New Fork built and disaster with the brake bridge...

After making a paper weight out of the 1st fork I decided to rebuild it instead of just leaving it, so I reheated and pulled the fork legs and cleaned and preped the crown for a new set. On this one istead of using outside plug drop outs I am using the standard drop to match the rear drop outs.

This time around I went way farther with the my measuring, alignment and prep of the fork legs. Trying really hard to make sure everything is going to be straight and square, the pictures below show a little of my new process.

You can see the center line of the leg so I will be able to align it with the crown.

Nice and straight and ready to be brazed...

This is after a quick soak to remove the flux, I used some some brass brazing rod that came with my 1st map gas kit... it works pretty well.

After some quick filing, I tried a little different cut on the fork end. I am still messing around with fork end cuts to see how they look after filing and how hard it is to clean and finish. This style is a pain because I have to get in with the dremel where as the straight solid angle I did on the rear drops is all file and very little dremel work, which is cheaper and quicker.

This is after the dremel work and using the abrasive wheels that cost 2 bucks a pop and they only last long enough to finishe one or two lugs... Expensive!

If you look close in this picture you can see the old fork leg I pulled out sitting there , I will probably cut it open to look at my brazing.

I am checking to see if a jig idea will work here, it ended up being a great way to do the fork (next picture) I have decided to not build big bulky complex jigs but ones that I can peice together and won't take to long to set up.

The setup here was quick and almost to easy, I am checking every angle for square and level. You can see I have a nice square flat piece of steel with a center line on it, the v-blocks are centered on that sto make a nice straight line for the rest of the jig.

Now checking for the crown to be level and square, after this I inserted the fork legs with a dummy axle and pulled the angles from the drawing to make sure I will have the correct rake angle.

Once I had everything set up and checked many times for square and straight I fluxed the crown to tack it into place.

After I tacked them into place I pulled it out and put it in the vice vertically to make it much easier to braze. It ended up being almost perfect with a wheel in it after I was done brazing, I will have some pictures of the filing later.

Now for the brake bridge, even though I thought I had it straight and square... it wasn't.

You can see here that I had some marks on the stays to make sure it was in place but once I started brazing it all went wrong. The jig didn't hold the piece in place so it ended up being low on the left side and poorly brazed. So last night I reheated and removed it, I will have some pictures tomorrow of that and how the new brake bridge looks.