After school had officially ended, I was lucky enough to be able to stay on campus and design and build my own bike frame. To quickly get a mental image of the vocabulary used in the following description, I highly recommend visiting: http://bicyclethailand.com/bicycle-nomenclature/ . The entire process took around 2 months, although dedicated fabrication time in the shop was only available for the last two weeks of the build. The first step was to build a mental image of what I wanted my bike to look like; mountain bike, commuter bike, road bike, etc. This mainly involved browsing the internet and looking at really, really nice bikes, and then telling myself to lower my standards, as this was my first bike frame build. Having decided that a road/commuter bike would be the most practical, a basic steel tube set was ordered, and I began to ponder the more detailed design considerations. How big am I? How big should the bike be in relation?  Where should the tubes meet each other to achieve this? And crucial for the next step, at what angle should the tubes meet? After mocking the full bike up in CAD, making sure all of the angles fit moderately within industry standards, and measuring three-thousand times, I began to cut and notch my tubes. This was incredibly nerve racking, and although not a whole lot could go wrong, if something did, it would require a considerable amount of work to fix.  

The tube notcher itself was a drill press with a roughing end mill attached and a vice that could be angled, allowing for very accurate notching. I was the first of the group to notch my tubes, and in doing so, it was discovered that the end mill caught and bent in the tubes as the tubes thinness negated the steel's strength. To fix this, aluminum inserts were lathed, inserted into the ends of the tubed, and consumed during the notching process. After the tubes comprising the front triangle of the bike had been notched, I tacked them all together on the jig using oxy-acetylene braxing , enabling me to remove the front triangle from the jig and fully fillet braze all of the joints. After the front triangle was complete, I began to manually notch the rear triangle, as the dropouts and area where the seat-stays went around my seat post had to be filed by hand. Finally, the rear triangle was ready to be tacked, and then ultimately fully brazed together. Due to the heating and cooling of the tubes during the brazing process, it was necessary to cold set the frame after it had cooled completely to ensure that each dropout was equidistant from the seat post, and in line with the head tube. I plan to build out the bike itself in the coming semester.