06/06/2026
After a very late night of reading engineering texts, scratching my head, watching Kelly's Heroes, more reading, and even more head scratching, I decided to tackle this project from a completely different angle.
My original plan was to braze the hinge and screw holes closed and then file everything back to shape. The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. Instead, I've decided to approach the problem from a jeweller's perspective rather than an engineer's.
The new plan is to make small brass wedges and plugs to fill the voids, then silver solder them into place. That way I'm using like-for-like material to replace the missing metal, rather than trying to bridge the gaps with filler alone. Less heat, less distortion, and hopefully a much cleaner repair.
Fortunately, I bought a few spare rings to use as sacrificial test pieces. The test ring taught me a valuable lesson about heat management. While the silver solder flowed beautifully around the surface of the ring, it didn't pe*****te as deeply as I'd hoped. The brass ring itself acted as a massive heat sink, drawing heat away from the joint and preventing the solder from flowing right through the repair.
That's all part of the design process though. Better to discover these things on a test piece than on the actual workpiece.
The next step is making and fitting the brass inserts before having another crack at it. Sometimes the solution isn't more heat or more filler — it's looking at the problem from a different trade's perspective.
