Dave Yates framebuilding course

[Nick H.]

Here's my rear dropout ready to be brazed. The reddish stuff is flux, which you apply with a brush. The dropouts are old Shimano ST ones which Dave had in stock. He chose them because they're nearly horizontal and suitable for a Rohloff.



Here's my fellow pupil brazing his rear dropout.



He's feeding in the brass with his left hand. Dave is using another brass rod as a pointer, but he didn't do any feeding in with it - we did it all.

[Nick H.]

My front dropouts after brazing.



As a novice you can't help being a bit messy with the brass. It doesn't matter, it just means more filing and sanding afterwards. You can spend ages and ages personalising your frame by shaping the joints with a file. Professional framebuilders can't spare the time. But it's not really an option if you leave the frame there to be painted at the end of the course. I took mine home and fettled it endlessly.

On to the main triangle. Some people use a mitring machine to cut the tubes, but at Dave's it's done by hand.



The jig means even a novice can't balls up the geometry.











Measurements are checked just to convince us that everything really is going to plan.

[Sergeant Pluck]

Moarrrr!

[Nick H.]

The fork crown before being brazed to the steerer.



Masses of heat  is required because the steerer is so thick it takes a while to get it up to the temperature at which the brass rod will liquefy instantly on contact. You can't tell from the pics, but you don't use the flame on the brass rod. You heat the tube and the lug until they're red hot, take the flame away, then touch the rod to the area where you want the brass to spread. Then it liquefies and runs into the gaps of its own accord. Simple!



Afterwards. Lots of brass everywhere.



Luckily it's the right shape to go in the lathe, so cleaning it up was great fun. I'd never used a lathe before, and Dave's one is the proper thing.

[Nick H.]

After only a couple of days of this:



The bulk of the job is done.



And you have what Dave refers to as a 'bicycle-shaped object.'



So it's time to bend the forks with state of the art machinery.

[Nick H.]

It's downhill from then on - lots of little jobs.  There was no time pressure, even for someone as hamfisted as me.  

This little job needed a specially shaped lump of wood from Dave's comprehensive selection of custom tools to whack a ding in the chain stay just behind the bottom bracket to provide clearance for a mountain bike chainset.



I lost count of all the braze-ons I put on. Three sets of bottle bosses, a peg on the seat stay to hang the chain on when you take the wheel off, cable guides, down tube lever bosses, canti brake bosses, rack mounts and I don't know what else. Here are the front rack mounts, kept straight(ish) and level with one of Dave's special thingummies. There's nothing you can ask for that he doesn't have a well-worn procedure for. I told him what front rack I wanted - a Tubus Duo Duo | tubus -  and he knew exactly what was needed.  It was very satisfying when I finally installed the rack - it went on so easily.

N.B. The mount on the left is still red hot.



Fitting the bottle bosses required silver solder, not brass. I can't remember why, but it was lovely stuff to work with. When it melts it finds its own way with a beautiful thin layer. It's a shame Dave doesn't allow pupils to build with 953. He reckons it would be a very expensive waste of rather a lot of silver, especially if you slop it around as much as I did with the brass.

I can't remember what's going on here.



Perhaps Dave is setting the correct distance for my rear hub, which is 130 OLN I think. (It's Dura Ace.) You can see the brake bridge, which I was particularly pleased with.

I'm brazing it on here. Or perhaps I'm doing the brake bosses, it's hard to tell.



E2A: it was the brake bosses -



The bridge comes as a one piece ready made casting and you have to trim the ends so they match the angle and distance between the seat stays. Mine came out just perfect. Sadly the same can't be said of the bridge between the chain stays just behind the bottom bracket. (Does it have a special name?) Good thing no-one ever looks there!

[Nick H.]

So that's it. Here's one more gratuitous pic of a flame doing its thing.



And here's Dave's glamorous assistant:



Even the ride to the B&B was more interesting than you might expect. Dave's workshop adjoins the UK's main Typhoon base.



Two years later the frame still looked like this. (Long boring story.) Untreated steel rusts rather fast and I've only half cleaned it up.



Eventually I built it up and rode it round the US last year.

[Chris N]

Great photos! Really want to build my own frame and would love to have a go a Dave's course.

[Rhys W]

Great photos! Really want to build my own frame and would love to have a go a Dave's course.

+1

[clarion]

Fantastic!  Thanks for going to the effort of a write up.

If I weren't a complete and utter Klutz, I'd love to have a go myself.

[Nick H.]

Yebbutt I'm a klutz too. If you can wire a plug you can do the course. Go for it! Dave's never had a pupil who didn't finish their frame. And he's only had one bloke who broke a frame tube, which was easily fixed. The whole thing is idiot proof. I didn't even burn myself (much).

