Day 1--Steel Frame Building

Today was my first frame building class at UBI and I was really stoked to get building my first ever lugged frame!! Hooray!! :) Having been at UBI a couple weeks ago for the Women's Bike Maintenance class was really helpful in knowing the layout and knowing who would teach our class. Gary and Ron are both amazing frame builders and teachers and I have no doubt that they will make sure that by the end of the two weeks my frame is ready for painting! :)

The class reached it's maximum limit of 8 students, all of them being men except for me. As my new friend Ariel (who is a woman taking the pro-level bike maintenance class) said; "Girl, you know how to bro-down" so I don't mind having all the guys in with me. :) There is quite a diverse group of people in the class from all over the country from Texas to Maine to Idaho, Wisconsin (me) and a couple locals from the Portland area. One guys wife sent him here for a birthday gift after he had a snowboarding accident and was in rehab for a year riding an indoor bicycle. He decided he liked riding bikes so he wanted to make one instead of buying one. He has no experience at all related to bikes so it is cool how he ended up here. Most other guys have some experience in the bike world --working in bikes shops, racing, and touring, etc. I was surprised how many of them have welded and have related metals experience. Luckily my metalsmithing experience is coming in handy because brazing is exactly like soldering--well, almost--and today I handled the torch like a pro! :)

Gary gave us a tour of the shop and of course went over all the safety issues. I was picturing myself in my classroom going over all this same stuff on the first day except to 27 hormonally challenged teenagers at once! :) Ok, back on track--I'm on summer vacation......

Gary giving a shop tour and safety rules

The first activity we did was to just turn the torch on and off and make sure we could get a reducing flame which is a type of flame that we need for brazing lugged bikes. I am familiar with this type of flame as I teach this in the classroom when students learn to solder. When I took my turn Gary said I did it perfectly! Yay! I was surprised at how small the flame had to be to braze something as large as a bike. The acetylene burns very hot so I guess this makes sense otherwise you can burn a hole in your bike tube--not a good thing.

We then got to braze on some water bottle bosses to practice with the torch. My first one was sort of funky because I am not used to having to hold the brazing silver on a coil and then push it on as you heat so I got a big blob of silver where I didn't want it. (When you solder you use chips of solder and just heat it). This is one difference between brazing and soldering and is somewhat like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. Takes some practice.

Drilling a hole for the water bottle boss

Brazing my first water bottle boss

My second practice water bottle boss brazed on!


After using the torch on our bottle bosses Gary got us right into setting up our lugs and mitering the tubes that go into the lugs. For this of course we used practice tubing that was a bit thicker than some we might use for our real bikes but this thick tubing can also be made into bikes. The lugs did not fit the tubing perfectly so we had to file and file and file some more. I only got as far as filing the second hole of the lug almost all the way and am close to being able to miter my tubes to fit. It is a pretty lengthy and frustrating process. The instructors insist that we learn to do all work by hand without using some of the power tools which could make the process easier though which could also destroy the tube much easier. I think they want us to feel the process tactically and know how much work goes into completely handbuilding a bike. As it is this way so far I have all the tools I need to make a frame at home except a jig but I am sure we will be using more tools along the way.

Filing and filing and filing my lug!

Thanks for reading! I have always wanted to try to make a blog and now I have one! Stay tuned tomorrow for Day 2 of my framebuilding adventure! :)