Shaping Lugs and a Track Crown with Brass

These are details from a bike I made a couple years ago but never got around to sharing. I wanted to give a larger radius to the joints of the Henry James lugs so I filled them with brass and then silver brazed the bike together.




This first picture is the top tube/head tube lug filled with brass and with a head tube extension added to give a more comfortable bar height while riding. I talked to Tom Kellogg at NAHBS #2 about extending the head tube which I have seen on his bikes and mentioned that Spectrum had started by using Henry James lugs and brass brazing an extension on, but this would end up cracking eventually at that junction. Then they tried tig welding the junction but with the same results. The solution that they came up with to avoid the cracking at the junction of the lug and the extension was to have their own lugs made with the extension already built it. No more cracks.

PS- By crack I don't mean doom crack. I think what Tom was saying was that the junction was just a flexy point and the two lug pieces would come unattached to each other but would stay in place due to being brazed to the head tube. The head tube remained intact.




Here is the seat tube lug with the same effect. The cap on the seat stay was made my filing the tops of the seat stays to accomodate a small piece of 1" tubing and then brass brazing them together. Then the whole thing would be silver brazed to the seat tube cluster. It comes out lighter than a braze in solid steel cap, and you can use whatever diameter tubing you want as the cap for different effects.




And again...




And again...




I also filled in an Everest track crown to have a totally new look. The Long Shen track crown that takes the 24mm round blades is pretty much the same design if you are familiar with that. This was a pain and a waste of about 500psi of oxygen but kinda cool. Wouldn't do it again.




You can see that the normal concavities that exist between the fork blade zone and the steerer tube zone have been filled in to give the crown a more oval shape when viewed from the top. I also did away with the pointies on the outside of the crown and made a flat area with a small slot remaining.




Here is a picture of the original from the Nova site.