Day two... Yep I still can't weld

Well we are now two days into class and I am still a terrible welder. By this point I thought that I would be creating the most beautiful welds that the titanium world had ever seen and I am currently creating welds that look like the moons of Saturn... Things are looking up however and my practice material is getting cleaner and cleaner. I have posted two of the practice T joints that I made today. You can compare them to the one I posted yesterday and really see the difference. I still wouldn't feel comfortable with these welds on my bike, but they at least look pretty.

We are working on our frame design right now and have gone over a few essential aspects of frame design. There are a lot of things that have to be taken into consideration when designing a bike frame, especially a custom one. I am going to try to simplify things using a few design ideas from the fireline 29er, but I don't want to create exactly the fireline, because after all this is a custom bicycle.

I also went out on the shuttle today for a nice ride. The first two miles were through huge patches of snow that I wrecked on everytime my tires hit the snow. Then I started up a really consistent steep grade climb that lasted about 15 minutes and finally I was ready for some downhill. The singletrack up here is fast. I was averaging about 20-25 mph weaving through trees and giong over roots. All the turns had burms that held my tires so I could lean way into it. Near the end there was a section that had some small jumps and had a section so fast that I had to be going 30mph it was scary.