I was actually day dreaming about something like that a few days ago. I came to the idea of gas brazing it, with either bronze or even silver solder, and letting the wicking/capillary action pull it into the full joint(or more of the joint anyways). But then again, I was a couple spot welders at work, and that's definitely easier.

This shades back to what I said about all this stuff being mild steel, you can get it hot like that, and except for distortion, you don't have any significant issues with heat treat/ embrittlement /etc. Unless you really burn the holy jebus out of it and turn it to slag.

Brazing is/was widely used for race car and aircraft fab work in Europe. Is welding "better" (stronger)? Yes, but brazing is almost always strong enough. The issue would generally be the rules organization(SCCA/NASA/etc) S/F....Ken M