Been meaning to post this up for ages but seeing as its persisting down and there's nothing better to do I thought what better than an sunday afternoon in front of the laptop fuelled by tea & biscuits! 
I noticed while on ride in October last year that the headset felt a bit lose but after tightening everything during the ride when I got back it still felt slack so I decided to take everything apart and take a closer look and to my horror I found the dreaded Pace head tube crack....ARGH!!!
How I didn't spot this crack while I was on the ride I'll never know but when I look back and think what I got up to during that ride I'm lucky that it didn't completely fail, especially when during part of the ride was down a very steep B road where I must have been hitting 30mph+ ......scary!
After a lot of searching on this and other forums I found that other people had encountered this fault but managed to get it repaired and so I set about contacting Pace to see what my options where. Pace put me in touch with Spondon Engineering but after I had sent them photos they claimed they couldn't do anything with it and it was either wall art or scrap metal. This, I thought, was unacceptable, I couldn't bear to part with my owned since brand new beloved Pace, it was, and is still, one of two of my dream bikes so I contacted a few other companies but with no joy. Then I remembered one of my customers is a motorcycle engineer and after a lot of dead ends and being told it was scrap I heard the words I had been wishing for: 'Yeah, bring it to me, I'll sort it.'
I dropped the frame off just before Christmas and understandably didn't expect it back before the new year but to my surprise in the week between Xmas & new year I received a few photos of the before and afters of the welding work with the message: 'Its ready, come and get it'.
The repair procedure involved cutting a V-groove into the headtube on top of the crack, which was then welded and grinded flat and then a strengthening piece added to the top and bottom faces of the headtube.
And this is how it looked when I picked it up, ready to be ground, sanded and polished into shape.
So I started off with a grinding wheel on an angle grinder to shape the weld and strengthening straps ready for sanding.
Once I had got the shape I was after I started sanding using 800, 1500, 2000 and then 4000 grit pads to get a nice smooth finish ready for polishing.
And then the finish after polishing for which I used various different metal polishes and then sealed with a metal sealant to help protect the bare metal from oxidising.
And here she is re-built with a few updates including new Flite, ProClass2 forks, a set of Hope Hoops and Hope headset ready to give me another good few years of happy Pace riding..................hopefully!
I noticed while on ride in October last year that the headset felt a bit lose but after tightening everything during the ride when I got back it still felt slack so I decided to take everything apart and take a closer look and to my horror I found the dreaded Pace head tube crack....ARGH!!!
How I didn't spot this crack while I was on the ride I'll never know but when I look back and think what I got up to during that ride I'm lucky that it didn't completely fail, especially when during part of the ride was down a very steep B road where I must have been hitting 30mph+ ......scary!
After a lot of searching on this and other forums I found that other people had encountered this fault but managed to get it repaired and so I set about contacting Pace to see what my options where. Pace put me in touch with Spondon Engineering but after I had sent them photos they claimed they couldn't do anything with it and it was either wall art or scrap metal. This, I thought, was unacceptable, I couldn't bear to part with my owned since brand new beloved Pace, it was, and is still, one of two of my dream bikes so I contacted a few other companies but with no joy. Then I remembered one of my customers is a motorcycle engineer and after a lot of dead ends and being told it was scrap I heard the words I had been wishing for: 'Yeah, bring it to me, I'll sort it.'
I dropped the frame off just before Christmas and understandably didn't expect it back before the new year but to my surprise in the week between Xmas & new year I received a few photos of the before and afters of the welding work with the message: 'Its ready, come and get it'.
The repair procedure involved cutting a V-groove into the headtube on top of the crack, which was then welded and grinded flat and then a strengthening piece added to the top and bottom faces of the headtube.
And this is how it looked when I picked it up, ready to be ground, sanded and polished into shape.
So I started off with a grinding wheel on an angle grinder to shape the weld and strengthening straps ready for sanding.
Once I had got the shape I was after I started sanding using 800, 1500, 2000 and then 4000 grit pads to get a nice smooth finish ready for polishing.
And then the finish after polishing for which I used various different metal polishes and then sealed with a metal sealant to help protect the bare metal from oxidising.
And here she is re-built with a few updates including new Flite, ProClass2 forks, a set of Hope Hoops and Hope headset ready to give me another good few years of happy Pace riding..................hopefully!
