Originally Posted by
cyccommute
While people may have the skills necessary, they don’t have X-ray vision. Most people going for this kind of repair may not tell the welder about the thinness of the steel tubing. The bicycle owner may not know or know that it’s important.
superpowers required? now that's just silly.
we're not talkin' 'bout metal foundries or boiler making plants y'know. these are common shops you'll find in the hundreds in modest sized cities, in the dozens in small towns, and shirley at least one in a village of more than 500 inmates.
ya walks into a local shop that specializes in thin-wall steel tubing, you marvel at the 10-meter long floor-to-ceiling display of available tubing stock, you mosey into the back and chat with the workers who spend years.......10 hours a day, 30 days a month, cutting and shaping and welding thin steel tubes into all sorts of household and shop items.
what? you think they've never seen a bicycle before? you think they're not clever enough to remove the seatpost to check the wall thickness of the seattube?
jinkies! i'll bet you a steaming hot bowl of dog-noodle soup the average worker could dink the frame with his fingernail and estimate within a couple hundredths of a millymeter the tubing wall thickness.