Not the same #$%* at all. The Tin Man's rod is what they used back in the day for gas WELDING aluminum. He's really critical of all of the crap they're selling these days too. From what I gather, soldering brazing and welding are three broadly different processes and any claim to be able to do all three is bogus. You should at least check out his vids on how much stronger Aerobraze is than TIG/MIG alloy welding. The gas method leaves a homologous material that's workable, such that you can planish and wheel sheets that are joined without cracking them apart along the joint line. The reason the common rods are so good on all of the cast stuff, is the cast stuff is so weak that it'll break even before a lousy solder joint will fall apart. I've tinkered with it aplenty. What I'm proposing isn't anything new, I'm talking about the technologies the old masters used when building all of the race bike tanks and fairings and cowls and what-not, not to mention all of the aeronautical applications of the pre-jet age, when aluminum was still the choice structural component, before all of the weird duralumins and the like came along with their own unique tech.
I don't know about ya'll, but for an alloy tank on my bike, I don't want wall thicknesses more suitable to a monocoque frame, or rear-set bracketry, or engine covers etc. The tank ought to be light first and fore-most. If it's not lighter than a steel tank of equivalent shape and size, why in the hell are you using alloy in the first place? This is why I'm talking about the flow-forming and #$%*. Let the rounded domed shape carry the structure, just like an egg shell, rather than something more like a ... an okra pod, with several seams down it's length. All of the fibreglass #$%* out there scares me how easy it was back in the '70s and often still is, for people to just jump into working with the stuff with little or no understanding of how to engineer it, just an image in their head half-baked from Roger Dean album cover paintings and science fiction movies. Meanwhile the old technologies languished and few sought to learn how to use them when everything could be made cheaper and quicker with the new materials. But yeah, this TinMan guy has brought a lot of that old school stuff out and dusted it off. It's not gimicky new #$%* at all.
