TBA frame building course

I finally did the TBA frame building course that my wife organised for my birthday about 18 months ago. Thought I would share some photos and comments here in case it was interesting for any other forum members who were considering it.

I made an 'all-road' frame, using a custom headtube to work with the Scott / Syncros internal routing system. In general, the 5-day course doesn't really have time to accomodate custom parts, but after a few emails back and forth, I managed to convince them to let me give it a crack. Any probalems with jigging / brazing / sizing were completely on me and they gave no guarantee of coming away with a usable frame. Completely understandable and I was happy to take the risk.

The teachers on the course were really great, I cannot recommend them highly enough. Andrew and Jack were both so good at maintaining a safe working environment for all the students but still allowing us to be relaxed and comfortable when working.

The 5 day course in general is quite fast paced. Each step of the process is covered and explained, but if you're not already familiar with the concepts of framebuilding or comfortable working with files and flames then I imagine you could get a bit lost or you'd have to be good at asking questions ;)

In the end, all of four us came out with a straight, rideable frame that was built according to our specs. We did not come out with 100% of the knowledge to start up our own frame building business tomorrow, but as a foundation or 'taster' to get acquainted with the skills it was really very valuable.

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Looks great!
What's the Scott headset system?

nice one, looks great

The steerer is offset to allow room for cable to pass through the compression ring. It uses IS52 bearings top and bottom. Front brake then goes through the steerer, rear brake wraps around the steerer and down the DT.
The frame is AXS only, so no other cable routing apart from a hose exit on the NDS CS.

The frame is currently at Lumar Colors in Italy. I hope to have it back from them in the next week or so. It's been painted in a brown / black metallic fade. The brown should be the same colour as my van. I'm not a big car person, but I'm also not a graphic designer, so this is what I ended up with.
As with every bike build, sourcing parts is taking longer than expected. Now Classified are selling their system as a hub only, I'm very tempted by it, mostly just so I don't have to ruin the paint with a FD clamp. There is no provision for a RD cable, so the frame is AXS only and I already have an XPLR groupset, so that helps the situation.
I'm still struggling to shoose a handlebar. I think I want something carbon, around 12deg flare, 40cm with internal cable routing entering at the levers and exiting under the bar at the stem. Whisky No.9 could fit, and they have a large clamping area so good for bar bags etc. but no cable routing.

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Very impressive work.
Can I ask why sent it to Italy for paint?
It does indeed look like an excellent finish.

Neat brazing!

I live in Switzerland, so it’s not so far to ship, and Lumar are the best paint shop I could find that didn’t have outrageous wait times.

Thanks!

This bike is almost finished! I've mislaid the front axle, and I've stuck some Teravails on there for now as the Challenge tyres lived up their name...

I will probably drop the bars once I've ridden it a bit, was too nervous to do the chop in one go. I will also swap the groupset for 2x in the summer.

Super happy with how it's looking, let's hope it rides nice too. I know the spacers / stem looks very chunky as it is now, unfortunately with this system I'm a bit limited, but over time I'm hoping to 3D print some spacers which will allow me to run different combos.

It's a shame to hear that TBA has closed their doors now, they were a great team.

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