Progress?
Three racks in various stages of construction. The small one is for the midlifecrisismobile, and the two big ones are for Russell’s Kogswell and the Murray Baja Experience!
This is about 2 hours of work, spread out over about 3 months; 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there, and a marathon 45 minute brazing session to get the slats and backstops in. You may notice the little Y-shaped thing that’s sitting by the small rack; that’s the fork crown mount for it. Yes, it’s not symmetric, and that was an accident, but it turned out to be a fortunate accident because it gives me more clearance around the Travel Agent that I’m using to get enough brake pull from the sti shifters on the mlcm.
The list of things to do is still somewhat daunting; I need to braze up light mounts for all of these racks, cut out rack mounts and braze the to the struts I have yet to cut out, braze in central crossbars for all three racks (the small rack only needs them to have a place to attach the fender to, the others need them to keep cargo from sagging into the front fender/wheel,) then backstops for the big racks, fork crown mounting brackets for the big racks, and a decaleur to go with the small rack (because I’ve put a 10cm stem onto the midlifecrisismobile and the old Velo Orange decaleur no longer clears the stem. I will probably also braze a couple of bolts into the deck of the small rack so I can tuck a minipump between my rando bag and the backstop – maybe I’ll scrounge a Lezyne or PDW pump to go there instead of the plastic Topeak I’m using right now – as well as some loops for wire routing (I do need to decide whether to drill a hole in the head tube, then fish wire back to the rear light and down to the dynohub – if I do that I can get rid of most of the forest of zipties that currently festoon the midlifecrisismobile) but those decisions are fairly trivial and can wait a while.
Comments
Yeah, the little rack (when I get it finished) is going to have about as many joints as a frame does. And the joints are all a lot smaller and fussier to shape. I think that when I finally get around to assembling the kit bicycle I’m going to be very happy that I’m filing on things that don’t require teeny tiny files to work into the nooks and crannies, and that have tubes large enough so I can drill vent holes into them without worrying about having the drill bit skitter off to one side and tear the tube apart.
(I may end up redoing the fork crown mount too, because the bolt I’m using turns out to be a little bit too short for my tastes – it just barely reached the recessed nut and I think I want to have a little more of the threads engaged when I take the thing out for a ride.)
All the threads, and a few more for a couple of washers, seems like an excellent plan.
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The one time I managed to talk a frame builder into also producing a front rack, I was informed in no uncertain terms he wasn’t going to be doing that again. There’s a lot of little fiddly joins and a remarkable amount of brazing or welding in a rack.
A lot of the Lyzene small pumps come with mounting brackets meant to go on water bottle cage screws, behind the cage. I find that the brackets work well, so you could get away with a couple of tabs to take the M5 bolts?
Despite the 2011 model’s lamentable predilection toward bringing Presta valve cores with it if you’d screwed it down too tightly on the valve, I’m very fond of my Lyzene micro-floor drive; you’d need 31 cm of width to fit that back of a rando bag, but that doesn’t seem inherently implausible.