Originally Posted by
Duragrouch
Really(?!) So the dip-brazing just conformed to the joint and formed a fillet naturally? I could see that as possible, different liquids naturally form convex or concave shapes due to surface tension and other factors. I just recall the joints being very smoothly blended, I didn't see shapes like that until I bought my Cannondale, which had large aluminum welds that were post-dressed with handheld power strip-belt sanders, no undercut, real craftsmanship.
A lot of the shape of Schwinns dip brazed frames comes from the way the tubes are swaged and punched and pre joined before brazing. I had also assumed them to all be fillet brazed too, upon looking at the smooth joints on their frames. Of course there were lugged and brazed Schwinns and they did fillet braze a few. Dip brazing was a revolutionary manufacturing technique ,probably because it yielded such pretty results and cost half what welding did ( hourly wages had risen, now everything is made by slave labor in China)