SON SL stainless dropout problems

[Cyclefab LLC]

A few weeks ago, a customer brought me their Velo Orange fork and a set of SON SL stainless hooded 12mm thru axle dropouts to weld on.  They bought these dropouts from Rene Herse, but they are made, or at least distributed by SON in Germany, their part number 73775.  I thought they were unusually difficult to weld, so to satisfy my  suspicions, I sent a set to a testing facility, and sure enough the analysis came back as 303 stainless, with more than ten times the allowable sulfur content of 304 stainless.

I sent this data to Rene Herse (they said they would relay it to SON), to the general contact email at SON, and to a project manager at SON whose contact info was shared with me by another framebuilder.  That was over two weeks ago, and nobody at SON has responded to my emails.

This seems like a big deal to me since my understanding is that 303 is generally not considered weldable, or at least not advisable beyond decorative applications since it may crack in the heat affected zone.  It seems like SON should be assessing and withdrawing current stock, if not sending out recall notices to anyone who may have built forks with these parts.

My customer generously paid for a second set of dropouts to send for testing, then a third set (mild steel this time), and for my time to cut off the stainless ones and weld on the steel ones.  Even so, I'm out the cost of testing and my time dealing with this, so I'm a little sore that nobody at SON can even be bothered to acknowledge that I discovered this and shared it with them.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent, and to say "watch out" if you're using those dropouts.

Colin

[David Bohm]

Yes, but they are perfectly brazeable which is how these should be attached. 

Dave Bohm

Bohemian 

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[M-gineering]

Here's what the package looks like, and the dropouts are clearly marked
1.4305, which is equivalent to 303!

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mvg

Marten Gerritsen
Kiel Windeweer
Netherlands

[Jon Norstog]

It might be better to braze these in place with silver.  At least SON tell you which variety of stainless they are made of. 

jn

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[Cyclefab LLC]

Ah, thank you for this! I did see the original packaging, but didn't notice the number since I'm not familiar with DIN codes for alloys.  Now I know it was intentional.  Still, that is a bit of a mystery to me.  Why exclude what is by far the most common method of bike building in order to save a few dollars on machine time?  And then have no documentation or warning besides the DIN number on the package?  (Not that I'm trying to avoid blame, it was my fault for not noticing the DIN code, but some builders may not know the significance of 303/1.4305.)