Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

About a year ago Alistair Spence and I proposed starting a local group of hobbyist and professional framebuilders to meet once in a while and discuss projects, techniques, whatever. Alistair came up with the name SABMA (Seattle Area Bicycle Manufacturer’s Association). This weekend we had our fourth meeting, which signified the start of the second year of SABMA.

So far the meetings haven’t had much of a theme, they’ve been more of a chance to explore other people’s workshops and to get to know each other. This time around I proposed that we do a little hand’s on work too. I brought over my oxy/propane rig and we setup Alistair’s oxy/acetylene rig. Mark and Martin offered to do some demonstration joints. Alistair prepared the lugs and I mitered some tubing. The meeting had a good turnout for such an event,8 of us showed up for it (Andy, Alex, Alistair, Dan, Eric, Mark, Martin,Thomas).

First up Martin brazed a Ritchey dropout to a chainstay:

Mark brass brazed a lug using oxy/propane:

Martin silver brazed a lug using oxy/acetylene (this shot wasn’t taken through didynium like the rest of them,so you can see the red sodium flare from the flux):

As a Grand Finale Mark quickly mitered up the remaining scrap tubes and fillet brazed for us. Since I’ve been working on my fillet brazing myself I learned a lot from this quick demo and look forward to practicing some more at home:

We didn’t have too much time for show and tell this time. Martin brought a road/disk bike that he is working on, Alistair showed his latest bike (well documented on his flickr site) and I bought a couple of front triangles that I’ve built. Eric Bailey came with this neat stem with integrated decaleur:

Thomas from Idaho also brought his latest kokoPedli folding bike and showed it off to us.

I didn’t take a photo of the awesome spread of food that we brought together for the event. Alistair and Alon made a nice Gazpacho and there was a variety of store bought and home made muffins, bread, cookies, cheese, and beer.

I really enjoyed this meeting and look forward to the next one. I think we’ll be discussing alignment at that one, and hopefully having a bit more time for show and tell. I might even have a bike to ride down to it.

I brazed the front triangle of my first frame this weekend.

Things went pretty well. I did have one mistake which has made a fairly minor change to the geometry. My brazing order around the downtube, seattube, bottom bracket area should have brazed the front of the downtube and the back of the seat tube first before any of the crotch in between them. The fillet in the crotch pulled them them together, which made the seat tube angle a bit tighter. I think that this is all okay, I’ll just build the bike with a 72.5 HTA and a 73 STA instead of the opposite as I had planned. The seat tube is 56cm C-T and the top tube is 56cm C-C (giving me a virtual of around 57cm because it has a sloping top tube). The top tube slopes at roughly 4 degrees. This is a learning frame, so I’m okay with a few little mistakes.

The seat tube to top tube junction was one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to put a sleeve here to keep heat distortion down and I don’t like brass brazing long sleeves. Mark Bulgier had the best suggestion for handling this area, but I didn’t have the right materials on hand. My solution (a pretty common one) was to sleeve out of 1 1/4″ x 0.058″ (which sleeves perfectly over a 1 1/8″ seat tube). The top tube was brazed to the sleeve first with brass, then the sleeve was brazed to the seat tube using silver. The silver inside the joint will melt a bit when I braze on the seat stays, but the sleeve is so long that the top and bottom will stay solid and the silver won’t be able to go anywhere. That is the theory anyway, we’ll see if it is true in a few weeks. My biggest concern is that I probably don’t have good silver penetration between the sleeve and seat tube behind the top tube fillet. I’m not worried about the lack of strength there, but I hope that it doesn’t create a good area for rust.

I used a pin through the sleeve to align the vent hole in the top tube with the one in the sleeve.

Everything came out fairly straight when I checked it on my alignment setup. The head tube has a very slight twist when compared to the seat tube. I might try to cold set it out of there, but I’m not too worried about it.

I mitered everything on my milling machine. My setup for this was really simple,but seemed pretty effective. I used two of Alex Meade’s clamping blocks and clamped the tube into the milling machine. I set the angle using the machine’s head (I don’t really have a good angle table to adjust the angle of the tube itself). To keep the miters in phase I always kept one block locked onto the tube at a time when I moved the blocks from one end of the tube to the other. The final miters came out nicely. I only touched up one miter witha file,and that was the top tube to seat tube miter because the top tube length shortened a bit when my ST/DT angle tightened up.

If you aren’t bored with this project by now you can see tons of other photos in my smugmug gallery.

I’m on the east coast visiting my family this week. My mom and I enjoyed a nice mother’s day weekend on the Eastern Shore (of the Cheasapeake) andtoday I headed up to my dad’s house outside of Philadelphia.

