The one I used at trek was a round bar to go through the bb and I forget if there was an alignment bar on the outside. It was permanently attached to a table though.
According to the Vintage-Trek website, we were pretty hit or miss about getting the serial numbers right

I guess it's time to publish an Andy Stewart serial number secret decoder?

pun pun. Andy

Here's the sibling to the number punch vise. This one clamps around the steerer to mark the fork. I got to use a new boring head on my mill. Really neat that it went well without issues, But it was cold, 24F degrees in the garage. I doubt my heart rate got above 90 today yet i feel like i rode 40 miles. Andy

I was out working on the new project last night and took some photos of a couple of other little tools I've made.

The fork blade gauge is really simple but very handy.



I use this to hold canti bosses when mitering. Simple little thing but gets a bunch of use.

It seems that the simple tools, or maybe the tools that make a simple operation quicker/easier, are the ones that I like to figure out. I have held a cable stop braze on bit in various ways before. The tapered end of a punch can be jammed up the stop's ID while you do what ever to it. The bit comes loose often and you tap it back in place. Here's my solution. Andy

I always like seeing your tools/fixtures. What are you doing with the cable stops that requires it being held like this? Mitering the base with smaller radius so it fits on a smaller tube better?

This comes from someone who hates cleaning braze-ons more than any other task in the process. Have you come up with a tool that helps clean the underside of those reinforcement stars?!

I do prep the base and sides of the stop before brazing. When my wire wheel is clean I'll just use it to clean the surface. I also sometimes change the cast miter with a file and have used production cloth instead of the grinder's wire wheel for cleaning prep. So being able to hold the stop, maybe in a vise, helps.

I don't use bottle boss star reinforcements on most all my bikes. I did long ago and have a few times since. I just never found the need to do so but I don't use tubes with uber thin walls either. Andy

As I was fabbing this I wondered if you guys could tell me what's it for. Like many of my tools it took a few years of mental incubation to sprout. Andy

Is it a front rack jig?

Good call but it's a rear rack jig. Here's the insitu shot. I still haven't figured out the rack top to jig arms clamping, might just use wire. Andy.

I almost just stopped at rack jig. This looks like a nice solution, well done.

I just did my first set of braze on cable hold downs. I used a piece of 1/4" OD tube about 16" long that I had around. Laid that in the cable saddles of two hold downs. It allows you to align things with a good visual of being straight on the tube and keeps the two hold downs aligned. Gravity did the rest. Worked great!

I don't have a lot of tools that I have made.

- hole saw arbors turned on morse taper stubs from the cheap store;
- rack bender
- heavy tube bender
- Small wheel set for my 2x72 for grinding copes that aren't worth setting up for
- I have a nice set of old milling machine tables that I can set up to hold almost anything, so I don't need things like butt gauges for the slow rate of production I engage in because I can fixture that on the table.

I will put up some pics when I get back to the shop

Ok, I have the heavy tube bender here, it was home made, but not by me, a guy I met through a frame group knocked a few out. He had to buy large chunks of steel for the dies, they got quartered, so then he had to make 4 benders to sell off the sets. The guy would toss this stuff out on his downtime as a firefighter It is an old picture, today I could set it up on my fixture table, though it really takes a huge shop, or the outdoors to get the swing room this thing needs. You can nudge tools to get nice sweeping curves or do hard bends. I think you can get this kind of thing for cheap on ebay, back in the early 2000s, they were a lot of money if you didn't make one.:

I thought I might throw this up as well. Built at home from 8020 and mostly parts from McMaster Carr. Cones came from The Chop Shop. A few waterjet parts, a couple of lathe bits that I was able to make at work, but the rest was made at home on my mill. I have full SW models and step files if anyone wants them. The rear is direct reading for BB drop and horizontal center length. The front is from reach and stack. Head tube and seat tube angles are direct reading. It works great, but isn't as nice as Joe's at Cobra... But, if I remember right, the BOM was about $1K...

That's way better than my sh0nky jig. I think I'm going to make a new one now that I have a much better idea what I need. Out of metal of course, not aluminium. To simplify things I plan on just making the ST vertical and only the HT fixture adjustable as to angle-- it's only the relative angle that matters. And I don't need a rear axle anything as I do the CS first thing after ST to BB with things clamped to my welding table. So I really just need to hold the ST and HT.

Agreed! There are a lot of ways to get through this process. I guess my brain prefers to see the whole bike together before I start brazing. Just preference, certainly not required. I had used SW to build the jig and the first bike, so had a good visual, but don't intend to keep doing the full 3D for bikes in the future. The jig helps me with the aesthetic aspects Here are a couple of pics with most of the tubes in place.