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  • Lugs are easier, not least because they hold everything in place while you wave a torch around while poking yourself in the face with some welding rod. However, due to the amount of metal you need a torch with some serious ooomph. It's not so much the temperature of the flame, as the total amount of heat it can chuck out.

    Fillets are harder to do, particularly with silver. The hard thing about silver is that when it melts its very runny, almost like water. Overheat a brass fillet and it'll get a bit saggy. Overheat a silver fillet and you'll end up with a little puddle of silver on the floor. You also need to be much more careful with cleanliness and contamination with silver. If you cook the flux then it's game over, start again - brass is far more resilient to a bit of overheating.

    The downside with brass is again the extra heat required. You can add little braze-ons using silver with nothing more sophisticated than a standard plumber's blowtorch. Doing lugged joints with brass is going to require oxy-propane or oxy-acetylene like @coldharbour says.

    If you just want to stick some stuff together, I'd suggest just getting a blowtorch and a small quantity of silver and flux, something like a bit of Fillet Pro from Ceeway and some System 48 flux. You won't be able to build a frame using it, but it'll be good practice anyway with little capital outlay.

    Then once you've upgraded to oxy kit, get some practice tubes and lugs from Ceeway and do a load of them. Then move onto your first lugged frame and you're away...

  • Top advice. Thanks for your reply
    I might go for the sticking stuff together route for practice, then as you said, invest and get some practice tubes etc

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