I flew out here with my folding bike (Bike Friday Tikit). The $15 bag checking fee ($30 round trip) is annoying, but still cheaper and more enjoyable than renting a car. My clothing suitcase is a small carry-on bag from RickSteves that fits nicely on the front porteur rack. Ithelda few days worth of clothing, my laptop, camera, and other stuff.I had a saddlebag for tools and a few other items. My mom is driving up this way in a few days and will bring my bike suitcase along. I love the Tikit and it’s great for this type of trip. The i-Motion 9 that I put on there is working very nicely too.

The ride was an enjoyable route mostly on small 2-lane roads through farms. I didn’t hit any traffic until getting within spitting distance of Newark. At Newark I hopped on Septa (Philadelphia’s regional rail system) and took the train up to my dad’s house. The riding was about 60 miles and pretty flat. I think over here these would be called rolling hills, but in Seattle this would be called flat.

Thanks to Frank from bikede.org for helping me with the route. He suggested about 70% of what I rode and his suggestions were spot on.

All photos (most of them are on here already).

Notes from my previous similar trip. I took a different route, but the scenery is similar.

I’ll come back later and link to the route on Bikely.

Easton eccentric bottom bracket with the shell in Rene Herse/Alistair Spencestyle. Eccentrics are heavy, this setup weighs 425 grams.

Seat tube mitered and water bottle bosses brazed in.

3 hours down, lots more to go.

Friday after work Andre, Andrew and I biked up the North Fork of the Snoqualmie River searching for camping spots. None of us had been very far up the river before.

The first section of the road is called 5710 and gives you access to Hancock and Calligan Lakes. It’s a really nice stretch of road with no traffic and good surface conditions. Beyond that we merge back onto 5700 which is more heavily trafficked (this means a car every hour or two) and looser gravel.

We had a few areas to check for camping in mind. There are two valleys that go into the National Forest, Phillipa Creek and Sunday Creek. We didn’t explore Phillipa Creek and Sunday Creek had snow right at the trail head. Across from Sunday Creek was an old road which looked promissing, but it ended at a broken bridge. This would be a decent camp spot most days, but it was a little damp on Friday. We kept heading up the main road until we got stuck in snow at the Lennox Creek turnoff. There was another (loud) group camping here, so we turned back. At this point it was getting dark and we needed to find camp pretty fast.My GPS showed an abandoned road a couple of miles back, so we checked it out.

The road looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade or two. It was very overgrown with shrubs and trees, but we pushed our way through. The area by the river was pretty nice and had an open spot for dinner and some good trees for hanging our hammocks. Andrew found a nice soft spot for his bivy. We made a quick dinner, enjoyed a small fire, and went to bed.

Themorning air was chilly andafter a bit of tea wehit the road and head back to the car.The blue skies of Friday night had been replaced with a low fog. The roads were clear andthe slight downhill trend made our ride back a little faster than the one the day before. At 9:30 we reached the car andwere heading home.

Ilike Friday night camping because you still have a full weekend for other stuff too. I look forward to exploring this area more in a month or two when more of the snow has melted. This would have been a great area last year because the bridge which makes it accessible cars had been washed out. Now it is open again and there is more traffic.

All Photos

I’ve finished my most recent round of hacking on my Bike Friday Tikit.

I callit the Seasons SpeedingTikit Porteur. Seasons because that is what Bike Friday calls the Tikit with an internal hub. Speeding because that is what they call it when you put on drop bars. Porteur because it has a (mini) porteur rack up front.

The new rear hub is a SRAM i-Motion 9 (or i9). The i9 conversion benefited from some brazing of the bike’s rear triangle. I switched the dropouts to the pivoting dropouts that Bike Friday makes. I also had to move the rear canti studs a bit. I made a photo essay of swapping out the dropouts. The i9 seems to work well and has a nice gear range. I had originally planned on building a custom bar-end shifter, but gave up on that project. The rear triangle will get fresh powdercoat soon.

The drop bars make the quick fold a bit wide, but remove the stem and it gets narrower than a stock tikit. I don’t need a compact quick fold very often, so this is a good compromise for me. I can ride on drop bars all day long, but flat bars hurt my hands after 20 miles or so. I really love the Tikit fold, it is very fast and all of the dirty bits on the bike get folded to the inside.

I made the mini-porteur rack a long time ago and it continues to function well. It looks really dressed up with the black powder coat.

The Tektro V-brake drop-bar levers are a lot more comfortable than the Diacompe 287-V option. They seem to work pretty well on the front, but the rear is a bit spongy from the long cable run. The levers work better if your V-brakes have shoes at the top of the slot than at the bottom.

