Showing posts with label Forks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forks. Show all posts
1. Buy some Mullins 35mm trees and ebay some forks. Add to frame and congratulate yourself on having great taste when it comes to narrow front-ends.
2. Apply ruler between forks. Accompany ruler round swapmeets, scrouge ebay, wrangle advice until realisation that the only drum your ruler vaguely approves of is from a cub 50 scooter which has an axle diameter of about 6.734 mm.
3. Decide: brakes or suspension. Or machine your own hub but by that time you've already laced a Kempton found drum to the Borrani rim even though you knew it wouldn't fit but it was a twin leading shoe and you got carried away. Brakes over suspension it is.
Chop (all important word) the fork tubes.
This is actually the first part I ever made on a lathe.
Milling in the lathe.
Taper practicing.
Taper turning.
At this point I drilled and reamed a hole. Actually I snapped the pilot drill half way but seeing as it took me like two days making this part and working out how to use the lathe, I alternated. Plunged an end-mill in about 2mm (the snapped drill bit rising into the hole in the end-mill), oxy-acetylened it, hammered protruding drill bit flat, plunged the end-mill another 2mm, repeat 10 times until mad with the world then enlarge messy hole to correct size.
Make a little axle.
Trim the fork tube caps.
OPTIONAL: Advise all comfort cynics that you spent everyday for the last four years riding a completely rigid bicycle with 19mm cross-section tubular tyres at 180psi around crappy, pot-holed, English roads and you only had to see the doctor about an embarrassing lump on your anus once. This should distract them from knowing best about vibration damage, cornering-grip, and other borings.
35mm trees from Mullins Chain Drive. Barry, my local engineer, taught me to use his lathe and we shortened and narrowed the stem, made a top-hat shaped sleeve and got it all to work with the old ball bearings. I remember builders on biker build off boasting that they taught themselves everything but having someone show you is way easier.
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