Originally Posted by
unterhausen
pretty interesting. So the dropout connection wasn't very good after all. I haven't looked at enough more recent treks to have seen that style of stay end. I'm surprised they didn't look for penetration all the way around the joint.
It looks like they were feeding the rod from inside the SS perhaps to make sure that if they saw braze on the outside all the way around (which there was) then it was a good joint. I think it was pretty good. It didn't break easily and there was braze all the way around including about 3mm on the top and bottom edges. And this was only the seatstay joint which is pretty much completely in compression in use.
But I was carrying that leftover bit of filler rod around for 60,000km or so all around Europe
The Chinese replacement frame has breezer dropouts just welded all the way around. Probably quicker to do and a very strong joint.