A Brace To Keep My Wheel In Place

A few weeks ago I noticed my Phoenix had cracked again. This time on the weld at non driveside chainstay and the paragon slider.



Reading up on the interweb and talking to a few builder friends led me to believe this was due to the fact that the area had never been braced. So I talked to Chris, a local single speeder bad ass, all around good guy and owner of Podium Cycles about repairing the crack and installing a brace.



Chris installed a sleeve over the original chainstay and installed a brace between the chainstay and seatstay to hopefully advert this from happening again.

Another issue I've had with my frame is that the wheel has always leaned towards the driveside seatstay even though it was straight between the chainstays.



This difference is almost 3/8's of an inch. Chris put a Campagnolo dropout alignment tool on the rear dropouts and the driveside dropout was approx 3/16 of an inch lower then the non drive side. Chris said this was most likely due to an improperly set frame or possibly a miscut of the prebent seatstays...I believe this is the most likely cause since looking at the bends in the seatstays, they are asymmetrical.

As a temporary fix I took my dremel tool to the driveside dropout and removed the material necessary to allow the wheel to sit straight between the dropouts. A quick test ride tonight at 3 Sisters in Evergreen showed promise that the temporary repair will hold until I can get Chris to look at the frame more closely to determine what has caused this.