Dale shared these Trek photos:
> http://www.flickr.com/
I'm hoping slide 16 shows a pile of rejects! Nobody ever brazed anything that ugly in any of the frame shops I worked at. I know they were trying to go fast, but brazing them ugly and then filing the lumps off after is not the fast way to do it. Brazing can be done clean enough that there is nothing to file off, and that makes a stronger, longer-lasting frame too.
When I was at Davidson in the late 80s we got the brazing time per lug down to 2 minutes per joint, sometimes less. Fast enough I think -- if we could have reduced brazing time to zero, that wouldn't have reduced the cost of the frames much if at all. Those lugs never had any lumps to file off, or even burnt-looking spots.
See here:
http://www.flickr.com/
Now I'm not saying every brazer at Trek should have been a Richard Sachs, and yeah the bar has been raised a bit since those pictures were taken, but still I'm a little shocked at how burnt and splattered those Trek lugs look.
My first attempt at a lugged joint, in '78 at age 21, probably looked like that pile at Trek -- my teacher said I "crucified" it (which seemed like an inappropriate choice of words, but I didn't tell him so). But that was only a junker lug with two pieces of scrap tube for practicing. After enough practice joints, when I was ready to attempt my first real frame for riding, I used some old (50s) curlicue lugs that Jerry Collier gave me. They had all sorts of cutouts where files could never reach, but I was confident I wouldn't need to file any lumps.
I saw that frame again many years later, and it was not as I feared, that I only _thought_ I'd done a good job because I didn't know any better. No, it was still a frame I was proud to say I made, and it's still being ridden.
Mark Bulgier
Seattle, WA
USA