A little more progress

Today was a big day for hits on the web site, looks like folks were interested to see Carbon 1. That said, there have been no comments so maybe they didn't like the paint scheme. It's designed to appeal to a large local club, which limits what can be done in terms of colors and such. Anyway, I like it.

Sundays are a day of work for me, so bike building had to wait until after the kids got to bed.

The task for tonight was to begin Sarah's fork. The crown is an Long Shen LC-27. It's a sloping crown with external tangs and a triangular cutout on the outside tang. The shape is really nice (unless you hate sloping crowns) and it has the rake built in.

The built in rake is important as it seemed like these legs would be hard to bend. They had to be trimmed from both the bottom and top. On the bottom, Joe B's stainless dropouts fit right in now. Long time readers will recall that I've had to chuck these up in the drill press and cut down the diameter of the internal part of the dropout for previous forks. Anyhow, the bottom of the legs couldn't be cut shorter. So the rest came off the top, and again as much was cut off as possible, while still fitting the sockets in the crown. A test assembly showed that the wheel fits fine and that the fork corresponds correctly to the overall geometry of the bike.

I spent a good deal of time duburring the ends of the fork legs and then cleaning up all parts for joining. Until Freddy's Al-tife arrives, I've been doing my fine cleanup using one of the organic solvents (probably uses citric acid).

Out came the fork jig for the first time in a while, and everything was test fitted and the jig adjusted. Then everything comes off except the crown and steerer-tube. This crown has a lip on the bottom limiting how far the steerer is inserted. I ground a divot into the lip at the front and back. This way the filler can be fed from the bottom and its easy to see when its flowed out all the way around the steerer tube above the crown race. If the crown had no lip, it's just as easy to let the steerer stick out a little from the bottom and flow from the top.

It's interesting, I hadn't realized what a massive crown this is. It took about 3 hours to heat up. Maybe it just seemed that way, but it was slowwww. It cooled off just as slowly. In fact I began to wonder if it was stainless steel - but checking on the Ceeway site confirmed that it was not. Whew! Polishing the head tube will be enough for this old guy.

Hopefully we can finish the fork tomorrow and then move back to the frame. It would be great to ship it off to the painter by weeks end, but that depends on how busy the day job turns out to be.