BICYCLES DON’T BUILD THEMSELVES! Part 2 of cloning my favorite bike for adventure touring.

The second video in a series of bicycle framebuilding videos. This one covers the cutting, mitering, coping and fitting of the maintubes. No fire yet, but that’s right around the corner!

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[Music] [Applause] so I just uh checked this on a piece of glass actually use my my desk over there and you kind of roll it none of these tubes are going to be perfectly straight it’s like a 2×4 right so you have to find the Bulge and then put the Bulge up well at least in line you don’t want the Bulge you can see the line I have on here but you don’t want the Bulge going on one of the sides keep it in the vertical axis one of the other things to notice is one of the ends of the tubes is painted that one’s clean and and that’s going to tell us where the butts are so I got to look up the technical drawings on these tubes and Mark my butts okay according to the technical dryings we’ve got 105 mm and then 40 more and then this is the thin part so the butt is right in here and it’s the same on this side so it really doesn’t matter which way you go but you get to make a decision with your top tube of where you cut it you know sometimes you cut a little off both sides you know we’re going to have to miter that down a little bit hack it into length over here and have the shorter side on the seat post and have more up front stiffen it up a little bit so have more thick tube in the front which makes a stiffer front end I’m going to have have it kind of front loaded anyway so I think that makes sense so now when I go to my drawing so this is the edge of the tube on the short butt side it’s going to be at least that long and then marking the long Edge over here cut it about there so let’s double check that we’re going to be at let’s see here I want to think about this a little more to kind of figure this out and just be double triple sure that I’m getting it right this is the actual tube and then these are the actual lugs laid out over the actual drawing and I’ve measured it and confirmed it’s the right length so what I’m going to do is I’m going to draw with a sharpie inside that lug then I’m going to draw with a sharpie inside that lug and then I’m going to hack them down and file them to shape it’s that simple folks watch me screw it up oh hi Greg hi so I just kind of terrible lighting sorry about that just get in there with a sharpie and then I know that I can kind of go beyond the the [Music] [Applause] ink and that’ll draw your miters you can just file them down this one’s a little bit more [Music] complicated there’s [Music] that I marked it head tube seat tube so I mean it’s only going to go one way can’t really screw it up but well I probably could I’ve got some tubing holder guys here all [Music] right all right you can kind of see I’m creeping up on on the line so I don’t do this that often guys that do it all the time can just like without worry just Hammer these things out real quick you know if you’re doing a lot of frames like in a production and then you set your milling machine up and get your angles and lighter them I’ve actually got a fixture coming I might try to get my uh drill press set up to kind of rough these in and then I can just touch them up with a file but all you need is a hacksaw on a file to build a bike frame really if you kind of set it up where your file’s somewhat level kind of step back and take a look at it get it level with the ground and then just think about going straight forward that’ll give you a nice even coat and it helps you creep up on things and just kind of follow your line all the way around take off the edges watch things disappear but theoretically when you get it to this point it should match up to that head tube in The Jig pretty well okay so starting to be a little lower on this side I’ve got some to take some more to take off on this side so I’m going to favor this side try to keep things flat you know if you do this too much then it gets all uneven and so I’m at the line for the most part I can work on this side a little bit smaller file here and back off the edges let’s go take a look so one thing you can look at and you can just see how well it matches up man that’s like so good right and then you can check it in the frame jig too so that’s not bad but it’s also not good enough so throw it in the jig here and there’s a lot of like trial and error at this point especially for a guy like me and I just kind of look around and see where I need to take off material and it’s definitely on these outside lips I need to I need to file those back a little bit and then it should slide right into place famous last words I’m going to push these sides out a little bit again I’m trying to keep things in plain here okay so that’s a little better we could pull the sides out just to smidge more and then it looks like it’s hitting in the top first and the bottom second so I’m going to take a little off this top side too so I’m putting at an angle here where I’m going to favor this top side and I know the top side cuz I drew that line just give it a few swipes you know a very little bit makes a big difference here so go check that got to take a little bit off the wings it’s kind of like pushing them down and out that’s very important you just take a little brush and oh just kidding I figured out that I can leave my tubing block on there and just throw it up in here and work with it all right so that’s into jig oh there we go it’s got a little bit of a wobble to it but I mean that’s as tight as I’ve gotten it man now I feel like I could take a little off the insides actually maybe it is grabbing a little bit right there you know the lug is going to cover it all up anyway so the seat tube miters this one especially is way [Music] shallower okay so I got my top line and I got good over here in the head tube and then you can see I’m hitting the seat tube but there’s a gap here so I got to take a bunch of material off at least in the bottom Edge so opposite the line and maybe a little off the line it looks like my my Shar Sharpie marks are right on so I can go just past the Sharpie marks in this so if I just take off like a millimeter here not even I think it’ll slide right down into place here we’re going to be spot on there’s just a tiny Gap right here it’s just not quite resting there because it’s just sticking just a little bit there so I’m just going to take a smidge off there and maybe off the top file it back a little bit and it’s going to set right into place that looks pretty good resting in its home there