Thursday, March 24, 2011

I love offset seat tubes!

A couple of pictures of Kimberly's frame, and a couple of thoughts.

-I really like offset seat tubes. Not only do you gain some nice tire clearance, you also get a nice open area for the chainstays to be welded in. No compound mitering to the seat tube, not nearly as tight to get the torch in there - great stuff. This is a very easy setup to build, as opposed to say, a road bike, where the chainstays are crammed together and compound mitered to the seat tube. I hate those! Well, not really, but I much prefer this!

-The low mount Paragon dropouts are also nice, because the seatstay tabs sit up high, so the stays meet the seat tube at pretty close to 90 degrees (well, not really - these are at 77, but it's common to be at <45 on a road bike). Once again, lots of room for the welding torch. Love it!

-Geometry here is moderately unusual. Kimberly is shaped a bit like me (though obviously less breathtakingly handsome) in that she's got long legs but not much torso or arm to compensate - so this (29er) bike is built as short as it can go without having toe overlap - it'll use a 100mm fork and plenty of bar/stem rise, though! Figuring out what we needed to do was quite an involved process - luckily Kimberly rides almost exactly the same setup as Sarah, so she was able to borrow Sarah's bike and confirm that our design was on the right track.

4 comments:

Fort James said...

Awesome looking frame. I like my WW built frame with an offset seat tube for sure!

aaron w said...

Looks sweet!

kimberly + waltworks = happycamper!

Fort James said...

So what are the advantages to the low mount rear dropouts? Any stiffer? It seems lots of frame makes, both small and big, are moving to this style dropouts/brake mount.

Walt said...

James -

http://waltworks.blogspot.com/2009/10/low-mount-disc-dropouts-in-wild.html