Finished a pair of brass lecterns (thing you rest your papers on to speak) for a shop up the road. I’d been trying to get things done in an hour here and there, and it was making me crazy, was able to get six solid hours on them yesterday.
Client’s… client? had a lectern they liked the proportions of, but wanted something fancier, I guess? 1 1/2” x 3/4” tube, about 0.1” wall, radiused corners. All silver brazed with oxy/acetylene, with a spool I picked up in a mixed bin of metal. Nice stuff, flows beautifully (that’d be the cadmium…), probably melts around 1200F. Also a good test of the Miller fume extractor I picked up a while back, worked well.
The guys up the street are adding the top, 1/4” plate, held on with blind 1/4-20 screws from the underside. No clean up on them, apart from rinsing them in hot water to get the brazing flux off.
Test braze joint left, milled seat right. 1/8” cutter was a good match for the corner radius on the tube, having it socket in made alignment super easy.
Really happy with that fillet.
Full penetration, too!
Nice and clean on the face.
No process photos, was just trying to get them done. Brazing on the real thing was harder, unsurprisingly, huge amounts of distortion (1/16” out over 5”) if I wasn’t careful about keeping my heat really even. Best results were from blocking everything up on firebricks, with the joint fully exposed, so I could get at the whole area with the torch. Ended up having to torch straighten the first few joints, before I got the hang of it.
On my ‘to buy’ list, a small-ish cast iron fixture table. You can’t clamp stuff like this down rigidly, it needs to be able to expand and contract, but getting things on a flat plane and at 90 degrees to each other quickly and easily would be great.
Client’s… client? had a lectern they liked the proportions of, but wanted something fancier, I guess? 1 1/2” x 3/4” tube, about 0.1” wall, radiused corners. All silver brazed with oxy/acetylene, with a spool I picked up in a mixed bin of metal. Nice stuff, flows beautifully (that’d be the cadmium…), probably melts around 1200F. Also a good test of the Miller fume extractor I picked up a while back, worked well.
The guys up the street are adding the top, 1/4” plate, held on with blind 1/4-20 screws from the underside. No clean up on them, apart from rinsing them in hot water to get the brazing flux off.
Test braze joint left, milled seat right. 1/8” cutter was a good match for the corner radius on the tube, having it socket in made alignment super easy.
Really happy with that fillet.
Full penetration, too!
Nice and clean on the face.
No process photos, was just trying to get them done. Brazing on the real thing was harder, unsurprisingly, huge amounts of distortion (1/16” out over 5”) if I wasn’t careful about keeping my heat really even. Best results were from blocking everything up on firebricks, with the joint fully exposed, so I could get at the whole area with the torch. Ended up having to torch straighten the first few joints, before I got the hang of it.
On my ‘to buy’ list, a small-ish cast iron fixture table. You can’t clamp stuff like this down rigidly, it needs to be able to expand and contract, but getting things on a flat plane and at 90 degrees to each other quickly and easily would be great.
