Dave Heisserer and Dillon Hodapp of Minneapolis, MN, are building the Jiggernaut, a crowdfunded bike-welding jig:
Dave and I have wanted to build our own bicycle frames for years. Being bike enthusiast as well as handy people, there’s just something about a unique, hand crafted frame that resonated with us.
While researching frame building, we discovered that there’s a tool called a frame jig that is really nice to have when building your own frames. Basically, the frame jig holds all of the tubes in 3D space while you fit and weld them. We found some pre-made frame jigs for sale, but they were over a thousand dollars, which was more than we wanted to spend on a hobby that we’d never tried before. We racked our brains for ways to solve the problem and realized that we could probably build one out of MDF (inexpensive and flat) and have the pieces CNC routed (automated manufacturing). After prototyping a few jigs and building our first frame we knew that there had to be other people out there in the same boat as us.
The guys’ Kickstarter campaign has been funded but you can can still grab a jig for $299 including shipping, or $499 with all the tube you need to build your own frame.
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