Brazing in dropouts myself?

General Help
1

For those who are framebuilders and repairers

I have a steel mtb frame here I would like to run discs on eventually. I wanna throw a set of paragon rear dropouts onto it (with the disc tabs already on them). Partly to get vertical dropouts as well. It will require shortening either the seat stay a little for a top mount tab, or the bottom one for a low mount tab but thats fine.

As a guy who can weld with electricity, and have done soldering at school using a gas oven, how likely am I to be able to braze em in myself?

Dad can braze and has an oxy set so I can get him to show me the basics, and go from there. Seems like a fairly straight forward process… main concern being alignment but measuring and checking thrice and brazing once should get me there right?

And for the fork, I will use a long tang disc tab, but how the hell do I line it up properly? Will probably add a bit of bracing to both legs for safety

2

Can you?

Dont know

Should you?

Probably not. The frame and fork wasn’t designed for disc brakes.
Steel disc fork blades are way thicker than standard blades

3

Id just grab a new fork but finding a 1" fork with a reasonable axle to crown for vintage 26" seems pretty painful, only ones i can find are too tall (meant for replacing suspension forks)

4

Yeah but poppi did it, rite?

5

Clydesdale?

Next batch will have 1" and 1 1/8" steerers. Just run disks up front and linear pulls in the back. BB7 up front and Avid whatever up the back and you can use the Avid Speed Dial levers.

You can try brazing up if you like, but it’ll be pretty fraught I reckon. Without jigs and stuff, and no experience mitreing and brazing up the joints etc; fraught. Much easier to get a disk fork and run good linear pulls at the back