[Nick H.]

About the graphics: I designed a logo at www.Cooltext.com



and printed it on waterslide decal paper from here Inkjet Papers and Fabrics, Window Stickers and Other Arts and Craft Materials.

Colour-Tech of Dartford painted the frame, put the decals on and lacquered them. They haven't faded and still look new.

Colour-Tech were great to deal with, and good value. They painted my giant Sigg bottle and vintage Dura Ace levers to match!

[Wowbagger]

It's something I'd like to do as well, but I have no burning desire to get any other type of bike than those I already own.

[Nick H.]

Quite a few attendees seem to build a frame for their other half. 

[alexb]

Thanks for writing that up Nick. I deliberately didn't take a camera with me as I wanted to pay attention to what was going on. As a result I have no build photos, but I do remember that daunting pile of tubes in a box when I arrived!

Great looking bike at the end by the way and great to hear that you did go off and do your ride.

A lot of my bike has polished stainless on it. I spoke to Dave (via e-mail) about it for quite a while and convinced him that since I had some silversmithing experience he would let be build with stainless. There's even a tiny bit of 953 in the frame, anyone who sees the bike in the flesh is invited to try and find it!

I found the course fascinating. I'd happily do it again if I could.

[Nick H.]

I'm chuffed that people are enjoying it - I spent hours sorting out the photos!

What was it like working with silver? Did you pay extra for it, and recycle the dust?    Got any photos of the end result?

I'd say the course was one of the best things I've ever done. I told Dave and he said he gets that a lot!

[Mrs Pingu]

OMG that looks fantastic! And not only have I done silver soldering, but often I was a bit shit at it because the pieces were so small they sometimes melted, but I reckon them girt big bits of steel would be right up my street
Want.

[alexb]

To get a clear idea of where I was trying to go.
I wanted a bike with these physical dimensions, but I wanted the seat angle more relaxed and lower, but with more seat post, so I could run by seat bag lower to lower the CofG.
This was my old bike:

This is the new frame mocked up with wheels and the forks mounted temporarily.

Here you can see one overlaid on the other, so you can see how although the seat "height" doesn't change, I'm physically lower as a result of the relaxed seat angle (72 deg compared to 74 deg).

The wheelbase is longer as well for more comfort.
With paint...

[alexb]

I used a stainless fork crown, this is what it looks like after being cleaned up. I'll try and find some pics of it in the raw, but it took me about 2 weeks to get a basic polish on it before I silver soldered it!

This is after a bit of serious scraping and sanding

and finally you end up with this

[alexb]

These are the downtube bosses for the gear cable adjusters


After cleaning up and polishing

[alexb]

Various shots of the frame joints




The strange boxy thing is a quick changer, when you remove the wheel, the chain drops straight onti it, when you put the wheel back in the chain drops straight onto the sprocket - no more dirty hands - a total bastard to polish though.

Stainless dropout before polishing

[alexb]

Polished and painted dropout

Fork dropout

Seat cluster

Rear end showing quick changer

Sunny out door shot

More seat cluster - until you've done one you have no idea how difficult it is to control the heat flow and add brass to get that fillet to look right!

[alexb]

As for costs:
Stainless is a lot more expensive than plain steel.
Silver solder is expensive - I can't remember how much extra I paid, but it was quite a bit.
As a proportion of the costs, the tubes were about half the total cost!

Dave did tell me that overall, what I'd paid for the materials and the course was about what he would have charged me to build the frame for me, so it does pay to be ambitious!

As I said though, I've done silversmithing, so I'm used to controlling temperature, but in this case, the flow temperatures are much higher than I would have dared. Dave was egging me on to get more heat into things, whereas I was terrified that it was all going to suddenly collapse into a molten puddle (which is what silver does when you overheat it).

Stainless is a total bastard to file smooth and then polish. It took literally weeks to get a good finish on things.

[Nick H.]

Wow, what an amazing piece of work - you're a true craftsman. Fantastic! I'm so impressed!

[Sergeant Pluck]

All really interesting, Porkins and alexb both, and it's excellent that you both ended up with 1) exactly what you wanted and 2) something not available off-the-shelf.

Some aspects of the build are fairly rough and ready, aren't they? I'm thinking in particular of the hand-cutting of the mitres in porkins' post.

Some really clean-looking brazing on the smaller parts like the cable adjuster mounts, alexb, and that seat cluster looks perfect. I have no doubt that took a lot of skill and patience. I like those rear dropouts - always appears to me to be a better solution to have the stays inserted like that.