Had the good luck to find a fairly nice small hand miller a couple of hours away last week, and spent the good part of Saturday picking it up. It’s in really good shape, and I even found the vertical head for it collecting dust under a bench. It’s a belt driven affair where power is taken from the rear of the spindle, over a couple of pulleys that goes on the rear of the top column and then over to the vertical spindle in the front. The photo of the vertical head shows it with a setup for a drill chuck, but the original MK4 spindle is in one of the boxes along with all the needed pulleys and fittings. Quite neat. The only thing missing seems to be the handle for the Y feed, or: there is an original handle but the extension seems to be shop made. Must dig further into that when I have the time. I also collected quite a lot of other neat stuff (the guy who passed away had been a gunsmith).
Yepp. I’ve been hesitating to register a Johnsen Frameworks page due to my limited work capacity (I’m working part time as a consultant in addition to my full time research job), but I think it’s a smart move after all. Most of the content here on the blog will be mirrored on the Facebook page, but occasionally there will be some specific Facebook info published over there. Please follow me at www.facebook.com/johnsen.frameworks
Over in northern California there’s a guy called Mark Norstad who with his team produces some really fine frame building components under the Paragon Machine Works brand. I’ve used a few of the PMW products earlier, and now it was time to stock up on disc tabs since I do a lot of disc conversions on old steel frames. There was also a few 73mm bottom bracket shells for future mountain bike frames in the shipment. And what’s in the rest of the picture? The Bonty which is soon done, an anvil my uncle made in school, a Columbus Life top tube ready to be mitered and a pipe and tobacco. The latter used cautiously, of course.
One of the projects that I’ve been planning for a long time is a more flexible mitering setup where I’m utilizing one of the lathes instead of the mill. I already have a dedicated main tube mitering system from Anvil on my Tos milling machine, but there are parts that are easier to miter with a simple setup like the one I just made. My Blomqvist (South Bend 9-inch clone) lathe came with a lot of accessories, and the milling table was one of those hard to find things that came with it. With some simple machining on the big lathe and the mill I ended up with this tube clamp. It will allow me to miter stem tubes as well as strut tubes for segmented forks. Hopefully I’ll start on at least one of the latter this week.
It’s the 3rd of January, and those of you following my flickr-stream have seen this picture already. The holiday here in Hølen was spent with family, parties and good fun. Just before Christmas I had 15 good friends (some of which are riding buddies) from the local community over for food and drinks in the workshop. That was a great success, and I think we can call it a tradition! On workshop related issues I’ve been spending most of my time buffing the Hydra jig I got just before Christmas. It’s been thoroughly disassembled, cleaned and measured. As stated earlier in the blog it looked a whole lot worse than it actually is. Minimal wear and just a few pieces missing. All the bolts on the jig has also been replaced to unbrako bolts for easy setup. Another job was to deciphered the scales on the jig. They are not completely intuitive, but I managed to figure it out and Brent @ Bikeforest who develops the essential BikeCad Pro software that I use will include the needed output for setting up the jig in the next release of the software. New Years eve was spent in front of the lathe(s) to make some of the missing parts for the jig, as well as having a few beers. Now it’s 2011. Time to build.
Quick update from Hølen: The last few weeks have been dominated by two sick kids (flu/earache), so apart from making two classic frames ready for paint there’s not much to tell. Apart from the fact that the tools from Denmark arrived, off course. Here’s the Bike Machinery Hydra jig. Nearly complete, and with very limited use it seems. From the picture I received from the seller it appeared to be rather dirty (and perhaps missused), but after getting it into the workshop and cleaning it up a bit it’s apparent that it’s in really good shape. The only thing missing is the clamps/doodads that holds the dropouts in place. And from what I’ve seen they are really simple to fabricate in the shop. The table also arrived yesterday (pictures at flickr) and apart from a light surface rust that was easily cleaned off it’s in mint condition. Now I just need to figure out how to organize the shop with the new additions. Now: dinner!
Meet Maria, a 17 month old oatmeal-eating machine. She turned up two days after my last update last year. Fun stuff.
Allright. New start. It got to be more than a year since the last update. The 650b is doing fine and I’ve really enjoyed it both here in Norway and on a week long holiday with Pure Mountains in the Alpujarras area in Spain. I’ve managed to finish two more frames during the year. Both Elisabeth’s and Øyvind’s finally came together. Øyvind reports that he’s really, really happy with his singlespeed:
I’ve done numerous repairs, alignment checks (and some bending – or should I say heavy manipulating?) and modification. The most interesting one was a Colnago with a severely twisted, bent and broken off derailleur hanger. It took some thinking and quite a bit of work, but I turned it from being on the edge of becoming landfill to becoming a full functioning and nice looking frame.
The next weeks and months will most likely be filled with three projects. One classy urban commuter bike, one hardcore racing hardtail and a singlespeed for myself. I also have to find room for my new Bike Machinery Hydra frame fixture. I stumbled upon this when a Danish bike manufacturer moved their production overseas. Quite excited about that. It’ll complement my Anvil Journeyman fixture nicely, and will allow me some flexibility to work on two projects at the time.
As a part of the deal I also bought a new, more precise and larger alignment table. Both items should be on the way from Denmark tomorrow, so I’m really looking forward to getting them into the shop.
Well, that’s it for now. Oh, I just put up a page with some hard to get tooling information. Mostly for reference for other builders, but it might be interesting to have a look at for others as well.
Here is my 650b in the fixture. This was a project I started out with in may last year, but due to a number of things it was put on hold until now. It’s designed around a 130mm White Brothers fork and the frame is a mix of Columbus Life and True Temper OX2 tubing. The seat tube is a 35mm Life top tube with one butted end removed and sleeved to take a 31.6mm seatpost (to be able to run a Crank Brothers Joplin quick adjustable seatpost for long descents in the Alps or the Sierra Nevada). Geometry is a 69 degree head angle matched with a 73 degree seat angle. This is a degree steeper than I usually like to build my frames, but due to the 20mm set-back of the Joplin post I end up sitting in almost the same sport. That means that I need to dig up a rigid post with 20mm set-back as well.
I did finally find some time to finish up this Rocky Mountain Blizzard that needed to be updated to disc brakes. A fairly standard operation by now (I must have done nearly 20), but this one had a small variation that I tested on a beater bike a while ago. Instead of using new hose guides on the top tube, I opted for a solution where the cable guides that where once for the brake cable is drilled out and then the slot is brazed up. So in other words it’s just turned into a tube. A wee bit of work, but it’s worth it. Especially on a frame like this where the original braze-on is of the two-cable kind.
There’s a few other things happening in the workshop as well. I’ll try to post that later today.
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