A visual one, that is. Doing a hipster fixie for my old HS friend Scott, so I thought I'd spice it up with an external sleeve/lug on the seat tube. Pretty neat. I TIG the sleeve right over the top of the seat tube, which welds them to each other pretty nicely, and then I run a little silver into the top and bottom at the end of the build to keep everything extra secure. I've done this with some other frames in the past, but it looks so cool (and makes the seat tube so indestructible) that I might start doing them more.
In this shot, you can see how there wasn't *quite* enough material to totally soak up the heat at the point where the weld gets closest to the edge of the sleeve. Neat effect.
4 comments:
do it, man! that looks SWEET. you'll never go back - it makes that joint solid, your reamer will gather dust, you wll never have warrenty issues there and it gives it that little "custom" bling.......that and you can just use one seatube for almost every build! i like rcxst{?} steve.
Yeah, it's f'in sweet, Steve. I can't believe more people don't do seat tubes this way.
That one is actually an external butt ST with an .035" sleeve. Kinda silly, but it was mostly for looks. And I only had to use the reamer to get some flux out of there. Killer.
walt: That one is actually an external butt ST with an .035" sleeve.{quote} that's what i used to do, too. then i figured that by using a .058" sleeve on the single butt ST that i only had to order one ST and you always get the full BB butt lenght. cheers! steve.
Dude!
Super sweet Walt.
I can hardly wait!
Scott
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