Fiddly bits.

Along side building the main frame I have been gathering together all the components and additional bits that will need to come together to complete the bike. Wheels, gears and brakes will come from a donor bike. Seat, seat post, crank, bottom bracket head set and handlebars have been gathered together over the summer. In an ideal world I would love to fit it out with new parts but I am doing this on a budget of as little as possible. All these bits and bobs will come together once the frame is finished.

There are however some bits that are vital that need a little more thought. The cable routing and securing. In metal frame building they are called 'braze on's', the tiny parts that route the cables and the like. I cant braze these parts onto my frame so I needed another solution. I had thought about routing the cables through the frame, but decided not to for simplicites sake. So I needed to use a cable clip or bracket that would fix to the wooden frame.
I found a great selection of parts at Ceeway frame building supplies. I found two options so ordered both to test (and to fulfill their minimum order requirements) out mu options.

Here are the two options.

The two cable fixing options.

 I planned to silver solder on little stumps of metal bar that I would then epoxy into a pre drilled shallow hole in the frame. However after a couple of attempts I realized that it could potentially work but that I was over engineering the problem.

Failed silver soldering attempts.

Thinking it through I saw that I could use the hook type fixing by simply routing out a very shallow pit to match the shape of the base plate and simply epoxy the clip into the frame. This way the bracket would sit flush with the frame contour and was also thin enough to be slightly bent into and concave or convex profiles.

So I set about spraying them up. I lightly roughed up the surface with wet and dry paper, then super glued little a little leg onto each clip then pushed that into some plasticine for spraying. The little leg will snap off after spraying only leaving a tiny unpainted section that will be covered with epoxy once bonded.

Clips with primer coat.

Clips painted and lacquered.

Next step is to decide on the positions they will take on the main frame then rout / chisel out their pits.