It's no where near built, but it is moving on ...
The headset came out a while ago and there was witness of some distortion around the bores for the cups (they were both very tight at the back). After a while the penny dropped
and it appeared to have been caused by the welding as the distortion on the inside followed the weld on the outside perfectly. It also looked like this had caused the faces to be a little out of square.
I spent the afternoon in the bike shop today and managed to :
Ream the headset bores.
Face the head tube.
Run the tap though the bottom bracket threads.
Face the bottom bracket shell.
Pleased to say everything went well
The headset bores are now round and correctly sized
the head tube faces are square
The bottom bracket thread (distorted a little from the dint mentioned in an earlier post) also cleaned up perfect
One of the shell faces was slightly out but that is now perfect to
By chance I found that the frame had some form of datatag in the seat tube. It was a bit awkward to remove (especially when I actually moved it down past the bottle bosses
) but I have now found a method for removing them fairly quickly with no special tools and no damage to anything other than the tag :? That info won't be getting posted on the net ...
All the Ti bits have now been prepped ready for blasting and I had a trip to the blasters last weekend for a trial with glass media.
The glass was a little course so the next stage is to try calcium - Doing this tomorrow (pending weather) as the calcium booth was waiting on a part last week
The guy also has a stainless bead blaster so that might me another option ...
I hope I can achieve the nice matt finish I got on the bits for the Marin so I can do some blingy polished artwork
it's a shame the booth I used last time isn't big enough for a full frame :-(
Pics coming soon
I also found a lot of info on Airborne and the frame is defo a 2000 (I will update my thread title
). In late 2000 they offered a disk brake option and changed the geometry and some of the frame detailing. This one seems to be a hybrid of the change over period as it has the early 2000 geometry but the late 2000 features.
The features I refer to are the design of the head, canti bosses, dropouts and disk mounts etc
The geometry change lengthened the stays and head tube (early being shorter in both respects). Interestingly the longer head tube moved the welds away from headset bores so I reckon they knew about the problem I just fixed ... ;-)
I also have the sizing charts and luckily, according to Airborne, I fall slap bang in the middle of the range recommended for the 18" which you sold me
If I can suss out how to post pdf's up, I will add all the info in here
WD