Brazing ~ Luthiery Laboratories

Brazing

Brazing is essentially the same process as soldering. Two metal pieces are joined using a third metal with a melting point well below either of them. Brazing is useful for joining metals that cannot be welded, as well as dissimilar metals.

Brazing is also useful for joining heat-treated steels that would be ruined by welding. This was once paramount in bicycle frame construction, before cheap automated aluminum welding took over the market.

Finally, brazing is useful because you can do it with just a common propane torch. See my pages on truss rods for some designs you can build yourself from common hardware.

Workshop - Miscellaneous

This is a bunch of random stuff that doesn't categorize well anywhere else.

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Double-Acting Truss Rod

This is a spoke nut version, for use at the neck heel.

Here is a variation intended to adjust at the headstock rather than the heel, although it would work fine there too. I substituted a 1-1/2" 10-32 SS cap-head bolt for my usual spoke nut and threaded shaft. It is captured the same way, in a drilled-out coupling nut with a ground-down hex nut. The rod itself is 48" 3/16 rod steel, bent back on itself. Both coupling nuts are grooved on the attaching surface to hold the round rod. This greatly simplifies alignment and assembly, and the cap-head bolt eliminates one solder joint. All parts from my favorite luthiery supply shop, Home Depot.

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Angled Headstock Jig

This is the angled headstock jig I built from pine scrap, with an already-cut piece of 5" Home Depot maple headstock material attached with clamps. Basically, this jig is a 90-degree square brace, as precise as I could build it. It is square in all three dimensions, the most important being the vertical direction. The final stage of construction of the jig was to smooth all the surfaces on the sander, true up the saw, and then true-up the jig face by shaving it with the saw. You can see that the angle of the headstock is easily selected on the saw. The accuracy of this angle is not critical, as long as you are in the ballpark, anything will work.

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