The Coho shop was was full of activity on New Year’s Day.  Since I had a three day weekend last week, I wasn’t in the mood for one again so soon.  And since I have plenty of work right now, I decided to braze this frame up yesterday.

    This is where I stopped just before dinner.  What’s going on here is another alignment check.  This time, I’m using a wheel to check the alignment.  When it’s all said and done, a framebuilder wants to end with a frame and fork that will put two good wheels in the same plane and he wants the bottom bracket on an axis that is perpendicular to that plane.  As a rider, you want a bicycle that tracks well and turns one way as easily as it does the other.

    It’s easy to get so focused on the frame that we forget that it’s going to be a bicycle with a rider.  There are people who design and build systems to hold tubes while putting the frames together and other systems to measure alignment and other systems to correct misalignment.  Sometimes we forget that the best bicycles you could buy not so very long ago were mostly all built by eye.  And they worked marvelously.

    When we think of alignment as part of the substance of the bicycle rather than a quality of the frame, we start to see it more and more often as we build; and we immediately know when it’s not there.  Can I say, we see it’s missing?

    All along the way, from when I check the tubes before I begin to cut them, until I do the last checks before brazing the seat stays on and lock the rear triangle up, I think about alignment and I check it; over and over.  I do check the frame on the alignment table after tacking and before brazing, but the rest of the time, I’m grabbing a straight edge, and I’m looking all the time; from every angle.

    But it’s near the end, when I’m doing those last checks before brazing the seat stays in that I slip a wheel in the rear dropouts and I remember, It’s a bicycle.  I usually, pull the frame and wheel out of the vice, and roll it around a bit; show the dogs what I’ve been up to in the shop where they are not allowed.  I do it with forks too.  And do you know what?  That rolling around is an alignment check too because you see very clearly how the tubes and wheels line up.  At this point, they line up well and it makes me feel good.  That and the rolling part.