I forgot to mention that I am staying at a great hostel that is bigger than my house and have had the place to myself until today when a few people passing through town moved in for a day. It is always interesting to meet other travelers and hear their story. Anyway, it is working out great and the place is nice and comfy and it has free wireless!! :)
I had an interesting incident on Day 1 when I went to Quizno's for lunch because I couldn't get into the hostel to cook the first day until 5pm. I thought I would just get a sub and when I was in line making my order a woman from another business near the parking lot said "Does anybody here drive a green beetle?" I hesitantly stepped forward and found out that my beetle had rolled backwards in the parking lot and hit another car. OMG! I ran outside and was horrified to find out that I had forgotten the emergency brake and had accidentally put it into 3rd gear instead of 1st. That was weird because the car was actually in gear. Hmmm. Luckily there was no damage to the older car I had hit but my bumper had a nice little dent that actually popped out a little when I moved my car. The woman was so nice and said not to worry about it. I was horrified and kept apologizing but the woman with her 17 month old son were luckily not in the car and told me it was no problem! Can you imagine that? Had I been in Madison I could see someone freaking out about a scratch and my car insurance rates getting jacked up. The woman came into the Quizno's and I insisted I at least buy her lunch. She kept saying it wasn't necessary but in the end I won out and told her it was much cheaper than a car repair. :) Ashland is a pretty mellow town lucky for me.
Anyway, class was intense again and I was able to finish mitering where I left off and braze my practice lug together. Hooray! The moment of truth is when you cut it open and check to see if the silver has flowed all the way through. Mine turned out pretty well! :)
Here I am brazing my first lug!
My finished lug!
The moment of truth--sawing open the lug. Yeeekkk!!
Ron did a demo on fillet brazing which is another method of putting bike tubing together when you don't use lugs. Sometimes you are limited by geometries where lugs wouldn't work or you just don't want a lugged bike. Only one guy in our class is making one this way and it was fun to watch the demo.
We then used brass as a filler (vs. silver for the lugs) to practice brazing drop outs. Those are the parts where your fork or rear triangle go into the axles. We used a thick piece of steel to simulate a drop out and had to file our own notches in the tubing. Again, very time consuming but fun.
Here I am practicing a drop out braze. Don't you love my dark glasses?!
Again, in the end we cut it open and mine turned out almost perfect with only one little area where the brass was not filled in. It was a good day and things clicked easily especially with the hands on part.
Then came the geometry lesson. I was all excited about finding out how I could make a bike that fit me perfectly and how to measure, etc and that there was some sort of exact magic formula. That was all thrown out the window when they made it clear that there were just guidelines and you could really tweak things around, etc. The difficult part about this is that my knowledge was limited and I had no idea how different sized angles affected handling, etc. And I have never ridden a steel bike so I had to just figure it out as I went. Then we did all our homework which helped understand a bit more but it was overload on all the numbers. Mind boggling but still lots of fun. Below you can see my practice dropout when I cut it open to reveal all the lovely brass that I melted inside.
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