Yesterday I finished up the repair on the rear triangle of Cap's Emiliani road/touring bike. After reattaching the non-drive seatstay, rebrazing the opposite stay and non-drive dropout, and cleaning off the flux to inspect, I began finish filing, braze-on removal, and final cleanup. All is proper once again, and it's off to Hot Tubes on Monday!

Labels: Emiliani, Repair

Cap from Orono brought an interesting frame to the shop recently. A car accident (Cap was not seriously hurt), jarred the rear end of the bike pretty hard; hard enough to pull apart the silver fillet that held the non-drive seatstay to the seat tube. The frame was built in the 70's with Reynolds 531, Campy dropouts, and what appear to be Henry James castings by Cap's college roommate, Mario Emiliani. Cap rode the frame eastward across the country years ago and had converted it to a fixed-gear before his accident. Besides the repair, Cap requested a handful of braze-on removals and a respacing to better fit his track hub. When all is said and done, this bike will have a fresh coat of paint and will live again.



Because the seatstay became completely separated from the seattube, leaving two hard-to-clean surfaces, the first step in the repair was to remove the remainder of the fillet. Most of the material was carefully roughed off with the die grinder. After finish filing and sanding, we're left with steel on both sides, ready to be thoroughly cleaned to make way for a new fillet.





During the alignment process, two more problems showed up in the rear triangle. Both non-drive dropout and the drive-side seatstay developed partial cracks near the base metal. These will be solved with heavy cleaning, plenty of silver flux, and a little bit of work with the torch to fill the cracks.



The whole repair should be done by the weekend. The last step will be taking some post brazing pics, careful packaging, and then it's off to paint!

Labels: Emiliani, Repair