Fork Crown Chronicles: The first (steel) prototypes

:D

It's a bummer that I won't get these in the shop until Saturday, but I'm psyched to have them in hand!  They look great, but definitely need somme work.  Here's what I've noticed so far:

Machining: these guys need a lot of it.  There are printing marks (visible in the photos) and the tolerances from the casting and printing was a bit off.  I had to do some filing to allow the clamps to fit.  Other than that, I think some smoothing and possibly lathe work will solve everything.

Profile.  You can see some of the rough edges a bit better here.

Clamps: better ones are in the works.  These look nice, but I'd rather have them closer to the Takhion style clamps so that they could be interchangeable.

I made fork crowns!  That's super neat!

Weight: these guys are much heavier than my test crown.  I haven't put them on a scale yet, but I'll need to see what I can do to get the weight down.  They're made from 4130 steel, so they are strong!  That said, they also have the extra weight from the clamps to account for, so maybe this is a non-issue.

They'll need to be tapped.  That's not too bad, thankfully.  

"WE'RE HUGGING"

The rest will be tested on Saturday.  I can certainly get them polished and looking a lot prettier than this, so I'm not worried about anything thus far.  And I won't be the only one doing testing - one of these is going to a friend of mine who will be helping me iron out any kinks that I might find along the way!