The Montelimar

From Audax frame

The Montelimar is the result of the minor crisis I went through in 2009. It was designed as a long-distance bike for taking a certain amount of punishment and not necessarily for speed. To take 700c 28mm tyres with enough clearance for mudguards. The angles on the seat tube and the head tube are somewhere between 72 and 73 degrees and the bottom bracket drop is 60mm. The chainstays are oval and once again they ended up slightly too short.

The oversized tubes make the frame fairly stiff. It's really good when the roads are rough and in hilly terrain but at first I found it too rigid. However with the Panaracer Pasela 28mm tyres I learned not to inflate to 9 bar/130 psi as is the custom here in Germany (people think you're half cracked here if you ride a racing/touring tyre with less than 6 bar/87 psi) and that improved the comfort and the handling of the bike no end.

The bike comes into its own with a load in the front or on the rear where I hardly notice the extra weight. So I decided I'd have a go at making a front rack, which above all would support the light. The support on the brake-bolt interfered with the front-brake too much so I'll have to alter it but otherwise I was quite happy with my first rack.

From Audax frame

While the frame was lying around finished but unpainted, I made a pump-peg out of a pump stud and a cut-off from a mudguard stay.

From Audax frame

It has been an invaluable experience testing this bike on long rides in various terrains as well as commuting to work on it. It boosted my confidence in my meagre framebuilding capabilities and gave me the bike I had always dreamt about.

Wanting too much - my leap into long distance cycling

In 2008 I dreamt of riding my first long distance brevet on one of my own frames. So I set to work on a frame similar to the one I had made for my dad and registered myself for the 1400km Brevet London-Edinburgh-London in 2009. However my circumstances changed at the end of 2008 when my contract as an IT-technician ran out.

At first I thought I would have more time for cycling and framebuilding (a thing I’d love to do fulltime) but as 2009 wore on the opposite was the case. I had commuted a 66km round-trip to work regularly and now I had to do all that cycling in my free time. My original justification for framebuilding as an opposite pole to the frustrations of IT-work was also vacant.

As the year wore on I had a number of colds and tummy-bugs. I was desperate to complete the 2009 Brevet Super Series in Brandenburg but didn’t finish a single Brevet for illness and family obligation reasons. My frame wasn’t getting anywhere either because I was obsessed with creating something way above my level of expertise.

In retrospect this whole experience was very valuable. Feeling I had somehow failed at work I wanted to prove myself what I was capable of in other areas. Brevet cycling is very for showing you where your psychological limits are. Every event is a confrontation with yourself that you have to deal with efficiently so that you can continue and enjoy your ride. This ranges from how prepared (fitness, navigation, strategy) you are, what you brought with you (and now have to schlep up the hills), what you didn’t bring and now have to do without, by what ideals you chose and built your bike and most importantly how you deal with others (their speed, their lack of experience, their annoyances) on the ride. Framebuilding (or perhaps any craft) is similar. You constantly have to be aware of your limits and work within them and most importantly look at your results with those limits in mind. In doing so you build the foundational skills and your limits become extended.

At last I gave up on the idea of riding LEL and finishing the frame in time and that’s when things started to look up. I finished the bike in time for the 2010 Brevet season and completed the Super Series on it. I hadn’t underestimated what a pure buzz and extra motivation it would be to riding on my own frame. Sort of like going on a big adventure with a good friend whose shortcomings you can’t see because the comfort they provide by just being there far outweighs any faults they have.

From Audax frame

Trabant blue bike

From Urbanbike

This is a bike I made last year. I originally made it for myself but wasn't too happy with the results. While my father was visiting he said he'd have it if I didn't want it. I had a set of wheels with a 7-speed internal hub lying around so I used those with set of swept-back handlebars and traffic blue Bluemels that I had. The frame was powdercoated with RAL 5012 (Trabant blue) and toned in very well with the mudguards.Although the frame had been somewhat of a dud (the rear triangle ended up much too short) it cycles beautifully and this is not just my perception. Everybody who has ridden it comments how nice a ride it is. It's fast but always well controlled and very comfortable.This a photo my Dad sent me when while on the bike in Dublin.

From Urbanbike

It's great to have someone close do a long-term test on something you've built and the bike is standing up well to it's everyday requirements.

The continuing saga of the 650B mixte

The mixte I started over two years ago is almost finished.

From Latest projects

Why did it take so long? It took a long time to source suitable parts i.e. the lugs, tubing for the lateral bars. In the end I scraped the parts together and got going. This frame was almost entirely brazed with brass using acetylene and not propane as I used to. I'm particularly proud of what I'm calling the "knees up" bridge connecting the seat tube to the lateral stays.

From Latest projects

Long time no blog

So it's been a long time since I posted here but I haven't been idle on the framebuilding just lazy on the blogging. I got less enthused about the title of the blog, feeling that it might show a lack of professionalism people might see necessary for building a bike but now I'm well back into the Makeshift ethos. My latest project was to build a Worldbike. And here it is almost finished.

