Thursday 28 January 2010

Haven't been able to make much progress on the bike recently, partly through waiting for the swing arm and partly because I've moved into a new workshop (only 15mins away rather than a hour away like my old one was).

Just because I haven't been working on the bike doesn't mean I haven't been busy though. I've been fitting workbenches in my new workshop and have started to build myself a bike lift using
a load of 50x50x3mm box section my mum bought me for Xmas (well she did ask me what I wanted).


Last year I picked up a clarke bandsaw of ebay and this helped a lot in cutting up the box section.

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Only problem at this stage was, with the saw set to 45degrees, the roller bracket hit the workpiece stopping the cut

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I managed to fix this by spacing the jaws out with some 10mm bar.

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I then welded the pieces of box. To be honest I had some difficulties here mostly due to my lack of welding experience. Looking back I'm not sure it was a good idea to cut the corners at 45degres to each other. This 45degree cut has to be spot on for everything to go together properly. I think with my tools and skills it might have been better to cut the box sections at 90degrees and I might do that for the other frame.

I did manage to get the frame welded and after checking with a framing square everything looks reasonably square.

Here's things halfway through welding

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It was only after I welded everything up I realised that it would have been a lot easier to drill the holes for the pivots before I welded things. I'm now going to have to try and drill these holes square with a handheld drill as now I can't use my pillar drill as the welded frame won't fit, oh and I blew up my black and decker drill last time I used it and now only have a cheapy cordless drill. I also don't have a 16mm drill which I'm going to need to drill the pivot holes. I'm wondering if a step drill will be up to drilling 3mm steel.