Brian- Not too bad looking for your start. At some point you'll want to file the practice for a few reasons. The biggie is to see if you have pocks or holes be uncovered with the removal. More likely with more then one fillet pass IME, The other reason is to drill into your brain why you don't want to have to file any more then you need to so you'll have the motivation to improve your fillets even more

BTW I just read an interesting tip posted to the Classic Rendezvous Google list by Mark Bulgier. I never had heard of this trick before and will try it someday. The post was in a thread about US framebuilding history and the connections between various builders, whence they started, who they learned from, where they went over the years and who influenced them. I have a framebuilding email folder for interesting stuff that has only a couple of dozen emails in it, been saving them for years. Today I saved two... don't remember two in 1 month before. This is one. Andy



I just remembered some tricks Angél taught me, that I never saw at Santana. He would fillet braze a joint, a little lumpy -- better than the guys at Santana, but still not smooth enough to send out into the world without filing. But then he'd immediately start filing, with a very large coarse file, while the joint was still super hot, almost glowing. The brass comes off like butter. Those who have filed fillets know, the brass is slippery to the file, so you have to guard against the file slipping off onto the steel. But not when the brass is hot -- the file digs right in, great "traction", no skittering. He would take just the bigger lumps off this way, but it took like 5 seconds and the joint would be almost ready to paint. I was impressed. I bet he learned that in France.

Mark Bulgier
Seattle WA USA