Staying the course!

It may not look it from my lack of posts but things are moving along well with the BSA. I have the wheels back from Buchanans and they look awesome! Tires are mounted and I am really happy with my tire, rim, and hub combo.

A while back I purchased some 1" x 2" race-track oval tubing to use in the frame construction of the BSA. A couple of weeks ago I made some 1" diameter rolling dies and rolled a length of the tube the hard way. After determining the lengths needed for the chainstays I chopped up the arc I created and then began to taper them down like a bicycle chainstay. I was able to cut out curved pieces of pie from the flat sides. After dressing the weld area I tacked then fully tig welded each of the tapers up.

After all this work I was only about half done because now I needed to bend them in towards each other to wrap around the front of the tire. This was done by bending a piece of 1" tube which I split and welded in 1" flat bar to make my bends. After much more welding and hand finishing I think they came out pretty nice, I'm really happy with them.

Oh, forgot to mention what I did about three weeks ago... I brazed stainless steel axle slide plates to both sides of each drop out. It took so much heat to flow the silver, it was a big pain in the butt. I ended up having to use some fire bricks to make an open top furnace to get things hot enough to braze and get full coverage.

I'm really wracking up the hours on this build. Between the cainstays and drop outs I have about 40 hours :P