M_V's multitude of bikes and adventures in the land of framebuilding

Been doing a bit of work to my long suffering Genesis Flyer recently.

I've been wanting to learn to braze or weld for a while and sort of made a new years resolution to do so this year. I thought I might get a change of job that'd help with this but since that fell through I decided to teach myself.

I wanted to start with something sort of non-structural so that if it went wrong I wouldn't be taking a trip to the dentist etc and as I ride the Flyer brakeless I decided to chop the brake bridge out of the rear triangle replace it with a piece of plate steel cut into some sort of design.

I have a garage but it has no power so any sort of welder is out of the question.

I decided on Mapp due to the low cost and compact size etc of the torch. I know it's not the hottest flame but there's plenty of videos on youtube and threads on forums from people who have build entire frames with Mapp so I reckoned it'd be good enough to start with anyway.

I bought a torch and gas off ebay for a little over £50, picked up 3 sheets of 3mm stainless steel from ebay for a few quid too and then some silver solder rods and flux powder. I actually bought 2 setcs pof rods, first I bought 2 54% rods and a sachet of flux powder for about £5 but after using up both of those rods on my first unsuccessful attempt I bought another set of 10 45% rods and more flux powder which cost me around £15.

A couple weeks went by and I hadn't plucked up the courage to do anything with the stuff so one day when I was bored at work I cut the brake bridge out the frame and made a cardboard template as I thought that'd kickstart me into action.

I then cut the piece out of one of the sheets of stainless, although I did this at my dad's garage which has power I only did it up there in order to use his vice. It was all cut and finished by hand.

It took me 3 attempts to get the brazing right. I think the 1st two times I was making everything too hot so the solder was just running out. It also didn't help that the piece would expand when hot then contract as it cooled pulling it away from the stays.

Around this time I noticed that the ends were a bit more than 120mm apart, I got a bit worried that heating the seat stays had warped something but actually with a wheel in there everything lined up as it should so I think it was just that the brake bridge had been holding the stays together a bit. I used a toe strap to pull the track ends together a bit before the third attempt.

On the third attempt I also flipped the frame over and went in from underneath, using a bit of bent spoke to hold the new piece in place. This meant that gravity was helping and the the solder has somewhere to pool up as well.

I didn't hold back on the solder on the third attempt so there was plenty excess to clean up.

Here it is after I cleaned it up a bit. Decided I'd not do too much more cleaning up till I rode the thing incase the new piece pinged out at the first bump but I've ridden it a fair bit now and it seems to be holding up so I'll probably clean up the excess solder a bit more now andtreat the frame to a new coat of paint of powder.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c271/mechanikal_vandal/7BC4E5B2-FB0C-4DD4-BD68-D0F2F9022A12_zps9ju7px7h.jpg

So for around £75 I've taught myself how to braze and I've also personalised my frame

I have a set of stainless rack braze ons that I'm going to attempt to attach to a fork next I think. I'll probably need more gas for that but that's less than £20 and now I've got the hang of not spending ages getting everything red hot it should last me a while longer.