I know that bike!

 
A couple of months ago I worked on a fixie-conversion of a Scott CR1 with a broken dropout. Since the owner had already purchased a new carbon bike, he wanted something light and fun to kick around town on. I took some Surly hooded steel dropouts and welded on some tangs with Brett's torch, then bonded them all together. It's cool to see your work actually riding around town.

Familiar dropouts

 
When I'm working on a bike I'm always looking at things up close, and therefore am acutely aware of the slight imperfections. I'm always glad when they get put together into a bike, and all of the little problems fade away. This was one of my first welding projects and it was a great combination of steel and carbon work, and pretty challenging!

Bike parts

 
In an insane and probably foolhardy effort to save a few grams on my next super-bike, I've decided to carve my own dropouts out of some carbon plate that I purchased. It's a lot of work for marginal gains, but hopefully the result will be worth it. The nice thing is that the older style Cannondale derailleur hangers work splendidly with this setup: super rigid and replaceable.

Before

My teammate Ross had the misfortune of T-boning a guy who crashed in front of him at the Greentree training race in early August. Ross plowed his front wheel into the other fellow's back, and did a full somersault, emerging almost unscathed. Not so for his bike. It was broken in 3 places; the fork crown, the downtube joint and then 2/3 of the way down the top tube. SMASH! He was pretty sure it couldn't be fixed, but I was pretty sure it could. This was probably my most extensive repair to date.  

 

After

I'm pretty pleased with the results. Luckily the bike held itself together well enough for me to simply repair joint by joint. Ross got a good deal on the replacement fork from our club sponsor, Breakaway Bikes and I painted everything to match. I probably could have done a Giant logo to replace the original, but I kind of like the stealth look of the new paint. Ross came over on Monday night and we got Circles take out, had some beers and put his bike together.