[MENTION=381793]gugie[/MENTION] Me too! Very nice job on the frame. Your tools for straightening a bent stay are much more advanced than mine.

In the past, I grabbed an old 70s schwinn frame (nothing special) that had a seriously bent seat stay out of the scrap pile. It was bent a good 15 degrees DIRECTLY above where the dropout ended (inside the stay.) I figured, "what the hell, I'll try to straighten it" good experience at least. So I duck taped (yes... you heard that correctly) a very strong crowbar to the outside (concave) side of the bend, insulating the frame paint with a few pieces of pipe that I had cut in half lengthwise. The whole apparatus looked like a bow and arrow (just the bow part) with the crowbar being the "string." Then I put the whole thing in a vise, again insulating the frame paint with some half rounds of pipe, or possibly wood, I forget. And cranked on it. It certainly worked, I went very slowly. But you seriously have to OVERBEND the stays to make them spring back to "straight."

Then, of course, I had no way of checking dropout alignment, so I just kept trying to mount a wheel and bent the dropouts with a crescent wrench.

It worked, the bike rode fine, although it was hard for me to tell because it was so large.

The moral of the story is, I would have love to have watched how it was supposed to be done. While my method worked, it certainly wasn't right.