Progress

These are the road chainstays from Edge Composites with a set of dropouts finally bonded into them. I was unsure of the strength of my initial glue bond since the internal taper flares forward and it seems likely that my glue would have been squished into the wrong place, so I made an extra over wrap of the front half of the dropout for some security and style.



I also was able to put two layers of carbon on the front end of the bike. The vacuum bag process is AWESOME! Way easier to get good results. I just have to be careful when mixing up my resin. The summer temperatures shrink my window of opportunity pretty greatly. The first layer of carbon was a near disaster as mixed resin went exothermic on me. I knew things were going to be interesting when the consistency turned from honey to silly putty in about a minute. I fortunatley had most of the carbon already laid up, so it wasn't as big a problem as it could have been. Here's a shot of the vacuum in action. The whole thing cost me about $25 for the pump, and the rest of the stuff was trash picked. I do feel a bit guilty about releasing all of the freeon into the air when I robbed the air conditioner of its compressor, but hopefully the environment will be saved by my bicycling instead.

Before
After

This is the first wrap of the seat tube to top tube joint on the newest road bike. More to come when the vacuum bagging materials and chainstays come in.

New Pics

I finally have some new pics up of the latest frame (Mark III). The main triangle is all glued together and I'm waiting for a few more pieces to come from Edge Composites. It turns out that the first two chainstay units that I ordered were designed to be track chanstays, and therefore were a bit too narrow for my needs. I called up the guys and they were amazingly helpful. Good parts, great service, I guess something that I aim for as well.

I've also got some cool vacuum bagging supplies coming this week, so hopefully I'll be able to finally get the sort of "one shot" joints that I really would like to have. Of course, I still want to stick to what I know to a large degree, so it's also hard not to start just wrapping the joints with my special high tech compression wrap (read: innertubes).