A Bicycle is a Slightly Different Series of Tubes

The new tubes, lugs, and small parts have come in!  

Here's the entire bicycle, laid out.  The two tubes with an obvious taper are the chain stays (they connect the rear wheel to the bottom bracket.  The four thicker tubes make up the front "triangle" of the bicycle.  We call it a triangle because people get confused when scruffy bike guys use words like "quadrilateral".  

These tubes, with the exception of the head tube, are butted.  They get significantly thinner at the center to save on weight.  Since most of the strain on the tubes is near the joints, you don't lose a lot of strength.  

The small tube near the center with a drilling in the middle will hold the rear brake.

A lot of my favorite goodies are in that little plastic bag.  Reinforcement plates, classy adjustment barrels, and rack mounts.  I'm looking forward to dressing them up a bit this time around.  

This set of lugs are a little smoother than the last set.  They cover more of the tubes and sweep pretty gradually between them.  Unfortunately, this eliminates some of the elegance of the lugs I was originally using, which have a crease that better defines the tubes.  The flip side of that is that there's a fair amount of material to play with.  I might grind some detail work into the shorelines.

Tomorrow I'm going to prep a bunch of tubes (and the spare, cheap set of lugs I included in the order) for practice brazing.