Practice, Practice, Practice or Wax on – Wax off

[Dyon Taylor]

After completing Bike #2, I realized that I wanted to go back and spend some time improving my brazing technique. Overall I was pleased with how the second bike turned out, but knew I wanted to make improvements. In addition, while at UBI, Ron Sutphin and Tony Pereira really stressed developing filing and cutting technique. As such, I decided to put together a series of exercises that would help to develop my filing, cutting, and brazing.

I ended up with a set of exercises resulting in almost 300 individual work-pieces, all of which were hand cut, filed, de-burred, and sanded. All of this turned into just over 150 brazed joints:
o “Brake Bridges” brazed with internal rings of 56% silver – I had some previous issues with bridges pulling away during brazing
o “Lugs’ brazed with 56% silver – I wanted to focus on better shore lines
o “Tabbed Dropouts” brazed with bronze – I’ve had limited experience with bronze
o “Seatstays” brazed with 50% silver – As 50% silver can fill a small gap, I thought it might be a good choice for brazing Seatstays to the Seat Tube Lug
o “Canti Bosses” brazed with bronze – More experience with bronze

While I still have a lot to learn, this was a great experience where I learned quite a bit, and know that my next bikes will be better for it.

If anyone is interested, I posted a number of pictures on Flickr: Brazing Exercises - a set on Flickr 

A few photos are included below.

Thanks for looking.

Work-pieces prepped and ready for brazing
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Brake Bridges
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Lugs
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Dropouts
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Seatstays
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Canti Bosses
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Lots of brazing
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[Luke]

That's pretty damn cool.
Keep it up!
-Luke

[Dornbox]

Sweet mother of practice!

[Kumo Cycles]

Bloody excellent

Did you find yourself more comfortable with flowing the filler and controlling the heat as you progressed?

[edoz]

Good plan, it'll pay off in the long run. I bought 30ft of 4130 for practice before I built my first frame.

[Dyon Taylor]

Bloody excellent

Did you find yourself more comfortable with flowing the filler and controlling the heat as you progressed?

Keith - I did get more comfortable with flowing the filler and heat control as I worked through this. In part because I got much better at "reading the flux." I did these in batches of 5 or 6 joints at a time so I could inspect each batch, see where I needed to focus, and apply that to the next batch.

Thanks!

[timto]

Nicely done! I did a whole pile of less organized practice first too. Let me also practice filing techniques for fillet finishing. Amazing what the repetition does for - as you say - reading flux, and heat, and the impact of a good warmup , or of tacking order... keep at it!