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.