K Lew's All American Single Speed bike begins.



K Lew's All American Single Speed Cyclo-Cross frame build is underway. We are going to build up this bicycle using all Made in the USA parts, or as much as we can do.

We ordered made in the USA True Temper tubing; GasFlux Brass, Silver, and Flux from Henry James. The set is a blend of Platnium OX, and H Verus tubing.

Made in the USA Paragon Machine Works bottom bracket. There you see it sanded, drilled, and cleaned to be joined to the seat tube. It's a standard 1-1/2", 68mm wide, English threaded. You read that right, sometime parts in the industry are spec'd with both English for one dimension and Metric for the other.

This is the HVERST1 tube. It's 1-1/4" in diameter. The tube is thicker at the bottom then the top. The tube is 0.9mm thick at the bottom for 102mm, then tapers for 63mm till it's 0.6mm thick for the rest of the tube (515mm).

So we lay it out on the tube. The tube comes 680mm long, but we are going to need 555mm. The minimum on the thick end should be 25mm, but since it's a single speed it need to be a little stiff than a regular road frame because you tend to ride out of the saddle a lot more since you only have one gear. I'm going to leave 70mm

The end mitered and ready for the bottom bracket.

A quick test. We are almost there. The end has to be cut so it cradles the bottom bracket centered at a 90 degree angle.

In the jig and we are ready to be cleaned and fluxed.

It's a lot easier to put on the water bottle bosses when the tube is full exposed.

Water bottle bosses and reinforcements. We will braze these in later. .

This is the first pass. The fillet is small because I still have to attach the down tube.

Heat tends to distort things, so we have an alignment table to make sure everything remains square. according to my indictors indicate everything is square. Now on to cut the downtube.