First Blood

So I've been working in the garage some over the last few weeks. To be honest I haven't been all that productive, but I try.

As the title says I drew first blood on my ti frame today. Mitered the seat tube at the bottom bracket intersections. If things go well I will be mitering the rest of the tubes this week.


Seat tube in the mitering fixture.


Just out of the fixture...note to self. Check the speed on your mill.


All cleaned up. There's a tiny little gap.


And these are bullits that will be used for my seatstay tube caps. They looked like crap when I got them, but they clean up well.

Hot rod

Again I'm not very good at this.

So the better part of the weekend was spend milling down two plates to modify my current tube bender. Right now I think I can successfully bend .5" and maybe .75". I would like to try my hand at some .875" tubing, but it won't even fit in the bender with the current tube clamp. With that in mind the goal of the plates is to extend the clamp just enough to get a piece of .875" tubing in there. It may fail, but you never know and at $130 for a pair of s-bend stays it's worth a shot.

I still have to cut out another piece, tap it and weld all three together. Wish me luck.