Half a frame, but still waiting on a pair of mail-order track ends
With the original fork from the Trek to prop up the front end, and a paving brick to prop up the rear end so it’s more-or-less at the orientation it will be when I get the rear end brazed on. I decided that I’d rather not go down the path of doing a fillet-brazed BB cluster again (the first one wasn’t necessarily BAD brazing, but the BB slid sideways enough to make the frame unsusable) and snarfeled up a lugged BB of approximately the correct ST/HT/CS angles (both are about 1° too tight, but that’s an easy enough adjustment to make) to put into the thing.
Note that I didn’t drill the frame for bottle bosses yet; my previous attempt at a jig wasn’t very satisfactory, so I’m thinking about a way to do it better (without spending a stack of money on the thing – a commercial jig would be nice, but the ones that do tube aligning cost a large fraction of the cost of a hobby mill or small lathe) and until I figure it out this frame will just have to be unsuitable for randonerdery.
Stouter tubing, too (9/6/9 vs 8/5/8), so I can see if it makes any noticeable difference to the ride. I suspect it won’t – the mountainhack has a front triangle made of whatever super-heavy MTB tubing Trek did on the 820 that year, and it still has a sublime ride – because lightweight chainstays & seatstays are the way to go for a flexy-but-not-noodly frame.
The todo list for this thing to make it into a bicycle is
- the rear triangle (of course), which is waiting on a pair of track ends,
- shifter stops for the 3-speed hub (a Shimano 333; I do have a Suntour S-A hub, but it needs to be lubricated and it looks, at least according to the net of a billion lies, like S-A hubs without a grease port need to be disassembled to lubricate if you’re doing anything other than pouring lightweight oil into the shifter port on the axle?) I’d love to get a S-A 3-speed fixie hub, but the old ones appear to be few, far between, and expensive, and the new ones seem to have, aside from the ridiculous name, a reputation of becoming a freewheel hub under load(?!?),
- brake cable stops,
- a fork (the Trek’s fork would work, but when I braze up an xtracycle frame to replace the Trek I’ll want to put this fork back with the frame when I sell it) either made from scratch or out of my pile of forks,
- HT reamed and faced,
- BB reamed and faced
which is probably about 5 hours of work, or about 3 days of clock time, which means if I can do the timing correctly I can get this thing on the road in time to dismantle the emergency randonneuse for the final few frame tweaks (aligning the rear triangle, putting a wiring port into the DT for the rear light, and maybe adjusting the position of the shifter bosses) and painting.