fork = brazed (mostly)

some preliminary photos, taken right after i turned the lights on after brazing the blades and stiffeners into the crown. this was with 56% silver filler; the fork was built with 3 different fillers: brass at the steerer, 50N at the dropouts, and 56% at the crown-to-blades.

after soaking in warm water, i discovered i had skipped brazing a couple places. there was a lot of ground to cover in one session and the flux covering everything made it hard to tell what had been done. i'll go back in to touch up later this week, and fill in the vent holes at the same time.

i think what i did braze went generally well. there were a couple tricky spots, where i think i should have maybe switched to a smaller tip or a cooler flame...in particular the club cut-out in the 3rd photo above. that area just kept overheating, no matter how delicate i was with the flame. i hope to be able to get some silver to run in there in a few days after plenty of clean up.
in the same photo, you can see some excess silver built up in the concave shoreline of the crown. i was afraid of excess there, because it's so hard to get at. my plan is to try re-heating delicately to convince that silver to flow deeper into the crown. if that's a no-go, i'll try an abrasive stone in the air-powered die grinder.

i use a couple small rare-earth magnets to hold the stiffeners in place at the skinny end while i tacked them at the wide end. this worked well, and i was excited at the thought of using this method again for similarly delicate jigging, which i've have a frequent need for lately. after brazing, i discovered they had lost their magnetism. bummer. i assume it was the heat, but they must be quite sensitive because they were a few inches away while i was tacking.


in other news, i've discovered my school's blasting cabinet over the past couple days. it's a pretty basic one, and the media is really worn-out i think, but it works well for cleaning up areas that would be hard or impossible to clean otherwise. it's faster than files and shop roll a lot of times. but it doesn't remove a lot of material. i'll try to find some fresh blasting media.