The bars and the big reveal

The bars, well these came from a mates shed along with the seat. Originally from an old bike with rod brakes, the rods were long gone but the lugs on the bars were still there an the stem was brazed to the bars. I was very surprised to find that the lugs for the rods un screwed from the bars and a little hemispherical nut fell out the end of the bars once the lugs were fully un screwed, a little heat from a blow torch was a help here as they were badly rusted.
The stem was a little harder to remove. I cut a slit along the stem in two places half expecting to find the bars were in two halfs but they weren't. I applies heat to the stem where it was round the bars with an oxy acetalene torch to melt the braze, then with the bars clamped firmly in a vice and a thick welding gauntlet I was able unpeel the stem from round the bars. The double slitting of the bars was a bi mistake as I was left with a piece left stuck to the bars, more heat and some screw driver prizeing action helped get rid of it. All I had to then was weld up the holes from the lugs, which I did with the oxy, my first time properly gas welding and it came out ok with a bit of cleaning up. Here's the finished product,







Well that's a lot of the first mods covered so I guess its time for the big reveal to show you the full bike as it stands so far

The next stage

Ok then, the next step was to chop the seat post and re weld so the seat would sit level and further back with the part of the post that the seat was clamped to would sit hidden up above the seat rails.

So it was out with my old protractor from my school pencil case which hasn't seen the light of day in years, and a small spirit level. With the protractor against the seat tube and the spirit level on the flat bottom of the protractor, I tilted the protractor until the spirit level was level and then read the angle off the protractor.

This was my angle to chop the seat post at, to make sure I got it right, I cut the angle onto a short length of 2x3 then clamped the seat post to the length of wood and used the angled end as a guide to rest my hacksaw blade against as I was sawing it. No pics of this I'm afraid I just dived straight in and did it all.

Once cut, I welded the post back together to make an extreme lay back post of sorts and create the look I want (It did take a fair while to clean up the weld to get the join looking neat)

Add a really nice old battered Brooks B17 saddle and we're starting to get there





Then move the front mudguard to the rear



The next move was to ditch the apes and fit the bars that I'd sorted out, need to take some pics of them so more on that next post.