All of us use different methods to accomplish the same goals. We start with the teaching and tooling available and make adjustments as we make more. Unlike my buddy Andy, I'm not bothered with using silver everywhere including the bottom bracket shell heating it 4 different times, one for each socket. The advantage of doing it that way is to insure alignment and dropout length accuracy. I'm not reheating the whole shell every time but rather I'm concentrating heat on just one socket at a time.

There are 2 problems with brazing a joint entirely in a jig. The 1st is that it is difficult (maybe impossible) to keep repositioning the fixture that is holding the frame in the best places for brazing efficiency. And part of the fixture will sometimes be in the way making your heating pattern slower and more complicated. And 2nd it doesn't insure alignment accuracy anyway, that is determined by your heating pattern. Like Nessism does it, most of us tack in a fixture and braze free.

As a reference to alignment challenges, I refer back to the 70's when American framebuilding got restarted again. Reynolds required that those that buy 753 (thin wall heat treated tubing that can't be cold set) take a test to confirm they could braze a joint with complete penetration everywhere and end up with an aligned frame. When I talked to Terry Bill at Reynolds in Birmingham in 1977, he told me every single American that applied had failed the test. I'm sure that these pros after paying 75£ for the test tubes and making a complete frame and shipping it to England at their own expense put a lot of thought into their process. Their theory didn't match reality.

My primary tool in making a frame is an alignment table. I've also been refining a main triangle fixture ever since I came back from England with frame making tooling from Johnny Berry a master builder in England. In reality is just a much more sophisticated version of laying V blocks on a flat table over a full scale drawing to spot a frame together.