Big Day Today

Lots of work to get done.

I'm Screwed

The deepest, darkest, hairiest pits of depression, despair and deprivation will soon be exposed (keep your mind out of the gutter). In this post I will let you know my true secrets, my Turkish Gold and Goldilocks fantasies; My Peanut Butter and Jelly; the apple of mine third eye. YOU (you internet square) - Get to know - ME (another internet square).

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I am scared. Scared that I will not finish my projects. I have three weeks to:

1. Finish a tall bike.

This includes attaching the two separately welded triangles together, finishing a fork and putting the chain/ seat stays on.

2. Design and weld a front rack.

Should take a day, for a friend of mine, who has been really really generous to me as of late.

3. Design and build THE BIKE!

I don't even want to get into the details.

On top of all this, I have massive amounts of academic work, a summer job to follow up on, a sailboat to fix up and heaping serving of college senioritis to digest and secrete (hopefully soon, I can't handle the constipation). Not to mention I am living off of less than $100 .00 this month.

I am very, very concerned and therefore extremely concerned. Please lend me your support. By clicking on the add banners on the side of this post you will make my wallet a bit heavier and my ass a bit stronger.

God speed, ranger. You have entered the realm of my emotional head space.

Thanks for reading this, I hope I didn't overexpose my deep and dark hairy under locales (I told you not to go there)

Designing and Making (out with) My Tall Bicycle

Figure 1: My Hero

Everyone needs a hero, even you, you confident soul! You can check out this dude on the webosphere, here:

Cyclingwmd.blogspot.com

The Tall Bike Project (TTBP) has been coming together. Today I welded most of the upper triangle.

Here is the design drawn to scale:


I recycled all of the tubes from broken frames. I used a hacksaw near the joints, sand blasted the tubes and then used an angle grinder and power sander to get rid of the excess welds, braze-ons. Here are the finished tubes after mitering (see previous post):


Jig fitting came next. The Jig was made by an Olympian named Thomas of Bombus Bikes. You can check out their blog, here:

http://www.bombusbikes.com/

Its pretty amazing to have this jig at my disposal. Here it is fitted with the mitered tubes of the bottom triangle:


This is a "practice" bike. One where its ok to mess up welds. I did a pretty good job of that today. Here is how I went through the process:

1. Fit in jig, make sure angles are correct and all that.

2. Tack with the MIG. 4 tacks per tube at opposite points on the tube.

3. Weld with the TIG.

I decided God may not have granted me welding skills, and maybe there's a reason my dad wears white collars instead of blue. Dig? Nah, I think I just need a lot of practice. By the end of the day I was getting the hang of it, but getting the tungsten in those little corners is quite difficult. Resting on the corners of the tubing helped quite a bit. Here are the problem child welds of the day, stay tuned for progress:

Eeeeewww

Mmmumuumm? Some decent tackies on the MIG.