garage sale GT

Here's an '88 Schwinn Traveller I bought for a winter bike. It was already heavily rusted inside so I tried filling the frame with oxalic acid. Maybe I didn't remove or neutralize all of it, or maybe it was too far gone to begin with, but the stays cracked away from the seat clamp lug.

I pulled the stays apart and away from the seat tube by hand so no one would try to reuse the frame, because you could hardly tell it was cracked before I did that.

Anyway, get that stuff out of there, then wash the frame in baking soda or it could continue to work. It will tend to affect areas of high stress more than other areas, I think.

The '88 Traveller frame wasn't a bad frame. It had forged drops and was one of the lower models available with butted main tubes from Schwinn that year.

David Newton

That right there is what duct tape is for.

Thanks for sharing.

nwbikeman

I think a lot of the older frames not just Schwinn, were no more than a tack weld to begin with. Sorry for the loss.

cudak888 

Seen it on a Trek 720.

-Kurt

Scooper

Not an unusual failure.

garage sale GT

The joint held. There are still little pieces of seatstay brazed to the seatpost clamp lug. The corrosion weakened it, then I probably didn't clean out the oxalic acid well enough and it continued to attack the metal especially where the stress was highest, which was where the brazing ended, because it made for a stress concentrator where the metal suddenly couldn't flex.

This frame was so rusty that no way would I fault Schwinn or wherever they sourced the frame from.