Odds & Ends & Clean Miters

It's my day off, and the list of chores wasn't too long so I squeezed in some shop time.

First I worked on the steel frame, forming and brazing two small stainless pieces to protect the finish of the stays from the feet of the pump.

The shape of the handle (at the valve-end) is such that, when the pump is parallel to the seat stay, a little bit of the handle just touches the stay.  We don't want that to bump and wear the paint, so the one stainless protector is much longer to cover this spot too.

I also got some filing done on this frame, and have a few more hours of cleanup before the painter - but its getting real close now.

After taking an afternoon ride, I went back to the shop and did some more work on the CF frame. 

Here are a just a couple of pictures of the mitered tubes.  The first should make clear how the shoreline of the miter is different on the inside of the tube compared to the outside.  While this also happens with steel tubes, its much more pronounced on a CF tube due to the greater wall thickness.

And here is an example of how the BB fits up.  Note that I don't have a good way to hold everything tightly in place while taking this picture, maybe I can get a better shot when its in the jig for the initial glue-up.

You can see that the BB tube is cut to rough length (about 3MM long), with the rough end facing the camera.  I will be gluing the Ti BB sleeve in next, aligning the drive side with the finished end of the BB shell.  Then I can sand the the rough end down to match shell down to match the sleeve.

After that it will be time to miter the rear triangle and cut the head tube to length.  Then the fun begins.

One last thing, these tubes came from EDGE Composites (very nice folks with which to work), but they are now called ENVE Composites.