at long last, i have a couple of new projects at hand, both of which made big steps forward in the past two weeks. first, my friend nima in baltimore gave me a very nice raleigh team usa road frame in my size (64 x 62) with a cracked drive side dropout. as it happened, i had a very nice set of gipiemme dropouts that fit perfectly, so i sweated out the old dropouts, reworked the slots to fit the new dropouts, and brazed them on in. here is the frame with the dropouts roughly jammed in to check the fit:
here it is brazed up!
once they were in there, i re-spaced the rear end of the bike to 130 mm for modern road componentry, realigned the dropouts, and realigned the frame. a road wheel now pops right in:
i have made the first couple of passes at cleaning up the joints, but they all still have a couple of hours of filing and emery-clothing before i will repaint/powder coat the frame. i will also be building a matching fork for it, as it is quite hard to find forks that would match the bike, stylistically, with enough steerer tube:
that's a whole lotta head tube.
i am not sure if i will keep the bike for myself or sell it, yet. it would make an awesome road bike for some tall person out there who can't find a bike long enough.
the other project i have brewing is a sweet thru-axle disc brake gravel touring rando-gnar machine for my good friend emily. emily and i went to reed together, years and years ago, and didn't really know each other then. however, we then both worked at bike gallery in portland for a couple of years. she went on to run a branch of the bicycle habitat chain where i currently work in nyc. way back, several lifetimes ago, i had said that one day i would make her a sweet frame, and now that i am in a position to do so, we worked up the necessary dimensions and ordered up tubing. today i scribed the tubes, so as to be able to align the mitering templates relative to each other, and started to set up the first mitering templates. the next time i am in the shop, i will apply the final mitering templates, check my measurements again, and then start to cut and miter tubes!
