On Friday morning, it was 13 degrees when we left for class. Brrrr!

Since Doug is a 7th Day Adventist and observes Saturday as the sabbath, we don’t have class today and Doug’s workshop is closed. It’s all fine as having a day to recharge and read up on frame building and frame geometry probably isn’t a bad thing.

So far, we’ve learned most of the basic skills we need to build bikes and are now putting it all together. On Friday, we continued to work on our forks with Robert and me brazing our fork drop outs and Andrew brazing his fork blades to his fork crown and steerer. Unfortunately, the air regulator on Doug’s sand blaster died on us so prepping our parts is taking longer. We are almost to the point of having a functioning part of a bike which is exciting. Doug left early Friday to get a replacement part so hopefully we’ll be back on course on Sunday.

Andrew, sporting his newly acquired Niles FOP cap, brazes his fork blades to the crown.

In the meantime, my classmates have posted some of their own pictures from class on Flickr. Andrew’s uploads have shots of me wielding shooting fire and Robert has a great shot of me filing with three bandaids on and blood in my bottom bracket (see Day 2′s post, There will be blood)

Read the next post in the series, Day 6 & 7, Things coming together.

Read the previous post in the series, Day 3 and 4, Playing with fire.