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@danielj
So I've been wanting to build my own frame for quite a while but just never had the time or money to put it into practice. Currently ride a Surly Steamroller for commuting and a Crosscheck for long rides and touring. So I've been saving up and with the added bonus of getting a small pay rise in work things seemed to fall into place this year. I was searching around a number of the different framebuilding workshops and it so happened that Downland fitted for location, price and availability of a course when I was able to do it. Also someone I used to work with has just completed a 6 day course with them and had thoroughly enjoyed it so I put my deposit down and started on bike cad.
Bike Cad was a slow process to get to grips with everything and reading through various framebuilding books to understand what I wanted or would have the capability of building. Discussing a frame with Bryan at Downland Cycles I knew I wanted a CX/Gravel bike with a carbon fork. I got the basic design done on Bike Cad and then sent it off to Bryan. Discussion back and forth and also a number of measurements that needed to be checked on the first day.
In the meantime I managed to get a pair of brand new Hope Pro 4 hubs on ebay when they had a 20% sale and took them to SBC Cycles to be built. They had a pair of Halo Vapour rims which had been powder coated black which was perfect to go with my orange hubs. Amazing service by the guys at SBC Cycles and the wheels were ready in a few days.
Day 1 of arriving at Downland. Quick tour of the workshop and it was straight into finalising designs for the bikes. It was me and two other people on the course, one building a track bike and the other a hardtail mountain bike. After a number of measurements and checking against the set up on my current bikes, the design was completed. CX/Gravel bike with ability to take 40c tyres in the future. From there we then moved to picking out tubes. Bryan had just got a delivery of Reynolds 853 tubes which immediately got my attention. With riding my Surly's all the time they aren't exactly the lightest so I thought this was an opportunity to get something lighter although that wasn't the driving factor for my build. We checked all the measurements on Bike Cad and picked out the most suitable tubes for the main triangle. I also chose a 44mm headtube. We then used Bike Cad and Dogfeather (I think that's what it was called) to print out our templates for mitring our tubes. After a demonstration from Bryan we were off to practice on our little pieces of tubing. Once practice was done we then turned to the Jig. There were three of these in the workshop two of which were built in Bristol. Setting these up to the measurements we had developed in Bike Cad took some time ensuring that all angles and distances were correct.
Once we felt confident with our measurements, mitring the practices tubes and had a tea break it was time to start with our own tubes with Bryan there at all times keeping a close eye.
Having never done any metal work before it took me quite a while to get used to the tubes and mitring them to fit around each other. You have to become good friends with the files!
For the rest of day one and day two we spent mitring the tubes and checking they fit together, checking lengths, angles fit on the jig. When starting off it's a slow process measuring, having to put the tube in the vice, file, take it out, put it on the jig, check if it fits and repeat all over again quite a lot of times!
By the end of day two we had the main triangle all measured up and fitting in the jig. This also included me having to put an oval at one end of my top tube in a vice to make it fit around the smaller seattube
