I’ll skip to chapter 3 brazing the fork blades to the fork crown and later come back to brazing the dropouts to the blades. None of this information will be of much use to experienced builders but might help those with less. When I was learning to build frames in England, we brazed the crown first before brazing the dropouts. This allowed us to modify the length more easily to center the wheel. We didn’t have at Ellis Briggs a fancy fork fixture so that dictated doing the DOs last.

The oval shape of a fork blade frequently does not play nice with the oval shape of crown’s sockets. This probably involves some blacksmithing of the blades to make them fit properly. Most likely by squeezing them in a vise. Care has to be taken to ensure that the socket is touching the walls of the blades - especially on longer tangs. Otherwise it is easy to overheat the extensions and as a result corrode its surface before the silver melts. The other reason for making a tight fit is to help with getting clean shorelines. Any gap creates an area where silver can bulge out and is unsightly and reveals less skill. What I do during fit up is to use a punch to tighten the edges to the blades. The advantage of using a punch is that a blow can be precisely placed. Hitting it directly with a hammer is usually not an approved practice. Sometimes this involves just bending the edge of the socket walls in with the blows on the punch.