DIY Frame building

I know there was a thread on this a week or so. However I have some specific questions.

So, what I want to make a frame and possibly forks to match. What I would like is a road bike. The need to make make it including the joining of the tubes is pretty central, this therefore puts me in the realm of lugs and Silver Solder as I can’t weld other than very roughly.

Question 1: Is there much bending of the chainstays needed?

Question 2: How are the brake and chainstay bridges attached? Anyone got any close ups?

We can consider this a statement of intent and in true STW style I expect critique from those who are highly skilled and those who would not recognize a file if they were hit on the head with one.

More to come and pictures when applicable…..

1. If it’s a road frame with reasonably tight clearances, you can probably get away with straight stays. It’s also possible to buy pre-bent stays.

2. They’re just brazed in – mitre to fit at the correct distance from the wheel and attach.

Cheers Ben,

Yes the tubesets I have been looking at seem to be already bent. I was not sure if they required any further bending.

Off to bed now but I will post up the design brief once I have had a doodle and think tomorrow.

That all depends on your geometry, and your personal preferences – for instance I’m in the middle of a tandem trike build and the stays came with a single bend, but I quite like a double bend so added a second curve. Seatstays also often have a double bend for heel clearance.

So been doing some doodling and thinking and have a couple of must haves and a few would likes.

Must have:
Lugged steel construction (i will borrow an Oxy/Acet set)
Decent tube set.
Comfortable geometry for longish rides.
Minimum of bending required.
Painting to be outsourced. I know my limitations!

Would like:
Stainless Steel lugs. Unless this is going to make things much more difficult
Internal cable routing. (i know this will be a lot of extra work).

Been looking here [/url]for bits I was wondering if there are any other sites I should look at.

Stainless is quite a bit more difficult to braze – actually it’s usually silver-soldered, but you might want to think about silver soldering anyway – it’s lower temperature so you can do it with butane.

Ceeway is great – there’s no other UK equivalent.

Thanks for the reply Ben. When You say Butane. Do you mean something like this ?

MAPP gas gives more heat than butane, but is very expensive.

Silver soldering outside is poor for temperature control (wind etc ) but keeps the flux fumes away.

A copy of Soldering and Brazing by Tubal Cain will give you an idea of the options for torches that will work.

A lot of detailed stuff has been skipped over, but you get some idea of what is involved. Without a full frame fixture/jig , and without oxy-acetylene.

http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40013&t=12955392

http://www.salfordcitycollege.ac.uk/courses/llcourseinfo.aspx?id=173

Have had a bit of a reality check and am now resigned to plain-ish lugs and Reasonable tubeset.
Now, would anyone like to reccomend a tubeset and a set of lugs?

Once you have done a drawing of the frame you will know the length of the tubes and all the angles, the angles etc can limit your choice of possible tubes and lugs.

http://reynoldstechnology.biz/assets/pdf/rtl_2010_parts_list.pdf
The Fairing website gives an indication of what the dimensions of the Reynolds tubes mean. Where the butts in the tube start and finish etc.
http://www.fairing.com/Reynolds.asp?subcat=reynolds&subreynolds=525

Your lugs and dropouts etc will probably be coming from Ceeway, so might be cheapest and easiest to also get tubes from there. That would mean using Columbus.

Zona butted tubes are probably fine for a first frame and a good compromise between cost / strength / weight (budget about £20-£25 for each main butted tube). Download the tube pdf’s from Ceeway – they show where the butts end, how much you can cut and from which end.

http://www.framebuilding.com/Columbus%20Tubing.htm

Scroll down the page to links for other available tubes – e.g. plain gauge cheap 0.8mm wall Thron and Gara could also be used for stays etc.

I’ve done curved seat tubes from Gara and it was surprisingly tough / hard to bend (needed about 4x more leverage than my practice bends with tubes cut from an old Peugeot frame).

He also sells the cycle designs paste flux for silver soldering (and silver rods). You’ll get good results with this provided you don’t get it too hot. I sometimes just use a MAPP torch for silvering braze ons etc (not really man enough for a bb shell).

Reynolds is great but would need to buy all tubes from them to hit minimum order qty and then still need to buy the other bits from Ceeway.

Ceeway do full frame kits if search around their site

Thepodge…. That is purfect. They even sell practise tubes and lugs.

So now after moving house ina couple of weeks i can get to drawing and making an order. I am sure there will be many, many more questions in the coming weeks and quite possibly months.

