take any pictures while I was building.

Building all this crazy robotic medical and aerospace concepts at work has me dialed in to fabricate faster then the camera can take pictures for the blog.....

Don't worry there is a lot more at come on this ride ....

yep thats Jim C's 29er coaster brake wheel

8 hours + Coffee and Mt. Dew

=

The Bastard Child of a 1940s Schwinn and a 29er mountain bike

4130 and enough room for the fatty in the rear

Theres some reasons for the weird frame layout, you will see later

the only picture I took today during fab, because I was so pumped up how easy this simple little magnet makes life, worked so well, I called StrongHand and asked for more!

 Its got an on and off switch, do I need to say more?

DONE - Merry Christmas Brie

Well here are the fruits of my labor for the last day in a half.

A full custom 46.5 cm track frame and fork for my girlfriend Brie.

Happy Early Christmas - all 5 pounds 5 ounces of it

The bar and stem combo is on her other bike so she should be rollin 100% hand built once we build this one.


Enjoy

The S.S. Niña

Here is my project for Brie.....

46.5 frame for tricks - rollin hard on some 700c Velocity B43s

Its all Reynolds tubing and weighs like 4.0 pounds, not bad for a beefed up mini ride

She won the B43 wheels from the ALL CITY race Jeff from BikeJerks puts on every year- Fastest Out of Towner

Tomorrow I will post up some compete photos. This is the first frame I have built in my new frame table and the photo shows my 55 volume behind it

NAHBS part one...... SPEED RACER CONCEPT

well I am not going to show much more then this because its supose to be a surprise when the bikes get unvailed in Richmond. at the North American Hand Built Show. Chances are I will finish it up and just post pictures.... So stay tuned.... Maybe a few more days.....

Fresh welding on the Bottom Bracket

Coker Unicycle project is back online with a vengeance..... Get ready.... I picked out the tubing today at Fairing..... I got so pumped up.....

Schwinn Super Sport Cycle Cross Concept

Yesterday I finished up all the custom dropouts for the Schwinn Super Sport frame, other then a grinding wheel exploding and cutting my leg, I got a lot done. I made like 10 different dropouts before I found the one that I went with.

Rock Shox Disc brakes front and rear. The rear I decided to put on one of the new Avid 3G Sweep rotor they sent to me for concept projects, I just need to lace the disc brake wheel for the rear now. I shortened the forks an inch and the rear end of the frame 1.5 inches, it should ride like my Volume Cutter its about a 1/4 inch off the overall bike specs. If only Schwinn built them like that from the beginning.

The goal of this Schwinn is to build a concept 1960's fillet brazed cycle cross bike or a kind of urban speedy delivery bike. Plus it lets me test out my frame table before the big project hits the floor in a week.


Here are some pictures of the Hand Pedal bike I worked on last week. Everything fit, my custom Stem/Bottom Bracket worked perfect plus the shifter bolted up great. It was at Orange 20 bikes in Hollywood.

DONE

Well, its been a while of designing all the parts on the computer and machining every part to my exact specs by hand or cnc. Now the frame table is done! I loaded up a Yeti / Schwinn Straight 8 in the table to show how it works.

Here is a pict of the base table machining and then a pict of it all loaded up.

Not bad - The overall run out on the whole table is .016 of an inch or about the thickness of about 5 pieces of paper.

New Bicycle frame fixture

Well, time to build some thing cool that looks as good as it works, or well, I hope it works as well as it looks.

I decided to go with a free floating fixture for building frames because no frame I build is the same and an Anvil Welding fixture just limits you to a normal bicycle frame, and as we all know, it gets old after a while.


I don't do production runs but I wanted to build a frame table that was able to do production runs if need be, so making a fixture that doesn't need to be completely disassembled every time was key.

The fixture was all designed in Solidworks computer aid drawing program, as all my projects are drawn on Solidworks before they hit the workbench. This is a new idea to a lot of people, its crazy to draw something on the computer then build it, no guess work and fast build times!!

Here is a few pictures of the parts of the slide blocks for the bottom bracket, there is a titanium bottom bracket between the two cones. The fixture needs to seal as well to prevent gas loss, while the inside of the bike frame is filled with inert gas for welding.