Framebuilders - Did I mess up?

In the course of brazing together some racks, I got brave and decided to add some rack bosses to the fork and seatstays of my early 80s Nishiki. I also added eyelets to the top of the fork dropouts. This bike is my everything bike: loaded tourer, commuter, weekend bike. Thing is, I'm a beginner at brazing and went for it anyway. In retrospect, I chose poorly.

Recently, I ran into a local frame builder and told him about what I was doing. He told me the two big things to look out for in brazing: cleanliness and keeping the heat down. I removed all rust and paint before brazing and used flux, but my heat control is not great. I'm sure I fried some of the brass pretty good. Given that this is my first go at this, I expect that some of my brazes will eventually fail. But the frame builder scared me when he started talking about inclusions: getting the steel too hot and mixing steel with brass, resulting in a potential steel failure. The thought of a fork failure -- either mid-fork or at the dropout -- is scary to me.

I'm building my second rack and, after a frustrating day at the shop where I just couldn't get the braze right, I'm getting nervous about the integrity of my brazes. So my question is this: how hot would I have to get the steel in order to risk inclusions? Would I have to actually melt the steel (I think my heat was too low to actually melt steel)? Or is this a problem at temperatures lower than steel's melting point? If I took the frame to a frame builder, is it likely that he could examine the brazes and determine their strength, if nothing else to give me a piece of mind? Is it probably safe to ride this bike long distances (several hundred miles)? Should I just ride this bike until/unless I notice cracks?

I know these questions are difficult to answer without actually seeing the brazes and witnessing my work, but I want to know if it's common for beginners to court catastrophe when brazing on a fork. Thanks in advance.

Why not grab your braze-ons with some pliers and crank on them some? Don't get all crazy, but testing the integrity of the joints this way is reasonable. Most likely, you will be okay.

There are/were builders known for getting things pretty hot when building. Signs of overheating are common; today I viewed a very nice frame put together by David Kirk and several tubes were bulged where they exited the lugs. I have never heard of a frame failing because of it. Of course, if by "poor heat control" you mean "the tubes were white hot and I couldn't look directly at them" then you might have a problem...

FWIW, you may consider using silver in the future. Silver is still perfectly strong but uses much lower temperatures, keeping folks like us much further from a serious overheating mistake. Cleanliness still matters, however...

I have only been brazing for a little over a year and we all know to keep the heat down as much as possible but I have seen some old photos of DeRosa brazing a frame and he had a flame so big it looked like the flame coming out of a dragster tailpipe. I know that when you reheat a joint the brass seems to get a little harder to liquify and puddle but like Nessism said if you test it a little or tap it with a hammer and it still pings like solid steel its probably ok. The second frame that I built I reheated the joints about 3 times trying to make the brazes look better, I am sure I overheated it a little, then while cleaning up some of the brazes around the chainstays I accidently cut through about 1/2 of the thickness of the chainstay with a dremel sander, long story short I gave the frame to a friend who didn't have a cross bike he rides the hell out of it, jumping off curbs, riding trails, just trying to break it and it hasn't failed, he even won the Tennessee CX championship in his class on it. Six jours has it right though, Silver is the way to go. Good luck.