Face it, no man or woman is an island. While I claim to be a frame builder I really just put together pieces that I get somewhere else. Sure, I bend, form and draw tubes, I CNC dropouts etc. but at the end of the day I am just one part of the puzzle. I like to play a greater role than some in the total result. Some go much further than I.

This is a bike I have been thinking about for a while. I wanted to do some brazing with a gas torch and had some ideas. I also wanted to do a 650 bike and either a fixed gear or a hub-gear bike as well as something with slacker geometry and tight radius fork rake for the messed up roads around here. Oh ya, I wanted to try bi-laminated lugs.

If you have never heard of them, here is the scoop. Generally, lugs are either cast from steel or stamped from sheet. Bi-lam lugs are simply sleeves that are slipped over the ends of the tubes and brazed on. There are several potential sequences of construction and I tried them all.

One of the things I dislike about modern lugged bikes is the superfluous piece of head tube that sticks up above the top tube. It’s an acquired taste that I hope to gain soon.
It’s too bad that when the other important design features leave you in such a precarious position. When the bike is built it’s better.

This bike won’t have that problem because it will have a 1930’s style “head clip” type stem that takes up tons of space as well as other outdated concepts such as steel handlebars, cranks and 2X adjustable seat post and few if any alternate gear ratios.

The first thing was to modify a BMX integrated head tube for the upper cup and head tube lug sleeve. The reason it looks weird is using an integrated head tube is somewhat unusual. I want this thing to look like it was built in a dirt floor shop in London in 1931

top bearing cup and head tube segment

I wasn’t sure how the brazing would go I started with the head lug/top tube assembly

I didn’t want to braze this frame in my fixture so initially I just tacked it with the torch and sweat brazed it on my stand. It didn’t come out straight. It had just a bit of twist and I would rather throw it away than fight tubes like that. I had the idea, since the angles were set to clamp it in another fixture I have. This device has some interesting abilities and takes up little space in the shop.

Here is some sweat joints and the fixture I mentioned.

Once all this was done, I did the fillets (pronounced fill-it’s). I know how they came out but my eyes are ready to fall out of my head. More later. Thanks for tuning in.