I hacked up my favorite MKS Grip King pedals to have a quick release MKS EZ axle. This lets them pop off of the bike in an instant to make the fold smaller. Taking axles out of $60 pedals and putting them into $50 pedals is an expensive solution, I wish MKS just offered these with the quick release axle as stock.

I’m taking the bike on a train ride with me soon and looking forward to giving it a real test.

On Saturday morning Andrew, Rory, Andre and I drove up to North Bend with goals of riding up to Lake Hancock and Lake Calligan. It was already sunny and warm at 9am, and the weather reports just suggested that it would get even better. I think we all thought there might be snow up in the hills, but we found it much earlier than planned as we started the climb from the North Fork valley floor up to the first lake. Just a little bit up the trail and at about 1500 feet we found our first bits of snow. A 1/4 mile later the road was no longer passable.

We got to the fork for Lake Hancock and decided to ditch the bikes and hike up to the lake. An hour or so later the snow was up to our calves and we decided to turn back. We enjoyed a fast descent in snow turned slush and then experimented with each others bikes before finding our way back to the car. We’re all excited to return the area and eventually find the roads that link it up with our trip from a few weeks prior.

Today Christine and I took the kayak down to Nisqually Delta. It was another beautiful day which highs around 70 and clear skies. We were hoping to explore the delta and see lots of wildlife (primarily birds), but due to a two timing issues (time of day and time of year) we saw less than we were hoping for. We still had a great paddle,enjoyed wonderful scenery (great views of Rainier and the Olympics) and saw some cool birds.

The whole weekend was a great way to kick off spring/summer. I look forward to another busy year of spending time outside. I hope that I have a little time to work on bike projects too.

I’m almost done clearing out old projects and finally getting ready to build my first full bike frame. It’s going to be what Jan classifies as an urban bike. Kind of a light touring bike, drop bars, front porteur rack, 650B wheels. I want it to fit knobby tires without fenders or 40mm wide Hetre tires with fenders. To make this work I’m placing the fender mounts around 60mm from the rim. Here is a line drawing which gives the basic proportions:

The hardest place to fit these wide tires is the chainstay/bottom bracket area. I was playing with BG101 (an Excel spreadsheet) on the bus this morning and it shows this very nicely. This is what my bike might look like using a 55mm tire, 9 degree bend chainstays from Henry James, a 44t single chainring, Ritchey cranks (150mm tread) and a Rohloff hub:

Each grid mark is 5mm. Everything just doesn’t fit (the crank arm and chainring are both too close to the chainstay). There is a thin path through the chainring, crank arm, and tire which will let everything fit. A chainstay which makes that ideal path isn’t available off the shelf, so I’m going to have to modify (bend) what I can get. This is the hardest part of the bike for me, and the first thing that I’m looking at when I see other fat tired bikes on the road.

I’m glad that I avoided it on my first bike by using an existing rear triangle borrowed from another bike.

(click for really big)

The Markworth Forest is about 30 miles from Seattle just outside of Duvall, WA. I’d only been there once before and felt like I barely saw any of it. Lee, Andre, Andrew and I were trying to figure out a ride suggestion and I offered up that Markworth might be worth checking out.

We didn’t really have an agenda. There aren’t good maps of the Markworth or much information available on it. It is a working forest so you see a lot of clear cuts and some logging equipment. The roads aren’t mapped out very well. It’s lowland, so it is swampier than the forests that we’re used to seeing up in the mountains (John Speare used to live near there and described some areas as feeling “Deliverance Like”).

On the other hand it has waterfalls, great view, few people, lakes, and all of those other things that are fun to find in the woods.

On this visit we biked about 25 miles, found one very nice lookout, a creepy lake surrounded by some strange houses, two waterfalls (one that I’ve visited before),a few other cyclists and a woman training her huskies how to mush.

I think it’s too bad that all of this “near Seattle” forest is mostly working logging land and not really designed for recreation. There are some great oppurtunities here. I think I’ll be back to explore some more.

A few photos (more are here).

Andrew checks out the view of Seattle

Looking northish to more mountains and trails.

This crazy waterfall was loud and energetic. I took a(sideways)video too which you can see in the gallery.

touring*2 + mtb = pugsley

3″ of snow followed by 2 days of below freezing followed by 5″ of snow is enough to shutdown Seattle. We’re enjoying it.

Updated!

That photo of me flying through the air was the last time that our sled ever worked. We got home and Christine was bummed, so we made a new sled out of some old wooden XC skis, some plywood, and a bit of the old sled. It is a rocket!

I like biking in this stuff. I’m glad I don’t have the commute in it, but it’s fun having a couple of snowbike days. My studded tires should arrive tomorrow (if UPS is running), just in time for the ice. I also got to try out Lee’s Pugsley in the snow. The volume helps a lot, although he reports that it doesn’t do so well in ice.