Originally Posted by
bulgie
Andy's advice is great if you have room for a "flat surface" — I don't. My tiny shop space has room for a frame jig, only because it's vertical and attached to a wall, so the footprint (aka the floor area it takes up) is minuscule. So for that scenario, look for a jig that can mount to a wall. Doug's Ukrainian jig can do that, I think (Doug, please correct me if that's wrong).
Yes my fixture can hang on the wall when not in use. I'm not home where I can take a picture of it on the wall but I found in iPhoto a picture of a student frame and behind it one of my fixtures on the wall. That student frame was a fun one to do. She was a botanist and designed the blank lugs around the theme of a trillium flower. She was also fairly short and we used 650C wheels so she didn't have massive toe overlap. I did the spraying but she created the colors and design. In her case she wasn't wanting to become a builder so I did the brazing too.
Many classic UK builders used a simple version of my fixture instead of doing a full scale drawing. F.W. Evans in his brochures in the 1930's claimed to invent it. In fact Bulgie used to keep a website with scanned old catalogs that showed Evan's advertising brochure with a picture of his fixture on the front. Do you still make those scans available Mark? We actually had such a fixture on the wall at Ellis Briggs where I learned. The concept i use on my fixture is the same I've just added lots of bells and whistles that make me happy.
look behind the frame to see an example of one of my fixtures hanging on the wall.
One of the huge challenges of stand alone fixtures is accuracy. A lot of precision (= money) and maybe mass has to be built into the fixture so the frame is not built out of alignment. My philosophy is a bit different. I can adjust the pieces of my fixture that hold the tubes using the flat table it is sitting on as a reference. This takes away the expense and mass required if it was a stand alone version. By the way, since my fixtures are laser cut and etched in Ukraine, I'm not involved with any of the financials. They need every penny over there. Their lives are a mess and they keep saying they see drone bombs flying over their heads often. Occasionally they explode nearby (because they were shot down) and leave huge craters. Imagine what that does with their mental state of mind. I just assist with presentation and back up.