Frame game

I rarely do any drawings or sketches when I make my bikes because I like to create parts from an image in my mind, but there are occasions when a drawing is unavoidable.

I had recently ordered a length of 28mm T45 chrome manganese steel tube to see if it was possible to bend it at home with my old pipe bender. There is a difference between pipe and tube – pipe is measured by its internal diameter and tube is measured by its outside diameter, so the dies on my pipe bender didn’t match exactly with the diameter of the tube.

I remembered an old trick where you pack the tube with sand and weld discs onto each end