Soooooo... a friend of mine gave me a track frame with a substantial crack in the BB shell that he had sitting in his basement. The BB shell had basically cracked around the base of the seat tube. I've been riding fixed for a while and I'm interested in getting a real track frame, so I figured I could build up this trashed one to see if the geometry/ride/etc are agreeable before dropping the money on a frame. In any case, I took the frame to a welding shop that specializes in car framework but also does a lot of bike repairs (nice guys who did a bunch of work on my old band's van) and got the BB shell welded back together. It is now solid as all get go, and I'm itching to find a fork for it and build it up. The downside is that the $10 repair job ain't so easy on the eyes and I'm finding it very hard to resist the temptation to take a file to the weld and clean it up. My mind says that I should leave the lump for the sake of structural integrity, but my keen aesthetic eye is saying "file! file!" To whom shall I listen?

I'm scrawny (5'9", 130) and not a messenger, so I don't really see myself putting the kinds of stress on the bike that my friend did in order to crack it in the first place. Does anyone think that me cleaning this blob of metal up a bit is going to substantially - or even significantly - reduce strength of the weld? Is it a bad idea to tidy it up?

-Michael