Carbon Rims and Karate Kid

Welcome back gentle reader. This week we are discovering a little known element of building an ordinary bicycle is that the later models in and around 1885 or so had..... drum roll please .....carbon rims. I've been holding out on you as a BIG surprise as tonight we learnt about laying carbon weave and tensile strength. You'll have to excuse my little joke having you believe we were using those metal hoops as rims. Sorry but they were the frame to lay the carbon on. If you have a really close look at this photo you'll see that it has a carbon rim

Also the forks in this photo were carbon but we are using titanium for ours as this model was for racing we wanted a more comfortable ride. Oh and one last thing.
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Note the spelling of comming... urban dictionary shows us how to use comming in a sentence. People's obsessions with improper spelling are comming to an apocalyptic climax.

This weeks class was all about the rims for me. I was running a little behind and there was only a couple of us left to drill out the rims. It's quite a long process drilling 120 holes for the front wheel and 40 for the back wheel.

First step was drilling the front wheel. First you drill a 4mm hole through both layers with MFTDP (My friend the drill press) every second hole then flip the rim and do the other holes to keep 1BTKB7DH (1 better than Kevin Bacon 7 degrees hole)

Then you drill a 7mm through the first layer of metal. This is so you can tweak the spoke nipple on the end (Heh heh heh).

This took an hour of up and down, then I had to clean up my small rim from the brazing. From this...

To this... since I forgot to take a photo of it.

 I then marked out the twenty spokes.

And back to MFTDP for another 40 holes as per the large rim. However this was not as easy as it might seem. I had to channel my third sensei Keisuke Miyagi aka Mr Miyagi as both Sensei Penguin and Sensei Spongebob were at a meditation retreat teaching young Jedi's how to make crappy prequels and lift rocks with their minds (I suspect so they can stone unhappy fans from a safe distance).

In the directors cut of Karate Kid after Daniel son learnt how to paint a fence, wax about a million cars he then learnt the special advanced maneuver the 1BTKB7DH (1 better than Kevin Bacon 7 degrees hole)

I am pleased to report I have reached the level of Blue Onesy in the ancient art of 1BTKB7D. Mr Miyagi is very pleased.

Once all the holes were drilled I then needed to use MFTF to remove the sharp metal dags.

As usual this was not without injury, nope that is not a smear of rust on that rim it's real DNA impregnated vampire appetiser. Stupid sharp bits.

Once this was done I made my name plates. As the rims are to be sandblasted and powder coated we made a special plate and wired it to the rim so we know who's is who's. I used the punch and didn't hit my fingers. Yay me!

I got all excited thinking I'd finished until I found out I had to do a second one. Since I'd already broken the second last hacksaw blade on the first tab. The genuine woman aka Janine took pity on this slow boy from the wrong side of the tracks and cut the second tab. This task of good will maintained my unblemished record of outsourcing in each class.

Here is me proud as punch holding my rims.

Thanks third sensei Mr Miyagi your deeply spiritual guidance helped me through this weeks lesson. You are an inspiration to us all.