Pro's not threatened!

Okay, Richie, Curt, DW, if you're paying attention - you don't need to worry about me catching up to you soon - not that these guys would have worried anyway.

I looking in my BB this morning with daylight and found a small spot where I couldn't see the silver. Bummer. After checking with Fred, I went ahead and fluxed things up, reheated and pulled through as necessary before dinner. I also got a drop of silver in a difficult to clean spot on the top of the BB. ugh. But, my technique is still improved.

After dinner it was time to put water bottle mounts (complete with fancy reinforcements) on the down and seat tubes. Cooled and cleaned these - essentially just had to take off the flux. Next prep the seat-tube and check it against the drawing. A slight adjustment to its spigot and things look good, so clean, flux, pin and braze. The result is soaking in hot water now. I clean off the flux in a little while. Any filing will wait until tomorrow night, along with mounting the front derailer tab. I wish I already had one of e-richie's new tabs, in stainless steel. That would look cool. But, I'm going to make do with what I have.

I probably won't work on the top tube as I have an early ride Saturday morning. Instead, I'll try to get the TT done on Saturday and then focus on properly jigging my rear triangle on Sunday. At the present rate of progress, this frame should be ready for the painter when he's ready for it.

I just remembered that I have to replace steers in two forks. Probably will get than done tomorrow or Sunday too. It shouldn't take long.

Today I sent Freddy some money for flux and rod. Hope it arrives soon as my flux is running out. It will be a good test for the local welding supply to see if they have any good silver flux.

In the next week or two, I'm planning to order a tubing bender and some stainless tubing. With this, I'm going to make a front rack, to hold a Berthold bag. Hopefully it can be built to also hold lights and possibly to provide the cable stop for the front brakes. My thinking is to run verticals up from the back corners which would come together at the point of the cable stop and then join a plate with a hole in it for the steering column. There might also be a cross bar against which to attach the upper part of the bag for stability. We'll see.

That's it for now.