the locust

well this one has been in the works for a while. my brother has been riding a waaay to small cheap ass frame with a flared seattube so the seatpost slides down and makes him look like he is riding a clown bike. so i came across this nice trek from triry2002
here it is


now this would have been a nice conversion on its own but why ride a decent conversion when you can kick it up a notch. i stripped the frame down and it looked something like this badly photoshopped picture.



after that i sent it out to be bead blasted, i know now that u-strip in Milwaukee is a much better option than the guy i used. u-strip will probably have your frame done same day as opposed to the 14 days i waited with the guy i used.
anyways now that i had the frame blasted it looked exactly like the pic of the frame stripped except it was dull grey

(forgot to take a pic here)

so i suppose i could have sent it off to andy at Grafton powder coating services and had it powdered but i wanted to change it up a bit and make it special.

so i ordered some forged track dropouts from www.novacycles.com

the dropouts


after allot of filing and tweaking here they are. camera battery was charging while i was brazing so no action pics



so now i have dropouts in place and they are semi aligned. but i have about a 130mm rear spacing and this is a track bike so its time to remove the rear brake bridge and re-space the rear triangle.



after re-spacing the rear triangle it was time to fabricate a new brake bridge. i didn't like the old on as it was too bulky and it looked odd in its new position. so i brake out some 3/8 o.d. round tube stock and cut off an appropriate piece



after some work with the rat tail file it was time to braze it in place




after it was in place a few file strokes cleaned up the area and i had a finished product.

before cleanup


after cleanup


and finally the final product



so now its off at GPSC being powder coated today. expect some pics of the new paint sometime tomorrow or Sunday.

The LT

thats sweet... want to do that to one of my frames for me???

AfterThisNap

An Amish mob is looking for you.

Nice work. How long have you been brazing? How did you keep the dropouts aligned?
I'll be doing the same thing next week, but with a welder.

absntr

Nice work Kale - thanks for sharing.

Nice shirt too.

the locust

i have been brazing for a few years but only a few months on bikes. the dropouts fit fairly tight in the stays before brazing, the keey to doin it well is spending lots of time adjusting the dopouts in the vice (bending them to fit) before you braze. once i had them brazed in and cleaned up i aligned them using a micrometer and a few peices of 3/8 threaded rod bolted to each dropout - although park makes a tool for it.

the next project will be a tigged 29" MTB frame although i will be assisting on that one since it is my friends bike (and he can actually tig as opposed to my lame ass attempts at it)

summerinside

Good work. This is actually a really rad option for riding fixed on the street (I'd post my Bridgestone RB-1 with trackends, but everyone's probably sick of it).

That's going to be a really fun bike to ride. (and the resale value of that frame just went up by about 1000%)

Rikardi151

Yeah, I was jus thinking, you could make a pretty good business for yourself getting cheap/free road frames, doing this procedure, powdercoating them and selling them on ebay. You could probably charge double what it costs you EASILY... especially if you can send out like 5 frames to be powdercoated at once, as that would be the biggest expense.

the locust

not if you are really good friends with the powdercoater. my real problem is letting them go i spend waay to much time making sure the dropouts are perfectly aligned and that they are both symetrical.

AfterThisNap

just buy the park tools if you're gonna be doing this as a hobby. They're about 80 bucks for the set and make dropout alignment super EZ

ultraman6970

Good job...

UM

sof5000

hey if I buy you said park tool and pay fo the powder coating and such......you wanna do this for me?.....eh......EH


xvx
wes

SpiderMike

Nicely done. Now to find someone here in the Houston area that can braze.

the locust

Don Walker???

edit: and to all the people asking me about doing this for them i am not ignoring you just giving it consideration. also i dont want he mods to think i have some sort of commercial interest in posting this.

the locust

got it back from the powdercoaters last night. looks awsome. i totally recommend andy at GPSC if you are looking for a reasonable powdercoat. 75 for a single color and 120 for candy colors with clearcoat over the top. PM me if you are looking for a good deal on powdercoat and i will send you his contact info.

Jamtastic

very nicely done. fun color.

killsurfcity

that refferece to candy paint got mike jones stuck in my head...
nice work, looks great!

treechunk

You did in fact raise the height of the rear axle about 2-3mm which I think will be lowering the BB about the same, which may or may not be an issue depending on the frame's existing BB height.


That being said, looks good.

The LT

that looks awesome...love the color

the locust

the bb height isnt to bad and its only about 1.75mm measured from the back of the original dropouts which is essentially like taking 10 psi out of your tire so it is really negligble.

bobostein

not houston, but austin
www.moyercycles.com

i think he is biff on this board, and he could do it for you.

marqueemoon

Wow. Nice!

greengnt

that project turned out pretty well. did you use brass on the track ends and brake bridge? did you cold set the seatstays when you put the brake bridge that you fabricated in?

icithecat

I am looking at the wall and I can see your future written there.

tozovr

hey man great work! I wish I had the skill to do that work...I just posted my MTB frame conversion and the new track ends my buddy brazed in last week.

I dig the step by step!

RJ

ultraman6970

nice