At 08:45 PM 07/05/2007 -0400, Harvey Sachs wrote:
>For your reading pleasure, a Real Story. It was a long time ago, and I
>was using a little propane torch for stripping the paint from our early
>1950s Schwinn Town & Country tandem, a fine, 4130 chrome-moly,
>fillet-brazed beast. Suddenly, there was a splatter. Then more. Yes, in
>those long ago days of yore, before OSHA*, Schwinn used a bit of lead to
>smooth the joints... I can't remember what I replaced it with, but it
>was probably bondo. :-) FWIW, a lot of lead was used for custom auto
>bodies in the pre-Bondo era.
Exactly! Until around the 1960s or so, lead was the material used by auto manufacturers and body shops to fill body seams and imperfections. A certain amount of skill was required to use this method. Amateur handymen and shady car dealers used body filler, often on top of rusty metal, which gave that technique a bad name. I was quite disappointed when I found that the body shop had used bondo to fix the aluminum hood of my MGB, but it would have been too much to expect a Ferrari artisan to weld it and beat it back into shape. Eventually all manufacturers and body shops switched to body filler as the material improved and that happened before the lead paranoia began.
John Betmanis
Woodstock, Ontario
Canada