I guess none of you guys were 17 years old in Wisconsin in 1962, learning to build a hot rod with a Sears torch in one hand and a Car Craft magazine in the other.
I brazed patches casue I wasn't good enough to butt weld and hammer, I used coat hangers cause on the wages I was getting I couldn't afford proper rods all the time, nothing fell off and I still had a car to get to work and one to race
From what I gather from many of the posts in this thread, is that unless it's welded with a tig, and you made your own panels with your English wheel, and bead roller, and bent them with your 8 foot brake, trued up your frame on your own jig, it won't and can't stand the test of time, and it certainly isn't being built as a traditional vehicle. And everyone knows we all had access to each of those items back 4 or 5 decades ago.....right? (tongue in cheek) sorta.....
Cool word!.... But, to answer your question, I guess a sense of humor, that, and I don't take myself too seriously. No one else does either......
Car was built in 1959. Frame front half is model A rear half is 46 Ford from the Z. Whole chassis is brazed.
Nuhuu!!!! You can't stick a model on a 46 chassis. I dare you to start a thread and ask if you can do what is there,,, , I have a A coupe. I also have a couple frames here, A 46 with damaged front and a Model A with damaged rear. What id like to do is this, braze the two frames together and the drop the coupe body on it and finish out the build with an old flat head. What do you think? Come on man I wanna watch that
Or any place else on the planet for that matter. LOL Funny you mention Car Craft magazine. One of the fellas I went to high school with had a pocket sized paper back type of a book that came out in the '50s that his dad gave him. it was called how to build hot rods and customs or something like that. The preferred method of securing two pieces of metal was brazing, and it mentioned either with brass or steel brazing rod. That book got passed around a lot.
Just to be the devils advocate here. First one must decide what "the best way" actually means. From a purely engineering standpoint the best way is what it takes to secure the parts no more no less. So if you have a joint that takes for example of 27,000 pounds of tensile strength a process that yields 40,000 of tensile strength would be overkill and not be "the best way." Now we are hot rodders not engineers so that really probably doesn't apply. We as a rule have a tendency to over engineer the things that we build. Anyway just to play devil's advocate here and for no other reason than that. Note: the numbers chosen are nominal and have no bearing on anything other then to be used for an example. They do not take into account moment loads or live v dead loads or torsional loading and etc. they are just numbers on a page.
repairing cast iron, go watch keith fenner on youtube and see him repair cast iron with brass, he is a professional machinist and welder with many years under his belt.
No you do it. You Start the thread. Stand back and watch the shit storm. I can almost guarantee it will be full of experts with infinite knowledge. Then pop up the pics of what you have there. It will be a great Friday night thread
So many guys with so many theories about what will work and what will not work, and hot rodders have been making monkeys out of the them since the forties. One of my favorites, in the fifties it was well known to engineers that the maximum coefficient of friction of a tire on a paved road, was 1 or 100%. Therefore the maximum acceleration possible for a car was 1G or 32 feet per second per second. If you work out the math, that means the best any dragster can possibly do, is 150MPH and an ET of 9 seconds. They blew past that in 1959. So much for theories.
those British guys used some cool furnace brazing techniques on E Type jags frames made from Reynolds aircraft tubing looks cool
An old body guy told me the same thing as everything you mentioned in your post. This how it was done before tigs and migs stc. You cant weld over it though if you got to make a repair of it. Brazing will go everywhere if you try and mig.
My Chevy has a piece of brass brazed under the trunk. When I got the car (back in the early 2000s) I thought it was all bondo, but it turns out the bondo was just over it to take paint. So my bodyman at the time took it off and 'glassed over it and it lasted another 10 years or so with the trunk slamming on it this whole time. I'm thinking about doing it over again, but not sure if I should replace it with metal, or just 'glass over it again since it lasts 10 years and it's part of the history of the car.
We can end this argument forever if we all switch to aluminum foil plasma welding, the latest thing https://news.osu.edu/news/2015/10/29/vfaweld/
We bought this '53 Stude in 1961. I had once been someone's LSR car. It had a 4 point roll bar, that was electric brazed together, and to the car's frame. We updated it with the addition of a full, heliarc welded, chromoly cage. At El Mirage, in '62, I tried to see how high a Stude coupe could fly. The cage bent, and broke all around me. I am here today because the old brazed roll bar was the only piece of the car unbent, or unbroken. I will never know who electric brazed that roll bar, but I owe them my life. (It took 9 rolls to customize a Stude like this! )
Dean, or anybody else who knows for that matter, how is "electric brazing" done? I've seen it referred to in this thread, but it's a process unknown to me. I have read that brazing can be done with a carbon arc torch, and I have used silicon bronze rod with a tig welder with success, but electric brazing I've only read brief references to it. I do have a twin carbon arc torch and it saves a helluva lot of OA if you need to heat and bend heavy steel, but that's all I ever used it for. Got me wondering if I'm missing out on something.
The maximum coefficient of friction is still 1 and will always be 1 for calculations sake. Once any type of glue or traction modifiers are used that's a completely different equation. Once weight transfer without adding or subtracting additional weight is therorised it becomes a different equation again.
This idea was exploded long ago. There is no reason friction can't be over 1. That was just a handy rule of thumb with no practical or theoretical justification. If you don't like that idea, what about "toothed grip" meaning the rubber sinks into the rough surface of asphalt or concrete and gets a bite that exceeds the theoretical limit of friction. If that doesn't happen, how do you explain the long streaks of rubber left when you peel out? For that matter how do you explain cars that exceed the theoretical maximum of acceleration without glue or traction modifiers?
The Jalopy Journal
