Howdy, as you have seen I have done a fine job ignoring the blog the last few weeks. Things have been hectic juggling a few projects at the same time, with quite a few newer one’s beginning to line up.
One of the projects recently has been to make a Mach 2 version of the one piece handle bar and stem for the belt drive bike. The customer wanted a few changes to the original and he had also acquired a rare Columbus Gilco tube that he wanted to use for the stem.
When redesigning the set up, the idea of integrating the brake into the bar came up. As most brakes are aluminum, this then turned into me making the base for the brake. I machined it out stainless steel flat stock, manually. It took a hell of a lot of time because stainless is damn hard to cut, and my machining skills are minimal so I having to figure out a lot of things on the way. The actual lever and hardware was robbed off the original brake made by Paul’s components. I used the Paul’s as a guide as I was not trying to reinvent the wheel(or brake), but made a few modifications as the materials were different and I was not using CNC. I did not taking any pictures during the process, as getting this made took all of my concentration, but here are a few pics.
This is what I started with
Looks super clean!