Day 2 - Putting the first Triangle together.

The bike frame is made of two triangles.  The front and rear triangle.  The front triangle we piece together with the lugs and for the first time we can see a bike frame starting to appear.  The white stuff you see on the frames is the flux.  we coated the joints in flux for when we braze these pieces together.

Day 2 - Cleaning up our first braze

Sunday is a hot day.  I didn't think it could get hotter than Saturday but it did.  Froze ozarka water bottles are our best friends. 

First thing for us to do was to clean up the set post stays we brazed the day before.   This part of the stay is needs cleaned up purely for astetics.  We're hoping the more we clean it now the better it will look in the long run.

We then cut the stays to the proper length and drill holes in the rear stays to serve as vents while we are brazing the bike.

Day 1-First Braze

We stayed late to see if we could do our first braze.  This was the top of the seat stay.  The top of this will be outward facing and I was worried right away meaning people would acaully be able to see this. 

Tim walked us through it and we got all four done before leaving today.

Tim said that the hard work is done and the next three days should be more fun.  We are tired but we are excited!

Day 1-Cutting the tube.

Day 1 and we are already cutting tubes!  Too cool!
Everything was pretty easy to cut once our diagrams were made.  I was the only one who screwed up and cut a tube the wrong way.  Tim helped me fix it.  Just makes the bike lighter right!

Day 1-Design class

After we talked about what we wanted we set up some paper on our design/ping pong table (which Tim will challenge you to a game before anything starts).  Tim walked us through drawing our bikes to scale and calculating all the necessary measurements.

Of course Katrina's diagram looked much better than mine.

Day 1-Intro to the workshop

Tim gave us a little background on his shop and advised us to bring water because the workshop is not air conditioned.  He gave us very extensive directions to the shop and it's a good thing because we would have been lost otherwise.  His shop is in a warehouse of the main road behind a sign company building.

Both Katrina and I didn't sleep very well night before Day 1.  I think we both were too excited.  We went for our Saturday run at 6:30AM today to make sure we would bring everything we needed.  We packed water, cameras, the forks, and headset.  I even brought GPS in case we couldn't find the shop for whatever reason.

Now for what we forgot.
We took measurements 3 times along with hiring someone to measure us...forgot that information.   Also forgot my checkbook.  Damn it!
Tim was nice and luckily there had been enough discussion between us over the past few weeks we figured out what we needed. 

We sat down and talked for a while about what kind of bikes we wanted.

We decided that Katrina's bike will be designed for comfort, light touring, and road biking.  My bike on the other hand will be a more aggressive design for racing.  Tim knew the angles for each.

Katrina's bike will allow up to 700x32.  I will have a 7 inch bottom height with seat tube angle of 72.5 degrees and head tube angle of 72 degrees.  My bike will have a 6 in bottom height with a seat tube angle of 73.5 degrees and head tube of 74 degrees.  Are forks have a rake of 45.

Catbird Seat

"The catbird seat" is an idiomatic phrase used to describe an enviable position, often in terms of having the upper hand or greater advantage in all types of dealings among parties. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,[1] the first recorded usage occurred in a 1942 humorous short story by James Thurber titled "The Catbird Seat,"[2] which features a character, Mrs. Barrows, who likes to use the phrase. Another character, Joey Hart, explains that Mrs. Barrows must have picked up the expression from Red Barber and that to Barber "sitting in the catbird seat" meant "'sitting pretty,' like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him."