It’s hard work keeping the blog up. That’s all I’m going to say. But here’s what I got for you. I’ve been thinking about this for a while – a steel Uber Over Size (to use Richard Sachs’parlance) road machine with an Enve carbon seat tube. I want to add this to my offerings, and will start after I test the road feel, and do some thinking of thoughts.
So I’m going to take you on a little trip of process. And yes, I know, I am offending the gods of steel bicycles, but I just had to. The first thing that I did was essentially fabricate the entire bicycle, using 2 sleeves – one at the BB, and one at the ST / SS junction, held in alignment with a dummy tube. These sleeves were cut and machined to the tolerances for the carbon seat tube and epoxy (in this case 3M DP420 black). After brazing up and cleaning up the machine, I installed the seat tube, held in place in my Anvil jig. The final step for this machine was the branding – because I am a big dude, and the machine is for me (hella) the headtube’s got some length. I used my waterjet brass RAPHAEL on the tube, and I used my SANFRANCISCO logo on the chainstay – protect against the chainslap and looking super steezy at the same time. Depending on how things go, I may or may not paint this one. If I do, expect something out of control. But I’m more and more in love with the patina and age of steel, the colors of the brazing and the cleaning, the sharpie marks, the shimmer of polished fillets. The poetry of the making process is apparent. Anyways though. Whew. I was about to lose myself. The brazing of the logos has to be seriously tight – there’s basically no room for clean up there. Topping it all off is the Enve 1.0 road fork, black Chris King headset, Thomson all around, and Force for good measure. The wheels are Hed Belgiums laced to King R45. Tight as hell. I’ll let you know.
I also brought two machines to paint today – Brendan’s allRounder getting a rad metallic sage and Natalia’s CX race machine geting a candy magenta that is going to look out of control. I’ve got Mike’s allRounder (a lugged throwback) and Cathy’s allRounder (650b what!) up in the queue now.
Talk to you soon.