Plan is now to make some full size drawings, cribbing geometry from internet. Order one of those kits from ceeway. Then cut and mitre all the tubes prior to then a few practise joints and then sticking the tubes together. .

Found a program called tubemiter than allows you to print paper templates . I think this will help hugely.

The old copper smiths used to get me to coat the silver solder sticks with flux and leave them to dry before soldering. The flux and solder we used was full of Cadmium, which I don’t think you get now, so it might not work the same, but give it a try, it certainly made the solder run nicely.

Cadmium-free now.

Flux is vital, but I find it better to cost the joint with flux paste first – that way you can get on with brazing or soldering without worrying about flux, and the condition of the flux gives you a good clue about temperature, especially when silver soldering.

A simple butane canister will not provide enough heat, even with a brazing hearth behind it.

Mapp gas will eventually get hot enough but I wouldn’t waste your time.

I would use silver solder with at least 55% silver content, or use brass filler rods, you’ll have to get it hotter, and therefore need oxy acet/ oxy propane but you’ll get a much cleaner and stronger joint.

Using brass rather than silver is easier.. more forgiving for gaps etc if you’ve done a shiter with your filing

The Map Oxy idea has been binned. I will borrow a mates acetaline rig. That is the reason i was thinking about trying to do all the mitres and cutting “dry” as it were. Don’t want to be borrowing the kit and hanging on to it for months.
Thinking a bit more about this has given rise to doubts. Am i going to make things harder for myself ? I believe it may but am willing to be convimced otherwise.

.

Not sure what you mean by “dry” – laying out full-scale on lining paper and doing all the mitres first is a very good way of doing it. That way you can take your time with all the cutting and filing, get it perfect before you lay your hands on the torch.

Cheers Ben. Music to my ears!
I got it into my head that it was best done in stages from watching ytube vids.

Has anyone used that tubemiter program? Will be slow compared to pedastal drill but do not have access to one at the moment.

I went on the dave yates framebuilding course a couple years ago – and i haven’t built anything since so this is not to be taken as gospel, and i have forgotten stuff.. Also i think having a full jig has an influence, as you can fit stuff and know it’s right before brazing to calculate other things.

The way we did it meant there was only one “vital” length cut where you can’t have a second go at your mitres (toptube to seattube) – pretty everything else had a little leeway or could be adjusted – mainly because one end is going into the bb shell where it can stick through a bit if necessary.

Order was: stick seat tube into BB, stick top tube into headtube, cut the headtube length (the accurate one), mitre the downtube-headtube joint, then into the jig – get the downtube length and cut it (inside the shell again so can be long, just needs more grinding after. Cleaning is a ball ache though, so try not to obviously!).

Chainstays were attached to lugs at some point and were also in the jig for positioning reasons (and no, i can’t remember how all that worked properly at all)

Then stick headtube to downtube, then top tube to seat tube, then downtube to shell, then chainstays to shell

Then fitted and measured seatstays (the basic sticking to the outside of the seat lug design) and put a cap on, then stuck them on, then stuck seatstays-seat lug, then seatstays-dropouts

So yeah – one of the things i got from that is that there’s no reason to make things difficult for yourself, especially if it’s a first time.. however you do it, if there’s a way to avoid making vital cuts and mitres without having the rest of your frame to measure against, take that option!

I know if i was making another frame, there would be a fair bit of adjustment and compensation throughout, depending on how the previous steps had gone. My filing fairly sucked though.

uphillcursing

If you have a full jig/fixture to hold the tubes in the correct position and alignment prior to brazing, then yes it is an option.
But if you do not have some sort of fixturing to hold all the tubes then, its more practical to fit and braze one tube / joint at a time.

A flat surface is all you need – I learned several ways of making a frame:

– Flat surface. Draw the frame out full-size on lining paper, lay out on a flat surface. You can do all the cuts and mitres, though I used to do the front triangle first you could easily lay out everything as long as you’re careful about heights – get some v-blocks and you’ll be okay.

– Vice. Clamp the BB in a vice, and build up from there. Only works with lugs, and it’s easier if you pin the lugs (drilling little holes that you put nails in to hold the tubes temporarily). But advantage is you can get to both sides of the frame, and can check alignment with a bit of string from the dropouts wrapped around the head tube.

– Jig. Jigs are lovely. Some are relatively basic (like mine), some are works of art in themselves. They make it easier because you can (hopefully!) assume that the jig is straight – so you can just slot stuff in and off you go.

None of these techniques is better, you can produce a perfectly good straight frame with any of them. What the jig gets you is speed.

Having a T shirt like Dario Pegoretti’s is important though