Terry Osell's Latest 'Bent

Longtime professional framebuilder, Terry Osell brought his second generation, lightweight CLWB with a backbone frame. Patterned more or less on Mark Stonich's latest lightweight experiment, frame is 2" by .049”. This is up from the first version, which had 1.5” by .035” and was too flexy, until he added braces under the main tube. Main tube is ovalized vertically at the front and horizontally at the back. The frame by itself is 4.9 pounds, which is a little heavier than Mark's. But then Terry is a little heavier (around 210) than Mark too.

To those unfamiliar with Terry's history, He has certainly built more bike and recumbent frames than all the MnHPVA members past and present combined. Probably twice as many, and maybe 3 times as many. Mark



The head angle is 56 degrees with lots of rake to match, which brings the bars pretty close in, but Terry has gotten used to that and likes it now. The rear end is a monostay set of tandem fork blades with 3.5" of downward "rake". Seat is a Linear. He uses a kickstand consisting of a socket into which an aluminum tube is inserted. Then, when he takes off, the tube goes along the seat brace in a socket on the rear fork with a rubber band to secure it.



Bottom bracket is attached just on the front side of the head tube, and it uses 155 mm BMX cranks that have been drilled and tapped to take MTB 74mm small chainrings. The front shifter is on the steering head tube itself. This places the cage too far back to get reliable shifting over 3 chainrings, but works OK with 2. He gets a good gear range with a 40 tooth plus a granny on the front combined with a wide range, 9 speed rear cluster.



It is due to go to his brother-in-law soon to get Imron paint applied. The bike took him "almost a week" to build, much to Mark's chagrin!

(I just found out that “Almost a week” includes everything, like building the wheels and stem and assembling the bike. The frames take him 2 (!!!!????) days. One to miter, slot and braze it all together. The 2nd day is for finishing all the fillets, which I don't even do, and adding braze-ons. Mark)

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