Interbike

Interbike was awesome. As per usual, the biggest gathering of my people that I've ever been too. It's unusual to get a chance to be a minor level nerd in a big ass convention hall full of other nerds. It makes me feel a bit normal at the end of the day. As if there's nothing unusual about my 24/7 obsession with bikes. There are other people like me, and occasionally a few of them actually make some money.

Main goals were to find a manufacturer of 1.5" steerer tube forks, and a headset that can work with them, and also somebody who makes a cyclocross chainstay set for the next bike. I want to make me a cross bike BADLY.

Also, if anyone has a sweet hookup on a tubing notcher, or some lathe parts, let me know, I'm looking to tool up in the next few weeks and get this thing rolling.

Progress

I got a fork for the latest bike this week, and have also completed all of the carbon layup. Remaining to do are sanding the frame (least favorite part) machining the headset cups and finishing the paint. The bike is looking a lot like a bike, and should end up being my lightest to date. I'm hoping for about 3.25 pounds finished weight. I'm putting the rest of the pics up on FLickr

Waylaid

I've made some minor progress on the most recent bike project, but I've been really waylaid by a number of other factors, life and projects that keep coming up. My sister visited in early August, and various teammates of mine decided to crash their bikes. As the owner of my club's sponsor shop said, "These Cat 4's are going to keep you in business!" True enough. I've had to do 2 emergency repairs on frames that were otherwise cracked and un-rideable. I'm making a bit of side cash, but I really wish that I could just have a few days to work on the latest road bike uninterrupted. I have gotten the seatstays selected and started, however. That is a definite bonus.

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).

Cleaning house

Spent a lot of time over the last week and a half cleaning up and refurbishing the "shop". My basement is now slowly approaching what might be construed as a workable place. I also finally got around to piecing together bamboo and carbon for the next bike.

I ended up ordering chainstays from Edge Composites, and they're awesome, except now I have to figure out how to use them with the dropouts that I have. In an ideal world, I would probably try to fabricate some new dropouts from Titanium using some Paragon Machineworks bits and some tubing, but that is extremely unlikely for the near future as I have zero titanium welding ability.