resting in its home there nice and clean [Music] there that’s a good fit I’m okay with that all right ready to get going on the seat tube here so seat tubes are buted down by the bottom bracket and I’ve labeled the buted side which is the painted side so the butt goes to about here and then tapers off and then it’s straight through here it’s 274 in the inside for a 272 seat post basically it’s pretty straightforward we are going to cope the bottom end here so this will go into the bottom bracket I’m just going to stick it in there and draw with a sharpie and then hit it with the file and get it nice and close from there then we’re going to have to determine the length which we’ll do um with the lug we’ll get the length cut with the lug and you can just lob it off straight it’s it’s easier cuz you only have to cope one side and cut the other so here we go all right I cut a a little bit off of this one with a hacksaw thought it might save me a little elbow [Music] grease all right now I’m going to file it the other way [Applause] all right that kind of gives you an idea what things look [Music] like here all right kind of see in there how that works looks like we got a little lip right there we need to file down sticking up a bit too [Music] high that looks pretty good yeah if that lip sticks up anymore the bottom bracket will bottom out on it okay so back in The Jig got the SE post where it wants to be and I’m going to use a dummy bottom bracket an [Music] unlugenc here where the top of this tube hits and then just kind of look and see inside there you know it looks like it’s about 2 mm above it so that’ll get us really close too so I made my line a little bit darker there I’m going to hit it with a hacksaw and take a good guess at [Music] it so with the tube in my saw guide and see so that’s going to cut it just at the top of that so it’s going to cut it a little long and I can always just kind of grind it down with the sander all right we’ll check the fit here go in [Music] there get that head tube out of the way and then back in the way wow I think it’s right on we’re here and here and [Music] [Applause] here we got a little bit of wiggle room down here yeah that’s going to be just fine wow H I did something right I got it right on the first try it’s a good fit all right I got the bottom bracket on and the seat lug on and the top head tube lug on and everything is fitting really really good and tight so now we’re going to work on the down tube right there okay i’ I’ve marked my Center the tube is bent this way I can’t remember which call that and then I marked my butts and I’ve got a long side and a short side and I think I want to stiffen up the front end so that’s up here I want the longest butt up here which means I want to cut as much off down here as I can but I don’t really want that to be too short either so it’s not noodly down there I think I want to kind of cut off something from either end and we know it’s approximately 620 mm from the center of here to the center here and this is 670 mm long so I’m going to be chopping off about 25 mm from either side approximately but I’m going to go to the drawing and double check all that real quick okay I’ve got the lugs and the tube kind of mocked up here on the drawing and with these little clamps holding things in place I am going to draw my lines and start filing I don’t think I can lose with this plan so I’m just going to go for it I’m not going to yeah I’m going to I’m going to draw the lines from this and then hack it and then file [Music] [Music] all right again I just kind of hacked a big section out now I’m just going to grind it off uh here we [Music] go looking at my FIT here and it looks like got to take the wings down again quite a bit both of them equally so the wings are the part that I wasn’t able to draw with the Sharpie so that makes a lot of sense I kind of had to do those freehand get the clamp in there like that and just go to town on the sides here slowly but [Music] surely so it’s a much better fit and then we can check it with the lug put that on there and you can [Music] see lines up pretty [Music] good just like that pretty good I’m getting good at this I should build frames more often so now on the bottom bracket side second verse same as the first I’m going to try to pack out some material first seems to go a lot quicker and if I can get the sauce started more [Music] filing all right I got started on the side cut here keep working on that that looks pretty good maybe take a little off this Edge right [Music] there all right of course you can’t see any of this but you’ll have to trust me it’s pretty good okay back here in The Jig got the bottom bracket in there and I’m letting the the seat tubes just going straight down through so the joints are kind of coped together down there they’ll kind of hold this give me an idea of you know just so it doesn’t slide all the way down to this post so I’m going to lock the bottom bracket into place here get that tube in there and we’re going to set these brackets which I think I’m going to move this one this this one seems to be pretty ready to go that one locked down go to this hole with it well it’s a bit short but I think that’ll be okay I think it’s going to be fine oh this is way out of whack over here that ain’t right okay never mind that’s not right you may have seen that I’m just noticing it we’re going to move that down and that’s going to change the length and I think it’s going to be perfect let’s do this how are we going to do it we need to move these guys that’s why this was in perfect position just about is cuz I didn’t adjust it move this guy down one see if we can keep this one there though I like it down here more than up here okay got to slide that down so it seems that the angle is a little different than what the lug wants it’s we’re going to going have to bend that Tang a little bit so you see there we’re going to kind of have to shape that one a little bit all in all I clean those lugs up I’m getting close to brazing time I’m not going to do too much to these lugs I don’t see any sense in Reinventing the wheels Reinventing the wheel it’s just one wheel that you reinvent you need to reinvent all of them how cool is that okay those are our lugs and we’re going to grind these numbers off and uh get all this scale off get it down to Bare Metal clean out the insides you just got to clean them all up do that with couple of different tools here you know this sort of thing it’s loud it’s tedious it’s boring but it’s necessary so here we go it’s a good job for Woody Chelson here here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]