Fixture Mini Bonanza!
So I’ve got more pics of my rear end fixture (yeah, I said rear end hehehehe hehehe)
I’ve got it set up to accept Anvil dummy axles, and I’m going to make a set of clamps to secure the front ends of the chainstays as well. That way I can braze the dropouts to the stays, and miter them both at the same time using this fixture on my lathe. It’ll take the trial and error (or file and check) out of cutting the stays.
So since I used Brent’s dropouts and chainstays to get the thing all set up, I figured I’d go ahead and work on his frame. The poor guy has been waiting forever. So I got the chainstays brazed on today, and right now it’s cooling off. I’ll put it in the sink to soak in a little bit.
Tacked
Getting hot
Getting cold
Looking like a bike. Looking like I need to take some boxes out with the trash, too. Oh well, more to come.
More fixtures
I left you with the tube block, now I’ll post it in action. 
That hole saw makes a pretty good cut, as long as you feed it slow. That’s .058″ which is thicker than a frame tube. It’s what I make seat tube sleeves from. Thinner frame tubes require slower feed rate, but they’ll cut just fine.
It makes a clean cut on the first shot,
and that makes a nice tight miter.
Mitering main tubes is one thing, but chainstays is another. That’s where this next fixture comes in. I started this one with the milling setup I showed you a few posts ago.
I drilled a hole between the two pieces with my handy dandy new drill press, now I can bolt the pieces together to hold my Anvil dummy axle.
There it is, with a pair of stays in it. The big round thing slides in the slot, and centers the front ends of the stays. It also gives me a clue how much tire clearance I’m gonna have. In the next few days I’m going to setup a clamp to hold the front of the stays. Then I’ll be able to miter chainstays on it, too.
New fixture
This one I’ve been wanting and waiting on for a while. 
It’s a tube clamp for my lathe. It mounts on the toolpost and you clamp a tube in it. Put a holesaw in the chuck, rotate the compound to the desired angle and it miters a tube to the very angle you need. This is going to speed up the process of cutting frame tubes, and allow me to do a few things that weren’t really feasible before.
It’s got a bit of up/down adjustment, so I can make off-center cuts as well. That will be useful for making lugs and all that bilaminate stuff I’ve been wanting to do. I can also do some milling out of slots and stuff in tubes, and drill holes that are perfectly lined up. I need to get a few holesaws and try it out this weekend, so there will be some updates soon with the carnage, um, I mean results;)
Breaking the silence
So I’ve been pretty lax about updating this, mostly because there hasn’t been much going on. There have been a couple of things to report on, though. Adam’s frame was hanging in my shop, when Perry came to have me put another cable stop on, his son Jack was with him and claimed the frame for himself. The only issue, was that he didn’t like the wishbone, he wanted s bend seatstays. It’s not like I haven’t cut a frame in half before, so I said ok.
before
Now I wanted to do something different, because that’s just me. A lot of times I take ideas from various sources and mix them up, then put my own spin on them. When Keith Bontrager built frames, he made stays out of straight gauge chro-mo slipped inside a larger piece of straight gauge.
If you look close, you can see the seam in the seatstays right below the brake bosses.
Steve Garro of Coconino does it the same way. I decided to spice that idea up a tad, so I added lug points to my seam.
Sorry about the blur. Heres another shot.
So add a couple of braces and the deal is done. Once again, some tight tire clearance.
It’s actually pretty decent around the sides of the tire, and the dropouts are all the way forward which isn’t a probable position in real life.
If the tire looks little off, it’s partially because of the camera angle, and partially because I hand bent the stays. I bent the first one, then bent the second one to match. Well, almost match. I’ll do these stays again, so it’ll be worth building a setup for getting them the same.
Currently, I’m looking at drill presses. I want to get one soon, because I have several projects lined up for one already. Like building a fixture to match seatstays, and a tube bender.
Anyway, more to come I guess.
Edoz Bicycles 