another seatstay day is behind me.......i always start them first thing in the day, and they always seem to take most of the day. i was having a high-pain day as well, all day it felt like someone with a nice solid heel was standing on my right foot. ahhhhhhh, nerve pain. nothing like it. had severe spasms last night too, so my joints hurt and i'm tired. still, i powered through it and got through another work day. looking forward to a hot shower and some good homemade soup with my feet up. oooooohhhhhh yeah. so, my seatstays start with raw four foot lenghts of seamless aircraft 4130. i figure where the bends need to go depending on the choice of brakes, wheel diameter, and frame size. i draw a diagram of all this, cut the appropriate lengths of tubing, polish them, and brass braze the 1" of overlapping tubing together. then, they go into a bucket of hot water to dissolve the flux off to avoid glassy flux popping into you eyes during bending. {i had to have one of my eyelids lanced about four years ago to remove a piece of flux.} then, i bend them using my arbor press. {there's pics of this in my blog archives.} and miter them using my anvil seatstay fixture. then, much like the chainstays in the last post, they are slotted and spearpointed and tacked to the frame. nuthin' left as far as pre-brazing assembly except for the seatstay brace and brazing, then on to polishing and brazeons again.......any questions? steve.
1 comment:
Steve,
I know nothing about brazing or welding. Could you give a brief explanation of why chainstays, seatstays or other tubes don't get deformed when you apply sufficient heat to braze? It just seems strange to me that unevenly heated metal tubes don't get all wierd during the frame building process. Sorry if this seems like a basic question but I am a basic kinda guy. Thanks, lee t.
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