Project of the week (for a week several months in the future)
I can’t start it right now, because there’s an ipad app that has to have the buttons light up and talk to the backend threads, and there’s a suicidal depression that needs to be medicated into submission, but soon there will come a week where I measure the mlcm, measure the project bike, and merge the geometries together to see what falls out of the collision.
Rim brakes, sorry; disk brakes have a lot going for them, but I’m used to rim brakes and I want to minimize the surprises that might happen with a homemade frame. (700c, too; I considered 650b, but you can’t get 650b Resist Nomad tires yet and I’ve not found anything more baller than Nomad 28s yet (sure, 650b has Grand Bois Hetres, but they’re $60/each and are compared favorably to Challenge Parigi-Roubaix tires, which I found to be uncomfortable to ride, even though they coast for days; Nomad 28s don’t coast so well, but they’re really comfortable, really fast, and are very sure footed.)
The requirements for this frame will be
- clearance for 45mm tires + fenders (not so I can use 45mm tires, but so there will be plenty of room to fit fenders around Nomad 28s and, possibly, Nomad 35s)
- elongated top tube so I can put a short stem (to clear a rando bag) and pair of Cowbell bars and not have to squash myself in between the saddle and the drops. The project bike has the bars in a good place, but they’re a little high for my tastes and I might have to bring them closer to the saddle if I drop them at all.
- ports for internal wiring
- 3 sets of bottle cage bosses
- pump pegs on one seat stay
- canti posts for v-brakes (I considered Paul Racers but they suffer from canti disease.)
- shifter cable bosses suitably placed on the downtube so the shifter cables can arc around a rando bag without tight bends until they have to actually go into the shifters.
- fender mountpoint inside the fork crown so I don’t have to dick around with some stupid daruma
- rack mounts on the fork crown (the Pacenti Paris-Brest crowns have them, but the crown is $38, so it would have to wait until I’d brazed up, then cut apart to examine how far the bronze penetrated the joint, a couple of cheaper forks.)
I’m still trying to decided whether to do GT-style hellenic stays (I’ve grown fond of them after riding with Kevin for 10 or so permanents/brevets) or regular old fastback stays, and I probably need to be talked out of putting the rear brake on the chainstays instead of on the seatstays.
Someone else is going to do the fork, because the failure case for a fork involves going head-first into the pavement and i’ve grown kind of fond of my teeth and face. It will probably be low-trail, just so I can compare low-trail to one of the many high-trail cyclocross forks out there.
Comments
“Baller” means excellent. Nomads don’t have an anti-flat layer, but they’re faster than anything else I’ve had on the midlifecrisismobile (there’s nothing to compare them to on the project bike, because that’s always had Nomads under it), they’re extraordinarily comfortable, and they cling to the road (either paved or gravel) in a gratifyingly secure manner.
I’ll take the weekly flat as a price for this (and the weekly flat is only an artifact of it being a Portland fall/winter; the rain washes all of the pointy things into the bicycle lanes, so every tire I’ve used, up to and including an amazingly horrible pair of Continental Gatorskins, has eaten at least one piece of tire-puncturing debris in its life.)
About internal vs. external wiring; right now I’ve got a forest of zipties holding the wiring onto all of my bicycles (except the project bike, which doesn’t yet have a wired taillight) and it’s ugly. Tubes have to be vented anyway, so they’ve already got holes in them, but that’s why people Framesaver their steel bikes.
On a deeply raked fork, the fender will not sit flush against the fork crown, and if you’ve got a fender mountpoint instead of some jackass daruma that leaves plenty of room to get the headlight wiring out from the crown and onto the front rack (which I’m also going to port for internal wiring.) The only places where the wiring even needs to be visible is where it goes from the fork crown to the rack, from the fork crown to the downtube port, and from the end of the nds chainstay to the taillight (and if I wanted to do a Rene Herse-style commutator on the steer tube I wouldn’t even need to have the fork crown to downtube port connector.
If I can do it, I bolt the fender to the seatstay brake bridge (the mlcm has a fender mountpoint there, which works well when I remember to threadlock the fender bolt) and Russell’s Kogswell has a fork crown mountpoint (which I had to reinforce with a L-strap, because I don’t yet have his front rack brazed together.) I did snap and buy a cyclocross fork for the mlcm (plus a pair of v-brakes, because I am basically done with calipers shoving the fender to the side) and I’ll probably (when I get a torch that’s usable for frame building) braze a mountpoint into it as well, but right now I’ve got a homemade angled daruma washer that I’m using to hold the front fender in place, so I’ll just move that over to the cross fork when it shows up at my LBS.
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Fender mount riv nuts straight into the chainstay and seatstay bridges? It means you have to do the seatstay bridge position dead last, after the fender stays are adjusted, and it might mean you need to find some M5 flathead machine screws, but it does wonders for the lack of rattle.
Looks like you can get Marathon Supreme in 28-622 and 32-622 now; Racers in 30-622 and 35-622. (Still trying to figure out what “baller” means as a tire-related adjective, but if (as I am construing from a recent post) you’re flatting roughly once per 500km, I can say that I haven’t flatted any marathon tire yet, and have enough distance on Supremes and Mondail tires that I really ought to have if the average was 500km between flats. Not counting the Pluses, since Pluses are a slow tire.)
Are you talking a bolt hole straight through the fork crown, per some species of brake mount, for the front fender, or a vertical threaded fitment like a brazed-in daruma? If the later, some caution is advisable if you need to get any lighting wires up the stem/steerer; squishing the fenders straight up like that, while also great suppressing rattle, doesn’t leave a lot of space for wires.
Considered putting wiring mounts on the outside? I’d be reluctant to route wiring internally on a steel frame, just for fear of never getting the wet out, and there are all kinds of wee fittings mean to hold wiring.