From Latest projects

I chopped the rear triangle off a red old red Univega MTB I had. I then fillet brazed a 35mm dia. Downtube with a cut-off brazed like a bottom bracket shell to the end. The chopped off rear triangle was the brazed to the new shell. Then I went about reinforcing the extension with whatever I could find (the blue bits in the photo) and brazed on the top bars which will hold the long wooden bench. The bike should fit three children. I plan the to add a long foot rest that can be used to carry crates of water or beer.

Bicycle Framebuilding the first year Part 1

The idea to build myself a bicycle frame permanently etched itself in my mind by spring 2007. It took about 6 months to become so indelible. I thought that if I could have the wherewithal to start building a frame by the end of the year I would be doing very well indeed. I started the hunt for the necessities for building a bicycle frame a search that will probably be never-ending.

Looking through endless photo galleries and watching videos of proper frame builders it seemed there were two schools of thought: building in a jig and building out of the jig. The latter makes a good flat surface absolutely necessary but you also need a jig to hold the tubes initially while tacking them. To simplify things I went out to look for a jig and decided to do without a surface plate for the time being. I got an affordable second-hand jig from a blacksmith with a beautiful old forge, with amazing machinery. He offered to turn down the fittings on the jig to the size tubes I would be using. He had been TIG welding mountain bikes in it.
We talked about how I would build the frames and thankfully he subtly pointed out that working in my cellar and in the flat would not work as I naively had thought and he suggested that I should come and use his facilities, for free! 

I have never won so much as five Euros in my life but I have had the good fortune to make invaluable acquaintances and this was definitely a special one. I’m eternally grateful for the kindness Hans and his family showed me and the wealth of information I took in during my visits there gave me a start I would otherwise never have had.

So my jig stayed where it was for the time being and I started building almost immediately. In the mean time I had bought tubes and parts. When I first visited Norbert Koehn’s website he was selling off large parts of his inventory so I wrote him an email asking him for a starter kit and some tubes for practising. I heard nothing more from him but a few days later to my surprise a big box of steel arrived with enough parts to build two bikes for an unbelievable 75 Euros. Later in the summer I visited him and most of his old stock was already gone. But nonetheless I took home a load of small parts and odds and ends that would come in very handy later for very reasonable money. This was the second stroke of good luck.

The third stroke of good luck was that I managed to find space in garage right next to our flat to work in. But that’s jumping the gun somewhat. In between were plenty of mishaps that could have been avoided on the way to making my first frame which by the way was finished before Christmas, the deadline I had set for starting.

Starting a 650B mixte project - the wheels

I've decided that one of my next projects will be a 650B mixte. With this project I'll be jumping on two bandwagons at once. Mixtes are becoming increasingly sought after, particularly by young men in the fixie scene. My mother had a Raleigh mixte called a silhouette which I loved to ride as a young lad of about nine. The whole 650B thing seems to gradually grow from year to year but as always it'll be passé everywhere else by the time it catches on in Germany. The same goes for the mixtes.

650B is the french designation for a wheel that is 584mm in diameter according to the ETRTO standard, placing it between 559mm (26") usual MTB size and 622mm (28") the ubiquitous road bike size. In Germany sizes like these are dubbed in-between sizes as if to say they're neither here nor there.
650B however is enjoying a renaissance partly due to the work of Kirk Pacenti in designing a tyre in this size for MTBs called the neo-moto.

A smaller but growing following of the 650B size sees its qualities in building compact fast touring bikes or city bikes with wider than usual tyres (28-40mm). As Sheldon Brown pointed out, a wheel with a wide 650B tyre is roughly equivalent in diameter to a 28" with a skinny tyre so there's little difference in gear ratio or momentum. The benefit is the commfort that comes with the wider tyre cycled at a lower pressure.

So what does a 650B Mixte look like? Well I'm going for the classical design with the twin lateral tubes running from the rear dropouts right up to the head-tube. You have to imagine their continuation in the bikeCAD drawing on the right. This was just a quick draught. I'll draw the bike to full scale before I start building but you can already see how well proportioned this wheel-size is.

It might seem like putting the cart before the horse but I wanted to be sure I had a set of wheels before I built a 650B dedicated bike. Having the wheels at hand while your building is handy for checking alignments, brake boss position, mudguard clearance and so on.

Rims in this size are hard to come by in Germany. The only ones I found being old Mavic 40-hole alloy rims from Bruegelmann for 12€ each. I bought a pair not realising just how hard it would to find a set of 40-hole hubs. I eventually tracked down the necessary hubs to build the nicest wheelset I've built yet. So I thought I'd share a few pictures. The front hub is hi-flange Sansin and on the back it's a Campagnolo Record for a free-hub.