Author Archives: gdukebicycles

John bought this Jamis quest frame with a cracked dropout. He got it for a good price and saw a project to be had.

Jamis Quest with a cracked dropout

After a bit of discussion he decided he would like to have the option of fitting disc brakes and asked me to fit a set of Paragon Machineworks disk dropouts.

Paragon Machinworks

I had never worked with them before and the surgery proved to be rather radical.

Jamis Quest surgery

First of all they are much longer than usual road dropouts because they incorporate the disk mount. My usual method of mounting a disk brake is to braze a separate disk tab onto the stay. This means that the tab doesn’t have to be parallel to the stay. With the Paragon dropouts the tab and dropout are one. So, in order to get everything aligned the stays had to be cut much shorter and then spread just a bit further than usual and  the dropouts fitted to come straight back.

Brazed and primed

Luckily the chainstays on the Jamis don’t go straight back out of the Bottom Bracket. They sweep out about halfway along enabling clearance for the crank. I am pleased with the end result and hope it provides all the options John imagines

With calliper and hub

Paragon tabs straight back

Paragon Machineworks brazed

The nice people at English publication The Ride Journal http://www.theridejournal.com/ chose to publish my story.Very flattering to find yourself in the same company as Fabian Cancellara, Bill Strickland, Danny MacAskill and others who may not be known at all but still have great adventures worth telling.

As I mentioned last month I have been recently motivated to begin a restoration of a Petrus road frame I own. Petrus frames were built by ex-Olympian Peter Brotherton. Peter competed for England and after the 1956 games in Melbourne he decided to stay. He worked with the Australian team and amongst other things he built frames. He built them one at a time and from what I can gather used the hearth method. One of his more well-known customers was Allan Pieper. I remember seeing a few in the years I raced and always being impressed. When the opportunity to obtain one that would fit me came up I jumped at it. One of the reasons that I enjoy doing something like this is that I get to have a serious look inside a frame and see exactly how much care went into a frame by that particular builder. There are a dozen ways to skin a cat so by doing this I get to observe how other people do things. Something I immediately noticed on this frame was that it was pinned. Not surprising for a frame built in a hearth. What is more unusual is that unlike some frames where the inside of the joints look a little like a porcupine, with pins coming in from either side, this frame has pins traveling right across the joint from one side to the other.

 Given the fact that this was a custom frame, I was interested to perhaps find out a little more about it. It is orange with blue highlights in the lugs. Clearly someone wanted to emulate Eddie. It has a slotted bottom bracket shell. I have been advised that Peter stopped using those in 1979 in favour of Cinelli ones. This fits with the Merckx timeline. It has Campagnolo dropouts and caries a Reynolds 531 tubing transfer. The search for information has led me to more than one owner of Petrus bikes and a couple, including the son of Peter Brotherton who have owned theirs from new. Enough of the description. On to the project.

 My Petrus came to me with two of the three braze on top tube cable guides missing. The chrome on the front forks and rear dropouts was a little tired looking. Given both these things I decided to do a complete restoration on the frame. Before stripping the paint I carefully photographed the decals and got Greg Softley  (Cyclomondo)  to reproduce  them. I have replaced those missing guides and it is off to the platers for new chrome and then back for paint. The frame came to me with a Shimano bottom bracket and Shimano steel headset. While I am usually a Campagnolo  man I have accumulated a set of first generation  Shimano DuraAce parts in black. Some of them used and some NOS. If my assessment of the build date is right then these also fit nicely and are in line with the parts that it came with. Check back later and watch for progress

The Warrandyte region is my favorite riding destination in the Melbourne area. It has great scenery and enough hills to make any ride seem worthwhile, so having ridden through there last Saturday morning I was very saddened to see the losses incurred by people in the fires on Sunday. I wish everyone affected the very best and look forward to my next visit on two wheels

Happy new year to everyone who bothers to read this.
I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a couple of weeks in January down on the west coast of Victoria at a place called Port Fairy. Known for the folk festival it hosts every year in March it has a long history surrounding the water dating back to the time when it was a whaling village and is just down the road from the finish of the Melbourne to Warnambool road race. Visiting this fishing and tourist town has become somewhat of a tradition for my family and I. I get to ride with a great bunch of local riders, renew old acquaintances, often make some new ones, read books and try to surf. I also nearly always come home inspired by something I have seen or heard. This year there were two things.
One was this poster that I saw in a gallery and where the owner was happy for me to photograph it.

He is building

It might be about boat building (a craft that never ceases to amaze me) but I was struck by the fact that if I changed each reference to boat in the wording, to that of bike, it could easily apply to me as a bicycle frame builder. I think that when I explained this to the owner she was even more willing to allow me a photo.
The second thing I have brought back came after a conversation with another rider one morning about a bike he owned. We were talking about older steel bikes and framebuilders and it transpires he owns a Petrus. I will expand on this in another post but I too have a Petrus frame and this conversation has inspired me to get on with the task of restoring it to its former glory and putting it back on the road where it belongs

Impending home renovations have meant that most jobs done recently have gone un-photographed. I am working between boxes that are continuing to stack up , but I am still working. Enjoy this season with your loved ones and Hey, lets be careful out there.

My new (to me) Leinen Lathe and box of accessories.A fitting sibling to the Deckel Mill

Leinen Lathe

Leinen Accessories

The Gallifrey Project

Reynolds 753 and 531 tube sets

Reynolds 531 Bates cycles

Don’t hold you breath

Last Friday evening I attended a Melbourne performance of Einstein on the Beach. For the uninitiated Einstein on the Beach is a minimalist opera composed by Philip Glass and directed by Robert Wilson in 1976. I have listened to the soundtrack many times over the last 20 years but until Friday had never been privileged enough to see it performed. The music is quite repetitive, often rather metronomic and for some people downright irritating. I simply see it as sparse and have never found it such. While I have always enjoyed listening to it when the mood has taken me there, seeing it live brought meaning to the music that I hadn’t quite imagined. At one point the stage is re-set; to the music. This act is part of the performance.
I have considered this during the week and been reminded that when it comes to custom framebuilding there is much more to this gig than the actual shaping and joining of tubes. There is always allot of preparation and the regular re-making or adjusting of jigs and fixtures along with the refurbishing of machinery that enhances the end result. Sometimes it is easy to feel that I am wasting time when I am doing this part of the job and that I am not actually framebuilding. I understand why some builders have gone down the road of reducing the pre-production part of building to a minimum in order to maximise their production. But I am not going there.
With that in mind I set about making a bottle boss drilling jig for Commuter Cycles http://commutercycles.com.au/ and continue to call myself a framebuilder

Milling the bottle boss jig

Jig and drill guides

Finished bottle boss drilling jig