CCM Flyte Reproduction Curved Fork

Owners of Flyte 8's may wonder how they can come up with one of the curved forks that really makes the Flyte something unique. It is possible, with a lot of patience, a lathe, and some welding skills, to make a rough reproduction of the Flyte curved fork. It also helps to have an original fork to use as an example of the fork's construction and curve radius.

I do have some original Flyte's, but I also came up with a Flyte frame with a straight fork. I struggled for months trying to make another curved fork. The original fork uses a cast crown and a pair of chrome-moly blades that were probably bent using a specially constructed die, heat, and considerable pressure. I am not sure whether CCM did this themselves or had another company do this job for them. The blades are both bent and tapered, and this type of tubing really only came into widespread use on bicycle frames in the 1930's. Most early frames have tubes that were only bent.

I made the crown from a salvaged CCM fork header tube, a machined circular piece that bulges out in the centre, a couple of 7/8" I.D. pieces of tubing for either side to hold the blades, and a couple of end caps that were fitted after the blades were made and fitted. The crown pieces were welded together in the jig that I made.

Bending the blades became a problem. In the end, they were rolled in a machine in two sections and welded together. The upper section was just a straight chrome-moly 7/8" O.D. tube, and the bottom section was a tapered chrome-moly rear chain stay that I got from a supplier of bicycle frame building parts. It was cut so that the tapered section matched closely the original Flyte curved fork taper. Two fork enda were brazed on to the ends of the blades to hold the wheel axle, and angled slots were cut.

Some flattening of the inside curve of the fork blade sections occured during the rolling process, and an attempt was made to fill the flattened sections with brass. In retrospect, it may be better to bend these sections by filling them with sand and using heat and a lot of force. The blades are not good enough for chrome plating, but with a little more filling, the could be painted and made to look quite presentable.

John Williamson