A couple of repairs passed through the shop this month and one of them caused me to observe something thing I didn’t like. Andrew brought in his road frame with a broken rear dropout. No problem there. It was a fairly straightforward fix. While I was doing the job and trying not to take too much paint off the rest of the frame (Andrew’s plan was to spray some matching silver paint on the repair) I started to get really frustrated when the Bottom Bracket kept rotating in the vice. I couldn’t believe my vice jaws were that far out of parallel. Turns out they weren’t. I put a caliper over the BB shell and low and behold it looks like it was never faced. This wont effect anything if you are using a sealed BB, but if you installed either an old style cup and cone BB or an external cup setup then you would be in big trouble. I wont mention the name on the frame but I am rather disappointed that these things show up at all. Any way Andrew’s frame is back to where it should be. Liz brought me her Carter with a bent front dropout after the simple act of tipping over in the roof mount system. Not while driving, just while it was being mounted. I took the old one out and put in a new one. Lucky it was steel and not carbon. One bends,the other one breaks.
Broken dropout
Replaced dropout
Dropout Alignment
Bent front dropout
Replaced front dropout
After that I headed off to Lorne to participate in Amy’s GranFondo. It was a different ride to other years weather wise and while it could have been worse it was certainly colder and more consistently damp. Still a good day though
A wet day at Amy’s Gran Fondo
g.duke Handmade Bicycles 