Your Bicycle Metal Lacking Mettle? Find a Welder!
Sure steel is as strong as steel, but sometimes it still breaks. When it happens on tour you will probably need a welder to fix it. Like most things on tour, this can be much more difficult than it is at home where you can ask your friends, thumb through the yellow pages, call in favors, and return for a redo if you get bad service. On tour, your options may be limited to asking strangers and looking around for blue arcs. Both of those methods work and you should try them. When you do find a welder, you can expect that person will without a doubt fall into one of these three categories:
Category 1 - The Good: These are the welders you want to find. They are competent. They are brave. They are fair. Some are even artistic. Their welds are strong. And what they have welded is better than new. When these welders are finished, you feel as if your bicycle has been born anew. Your legs will be stronger. The sun may shine brighter. Butterflies will appear in abundance. If you find a welder like this write it down. You may ride away and never use that welder again, but you'll want to remember what its like to have a repair so thoroughly and successfully completed by someone you've never met and will likely never see again. Oh, and tip heavily. They earned it and you are representing cyclists afterall.
Category 2 - The Good Enough: These welders will get you going. Their welds are ugly, oxidized, but strong. After you get a few hundred miles on them you stop worrying if that glob of solidified black metal is going to fall apart. It won't. Your entire bike will fail before that weld does. It may not be pretty, but heck its - well - good enough. So get on that bike, smile to the wind, and ride on proudly.
Category 3 - The Bad: At first glance, the welds performed by welders in this category are indistinguishable from the welds in Category 2. But there are two clues to their identification: 1) The welds in this category will fail as soon as you have ridden a distance from the shop beyond which you are not likely to return. It is unknown if this is purposeful on the part of the bad welder, but if so that's impressive in its own right; and 2) you will pay twice as much for these welds than you will pay in the other two categories but you will not realize this until at least a month later. In these cases, rudimentary repair materials (twine, zip ties, dental floss, tape) are essential to allow the ride to continue. Don't let it get you down. Overcoming adversity is a hallmark of a successful touring cyclist.
I have little advice regarding how to identify these welders preemptively. You need to get a weld from them and see how it goes. In many cases you wont have a choice anyways. If they are in Category 1 you will realize it quickly. Categories 2 and 3 will be difficult to distinguish in real time unless you know something about welding.
Finally, there is a 1:1:1 ratio of these welder categories scattered throughout the world. Regional ratios vary. Therefore if you need a welder and you select one randomly from the world population of welders, you have a 67% chance of finding one who is at least good enough. When you think about it, that's not bad.
The same applies to doctors, but that's another blog post.
Good luck out there and may all of your metal stay strong.
Images: The Dogged Cog
Special thanks to Phelps Auto in Sanderson, TX for the best welding for a broken bike in 2005.