I leave early tomorrow morning for Oregon, where I’ll be spending two weeks learning the in’s and out’s of bicycle frame fitting, design and building. I’m planning on a brazed CX style frame, we’ll see what I end up doing when I’m actually there. After about a dozen different designs in BikeCAD, here are the two finalists which are subtle in their differences. Wish me luck!
With only a couple more weeks before my trip out to Oregon I’ve been doing a lot of frame design homework. UBI dedicates a few days to this, but they said the more I prep the better off I’ll be. With that I made a small investment in AccuFit and have been pairing up the specs I get out of that with the free version of BikeCAD.
The above is what I’ve managed to come up with as a basic blueprint of my frame. This is based off 8 measurements I did in AccuFit and various other calculations I did from some existing bikes I have. AccuFit spits out some solid numbers around seat tube angles, top tube length and seat tube length. From those 3 it’s fairly easy to figure out the rest in BikeCAD. There was a lot of trial and error, I did around 2 or 3 frames before I figured out where I was making some math mistakes. The above frame is pretty close being correct. When you’re done the stand-over height is a good indicator as to whether you did all of your calculations right. Even a few cm off in key areas will throw the whole thing off. My initial design came out with a stand-over of around 36″ which was clearly wrong and sent me back to AccuFit and the tape measure.
I’ll probably fuss around with this a bit more, but I’m pretty confident the above is close enough that I’ll only need to do some fine tuning once out at UBI with the help of the instructors.
Cincinnati re-adventure is a new blog project that Erica and I are working on. With our recent decision to stick it out in Cincinnati for a bit longer, a key part of that was to milk this town for everything it had to offer. We’ve both lived here most of our lives and yet it seems like we’re finding more and more new stuff everyday; places and things to do that we never even knew existed. It’s amazing what you find in your own backyard when you take the time to look.
We’ve done a soft-launch of the site – which is mainly the content bit. I am in the process of doing a custom blogger template for it so that the artwork will match the quality of the template.
i’m in cleveland visiting my grandparents and will be bringing back a Craftsmen Imperial 5×8 press that’s been hiding out under their house for the last 20-30 years. it is mostly in good working order, but needs a good cleaning. it’s missing the chase and rollers and all of the other various parts required to actually print anything (furniture, type, etc)
it will no doubt be a fun project, however i have a lot to research and learn since i have very little experience with presses, at least of this type.