A Brief Pictoral Diarama of a Journey In Metal....

Alright, time to put a face to the story. Here's a few pictures to take you through what I've been writing about. First up is the school itself. UBI is down in the old part of Ashland, down by the railroad tracks. It is broken roughly in half, with the front half of the school where the large classes of bike mechanics, wheel building, repair, etc go on. The back half is a big warehouse type shop space where all the materials are stored and the welding shop is. Next to this building is a dorm type building where students stay while they are in Ashland.



Just outside the frame shop door is this view back toward Mt Ashland. This is where I retreat when I've been under the hood for hours focusing all my energy towards a 6mm diameter pulsing pool of molten Titanium.....it's quite a dichotomy to say the least.



Here's the exterior of the frame shop...where all the magic happens. Notice the huge solar array on the top of the building, it supplies 60% of the power to UBI. Pretty cool given that we are all blasting away with 200 AMP welders and three phase machine tools.



This is where our teacher instructs us in bits and pieces along the way. His name is Jim Kish, and he is great. Not just in his welding and bike building which is pretty epic, but he's also been a fantastic teacher, putting us all at ease under some pretty intense circumstances. Can't say enough about him and Gary and Rich, who also helped me tremendously.



View of the machine shop wall, lathe and Bridgeport milling machine in the backgroun there....(I often wonder how I'm going to fit my own version of those in my basement.. ;)



Closeup of the mighty Bridgeport. Turns a daunting task into a pull of the lever. I think I could have a serious relationship with one of these...man love.



Oh yeah, welding. ;) So here is my work bench where I try to create miracles.



More often than not in the beginning, I was just lucky enough to get the joints to stick together and not grow big swiss cheesy breather holes on the side...goopy Ti.



You can see what happens to Titanium when it is over 800 degrees and finds oxygen....p.s. don't ride this bike ;)



But like anything in life, throw yourself back in the fire and breathe, and it gets better...



and better...little victories.



Finally, yesterday, I made it around these 2 Gruelons without a failure, and some decent welds interspersed amongst the rumples....



Armed with the knowledge that I wasn't a total plebe at the welding torch, I constructed a real live bottom bracket / seat tube weld with some quality Ti (versus the Chinese stuff we'd been practicing on). Then, it was off to a stationary jig and a 50 pound extended metal pole that I leaned and bounced on with my entire weight until the seat tube finally gave up it's life.....the good news is, it did it before my weld ever budged. Proceed, Grasshopper...



more to come in another post, gonna head out to take some snaps of Ashland and locate some surprises for my women back home.