I should mention, if you're using stainless steel tubes, TIG welding or silver brazing are the only options. Paint has been sanded off either side of the joint. I desperately want to improve and I want to share the knowledge with others. My 1980s mountain bike, a 1987 Schwinn Cimarron I got for $150, snapped in half. We also have proprietary goods and items from Gasflux, Harris, Weld Mold, 3M. Flux doesn't so much control temperature as it controls chemical reactions. Any brazing process is less hot than welding. Photo: Raphael Orlove A few months back, I got lucky. But if you want to explain the process in more detail in the comments, that would be great. I can't wait! I like the integrated seatstay-seatpost clamp, with the tiny lugs. Now, Gianantonio makes it look easy. awesome photos! What do you want to build today? Braze-ons Rods & Wire Frame Tubes Forks Lugs Dropouts Hardware Merch Our Favorites Bottom bracket shells - ISO threaded - 69mm, 74mm, 101mm - 38.1mm OD. Wonderful to get to see this as it happened. Bryan does good work. Watch Queue Queue. If you quench hot orange-hot chromoly … If you want to learn more about the hand brazing process, a good place to start is here, as well as this nice video from MAP Cycles. In the process I also began to rediscover my ability to concentrate for more than 30 seconds, to not think in hyperlinks and to piece together my swiss-cheese consciousness.I plan to found my own workshop. I want to create objects that are expressly functional yet elegant in form and purpose, human-scale and that will last more than a lifetime.Thanks for posting these wonderful images. Our eyes are forward, not backwards. I like it just the way it is and wouldn't want to turn it into something else. To ensure a comfortable atmosphere for my readers and myself, comments are moderated. To inquire about use of images, please get in touch. Designed by you, hand built by us. Ask Question Asked 8 years, 4 months ago. When you are still learning, it is incredibly frustrating though... cheers from California! As mentioned above, the steel doesn't have any hardness to lose. From what I've seen, Bryan likes to get inventive with seat stay caps and dropout sockets, so I guess that can be considered a signature touch. For a carbon-fiber frame, any dents on the surface can mean a crack or a failure. Steel Frame Brazing - posted in Tech Q&A: Does anybody know of someone that does steel frame brazing? If you notice such, get the frame professionally examined and repaired as soon as you note the dent. Examples are Independent Fabrication, Serotta, and Seven. Its a bike frame not the space shuttle rocket booster. Welding vs brazing bike frames welding vs brazing bike frames how do they make some bike frames so custom bike build process shand cycles. The key is precision - having steady hands and a good eye, so as to align all the parts perfectly, heat the joint evenly and distribute the silver properly. The papers don't change but are joined as one. Small Custom Builder – A small custom builder can best be described as a one – or two-person shop. The frame … 766 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 (415) 683-6166info@missionbicycle.com. The more a person comes to understand the manufacturing process that goes into making bicycles the more they can appreciate the cost of a good bike. Even a skilled craftsmen have this happen but most of the uber-skilled craftsmen can "read" the metal and know what to do to stop a warp or to correct a warp. Here is Bryan carefully arranging everything so that it stays in place. TIG welded joints are the most common type today, found on lots of bikes and lots of styles. Heat promotes oxidation, flux inhibits it. A welded or brazed-on reinforcement can splice the ends of a broken or crumpled tube. Brazed or welded steel plates can reinforce joints between tubes, once alignment has been restored. As the filler metal cools it hardens and forms a joint connecting the metals. I have great admiration for Bryan. Sign In My Account. Great pics. If you want to learn more about the hand brazing process, a good place to start is. From what I've read your mixte rides superbly and all your contact points are dialed. Velouria - thank you for your kind words. It took me over a year of conversations with framebuilders just to get to the point where I can actually read such a book and "get it", but I think that I am finally there. It's its own thing and I like it that way. A truly amazing and beautiful process. I've just barely scratched the surface in comparison. The process is quite beautiful - though best observed through a camera lens that allows you to stand back while enjoying a close-up view. I personally hold a master welder/brazer in the highest regard for their work. The modern steel tubesets are a long way from the skinny steel tubes of yesteryear, and the Enigma Elite HSS is a fine example of how good a contemporary steel bike can be. I agree that the seat cluster is very nice! This website does not use affiliate links. to the blog author. The subscription service is currently unavailable. This one reason custom bikes cost so much more than welded bikes. Comments that are inappropriately personal will not be approved. For most of the bicycle's history, steel has been the primary material for bicycle frames, with lugged construction the primary assembling method. Sometimes it takes brute force and torch to get the warp out of a frame. It is a beautiful art - and yes, as a professional writer, I have to say that the flux bit is tricky to fit into a couple of neat wholly accurate and easily readable sentences! Bike frames can be built of many things: steel, aluminum, carbon, even cardboard. All in all the craftsmen who do this work deserve hero status when they can coax a straight frame every time. Hmm. Flux seals metal from the air so that it doesn't oxidize, while at the same time allowing brazing compound (or solder) to penetrate the gap and do its capillary action thing. The main tube joints that make up each triangle are welded but some of the smaller joints, like the brake bridge, are fillet brazed. For metal there are two primary methods and a lot of confusion about how they compare, or which is used for what, and why. I learnt a great deal in those 7 days but in undertaking this course I can also now truly begin to appreciate the tremendous skill of an artisan like Bryan here. The luck was twofold: … Nice post Velouria especially as I've only just returned from 7 days in Canterbury, UK where I have successfully built a lugged-steel frame and fork to my own specifications (it'll be a single-speed with a geometry that sits somewhere between a path-racer such as the Guvnor and a track bike). All I'm saying is try it, as you have all the materials at hand. I have a fair amount of cleaning up off glassy flux and brass braze to get through before beginning the build however I did see an marked improvement with my later brazes and I want improve further.I have definitely caught the bug. It is crucial that everything is aligned perfectly. Very cool and quite different from the designs I'm most familiar with. I really enjoyed seeing and reading how this is done. Still, I'm curious how a low trail 650B bike would handle in comparison. Hence, it is a simple job for someone that knows how to work on steel frames. I do not place paid promotional content within blog posts. It depends on the objective. What you're seeing is raw steel tubing with a clear gloss powder coat. What do you like and how much do you want to spend? It allows the liquid brazing metal to flow or wet the joint, so that it fills the space between the lug and the tube cleanly. Most bicycle frames consist of metal tubes joined by either brazing or welding. So the filler melts to connect the tubes, but the tubes themselves don't get hot enough to change. Nothing is really happening to it. Steel frames are best welded as … Grant - good luck with the learning process and the workshop plans; your experience sounds wonderful. I advise buying a couple of spare tubes made from a cheaper steel to get used to the brazing process before you jump into the final frame. I'm going up to Portland OR. There is no problem heating chromoly to brazing temperature for any reasonable time. The luck was twofold: First, I was just putting along a little trail and not flying over a jump, and second, I would get to see how an old steel […] But it looks like I'll have an opportunity to work with Bryan on someone else's bike which we'll make a true randonneur. With non-steel frames, options are more limited, but I'll describe them too. A few months back, I got lucky. After years of designing things on a computer which don't exist and never will I can't begin to describe how good it feels to rediscover that seemless relationship between head, hand, senses and the materials you're working with - to being to tacitly understand what you're doing rather than abrogating much of the thinking and comprehension to a machine. Jim - Nope, my mixte has very different geometry than a traditional "randonneur" would. I hope this gives you some idea of how lugged steel frames are built, and a Thank You to Bryan for allowing me to photograph him working. Is that a Royal H. specialty?Given the horizontal fork ends, is the bike destined to be a single-speed/fixie?