Mick's XCR Road Frame

Mick's road frame made of Columbus XCR stainless-steel tubing. Everything is stainless-steel, with bits sourced from 5 different suppliers to get it just right: STI bosses, front derailleur mount, Paragon rear dropouts, BB shell, cables stops, seatstay bridge and the QuikChainger chain hook. The logos are etched, and it was a chance to try out a possible new head badge design.

The frame tubes were from Darrell of Llewellyn Bikes in Queensland, Australia and are a sample kit, developed for his stainlesss-steel lugs in the DOS "double-oversize" sizing. The 35mm downtube and 31.7mm top-tube diameters are a better match for Mick's weight and riding than the standard XCR kit with its triple oversize 38mm downtube.

With the seatstays being the most challenging joint on a frame and these tubes fiendishly expensive and rare, I decided this was best done with Fillet Pro, a relatively new high-tech silver-solder with much higher strength than the 56% silver-solder usually used for stainless steel. It's also possible to use Fillet-Pro for the entire frame using it for fillet-brazed joints.

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