Good Old Fashoned Elbow Grease

So I've been at a crossroads in my mind about how to do the miters on the chainstays. I don't have a fixture to hold them at the right angles I need them at, and I don't have any sort of mills or hole saws. Their odd shapes make it hard to check the angle and position of the miter with the same methods that I use to do the main triangle miters. I probably would have buckled already and paid out big for Anvil's chainstay fixture, but the Don is backed up and I don't know how long it would be before that ever came in. So long story short, I've been waking up in the middle of the night with cold sweat, trying to figure out how I'm going to do this next step. (just kidding... well not entirely)

But with a new sense of vigor, (Marc e-mailed, telling me how soon his first race was) I decided to just plow in and figure it out. The first step of attaching the dropouts worked out with a 2x4, cut in half, and carved out for the approximate angle and shape the chainstays would have. Then that whole thing was rubber-banded together, measured for proper position and geometry, and brazed on up. Actually worked out pretty well. But then the hard part came of the miter for the bottom bracket shell...

I was coming up with all sorts of wooden contraptions for ways of doing this, but none really worked. Finally, with that much needed kick in the pants from my good friend Marc, I decided the hell with it, I was going old school. People used to make these two-wheeled things without fixtures, mills, or even jigs. I was already ahead of game in that regards. So with my trusty file, and everything on the jig setup, I started a long task of seeing where it was hitting on the bottom bracket shell, taking some off of that point with a file, check again, file again, and repeat. I figured this would take forever. But it only took a few hours on each one. So long story with a short moral. Don't be afraid to dig in on a big task. It's probably not as bad as it looks from the outside.