Originally Posted by
Chombi
When most hear about "stamped" steel dropouts, they usually think of the big, flat, ugly looking ones you might have found on entry level and boom bikes from the 70's.
There are nice enough looking stamped steel DO out there. Ones that stick in my mind is the one used on some entry level Peugeots from the 80's like the ones on their PH10s. They are stamped but Peugeot bothered to add in window cutouts that make them look like they are forged. They even have what looks like thickened areas at the slot loke forged DO's do. I bet you can grind, round and smoothen them out at the edges that they can fool most people to think they are forged. Never heard of any failures with those Peugeot stamped DOs.
...again, simply as a point of interest, a forged dropout is heated (possibly more than once)
and then bent and pounded into a mold that is not all that dissimilar to the ones used to
stamp dropouts out of a single piece of steel. The stamping process is, to my knowledge,
a cold process, but you can bet the resulting piece is pretty warm to the touch.
Stamped mild steel is a pretty durable material, and based on my own experience these
are more easily bent for realignment....but they are usually thinner, and the forged ones
aren't difficult to bend either.