Trek also did induction brazing, must have been 1985 or so. Spent a lot of money developing the tooling. Just when they got it working correctly it was decided aluminum frames were the way to go. I believe this induction brazing line was scraped shortly after. Brazing in a vacuum using induction heat is very common in industry. It would be difficult to do bike frames this way. The F1 engines for Saturn 5 rocket, huge babies, were furnace brazed. Must have been fun to do this, but I am sure the budget was larger than the typical bike frame customer.
Jim Merz Big Sur CA
-----Original Message----- From: classicrendezvous-bounces@bikelist.org [mailto:classicrendezvous-bounces@bikelist.org] On Behalf Of M-gineering Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 8:36 AM Cc: 'Classic Rendevous' Subject: Re: [CR] Lugged Ti frames
Mark Stonich wrote:
> At 08:54 AM 10/16/2008, Doug Fattic wrote:
>> What I can say is that I would
>> never have thought of Cecil's method and my first reaction was what?!?!
>> Really?!?! He used that?!?!
>
> Doug,
> He told me one time of a scheme to produce steel frames with silver
> brazed lugs using heat lamps. It's been a long time, but I think it was
> to be done in a vacuum to eliminate the need for flux.
Gazelle had a production line where they used induction heating and gas shielding instead of a vacuum to brass braze frames. They said they had enough control to work with 753 but it was used for the mass produced klunkers.
Last I heard the line was scrapped as no one wanted to buy it
-- mvg
Marten Gerritsen
Kiel Windeweer
Netherlands